If you've noticed that Boeing has been in the news quite a bit recently, and not for the reasons they would like to be, you may be interested in this article.
It has some interesting things to say about the "Ricardian fallacy," and treating financial reports as the be-all-end-all of understanding the state of a business.
I remember reading recently... not sure if it was on Less Wrong or Astral Codex Ten... a great insight about colonialism: how it made the colonies poor, *without* necessarily making the empires rich. The colonies suffered a lot and had their wealth stolen, but the empires had to build armies which cost a lot of money and it is not obvious that the entire thing was a net benefit. So instead of modeling the situation as "X stealing money from Y", it would perhaps be better to see it as "X burning Y's money".
And I just realized how all this logic also perfectly applies to Soviet Union. Soviet Union made its satellite states poor *without* making itself rich. An average person in Russia was actually much poorer than e.g. an average person in Czechoslovakia. So from the perspective of the person in Czechoslovakia, it made sense to complain that their country was made poor by the decades of Soviet occupation... and from the perspective of the person in Russia, it made sense to object "what do you mean by 'poor'? look at me -- if you think that I have your money, you are crazy".
The answer is that there is no contradiction between "X making Y poor(er)" and "X not becoming richer in the process". Just like in real life, breaking someone else's legs doesn't make your legs healthier. But with wealth, people often have this fixed-sum intuition, and expect that if wealth was taken from somewhere, it *must* have appeared somewhere else (and if it did *not* appear somewhere else, then the person complaining about the theft is lying).
That makes me think about the later development of Eastern Europe. How much of the economical growth was the financial support from EU, and how much was... simply the Soviet Union not ruining things anymore. (This is not a dilemma; I assume that *both* numbers were huge.)
While its true that most colonies cost more to build and maintain than they ever provided countries (individuals profited, but their countries did not), do you have evidence that colonialism "made colonies poor"?
Looking at Africa, most of sub-Saharan Africa was absolutely dirt poor when it was colonized and was not meaningfully growing at all. So it's kind of absurd to say these countries were "made poor" by colonization. And since they weren't growing, even claiming that they were kept poor by colonization would be extremely dubious unless you had evidence that despite hundreds or thousands of years of stagnation outside of a few pockets, sub-Saharan Africa would have undergone massive growth just after the time colonization began despite showing absolutely no indications of this. Remember, Western Europe didn’t go from African level society to industrialization overnight. It had a long history of development, including strong advances in agriculture and a long intellectual tradition stretching back centuries and ultimately culminating in the scientific and industrial revolutions. Most of Africa never even invented the wheel, written language etc. but we’re supposed to believe that they were on the precipice of an economic revolution coincidentally just around the time they were colonized?
Aboriginal Australians have lived on the Australian continent for as long as 60,000 years and never came close to developing the rudimentary ingredients of economic development – were they too just about to get somewhere right before colonization? What a coincidence!
Of course, all this ignores the fact that many African colonies pretty obviously experienced massive economic growth. Even putting aside cases like South Africa and Zimbabwe which achieved remarkable levels of development under white/colonial rule, the GDP of most colonies grew significantly under colonial rule. There’s no conceivable way of describing these places as having gotten poorer during colonization. In fact, at the peak of colonialism, many of these colonies had larger GDPs than most countries around the world. It was only after colonization ended that growth in Africa stopped (or in some cases reversed) while the rest of the world (especially Asia) started growing economically.
Additionally, it is categorically wrong to claim that Africa is poor today because its resources were "stolen". Not only is abundant natural resources not a prerequisite for economic growth, but Africa still has more mineral resources than most of the rest of the world. So lack of resources is unambiguously NOT the problem facing Africa today. Africans are simply incapable of running functional governments and economic endeavours.
A lot of American liberals have somehow been convinced that Nigeria is some kind of African success story, that it’s a wealthy country full of smart black Africans or something. But not only is Nigeria much poorer and more dysfunctional than most people realize, it’s main export industry is oil and gas, and even here, despite its massive population, it is significantly dependant on foreign companies to operate these projects for them.
And you so often see western liberals crying about shirtless African children shovelling dirt in some cobalt mine or something, but then they’ll also cry about western mining companies operating in Africa. But the former is exactly what you get when Africans are left to mine their resources themselves without the help of foreign companies.
So much of African economic growth over the past few decades has been a result of western (and Chinese) resource projects (these companies not only operate e.g. mines, but they also find the mineral deposits in the first place, fund and manage the construction of the mine and processing works etc), royalties from which are used to fund infrastructure projects and so on.
And yet, people point to this growth (which is already fizzling) as evidence for what Africans are capable of without Europeans “holding them down”, but in reality this growth would have been impossible without Europeans (and Chinese).
But you need to understand that the “Colonialism made third world countries poor and Europe rich” line is one of the founding myths of modern leftism (along with “Slavery made America rich is why African Americans are poor today”). It justifies mass third world immigration to Europe and helps convince people that massive, categorical societal outcome differences have nothing to do with genetic differences. Accordingly, no amount of evidence could ever possibly get these people to ever admit that it is wrong, and it has such appeal they have no need to ever provide hard evidence for their claims and can rely exclusively on narratives.
Colonialism put in place extractive administrations, and when those "empires" collapsed what's left is what you see now.
There's a huge difference between dirt cheap but more egalitarian and dirt cheap but authoritarian. The previous one is very easy to "fix" the other one has vested interests keeping things that way.
> “Colonialism made third world countries poor and Europe rich”
meh, it's true in the sense that colonialism prevented anyone else except the empires to even start developing. what made Europe rich is the Industrial Revolution (which was of course much more than just technical/industrial changes)
Modern political groups are absolutely unhinged when it comes to certain memes/beliefs, which shows in their extreme reactions to certain policy proposals, and data/evidence/reason doesn't do much to them :(
What counterfactual do you consider as an alternative to colonization? If it is something like "(sub-Saharan) Africa was isolated from the rest of the world by a magical force field", then yes, the region would still be horribly poor. But if it is something like "(sub-Saharan) Africa engaged in mutually beneficial trade with the rest of the world, but was never colonized", then better outcomes are possible.
(My guess is that in the alternative realities where Europeans somehow did not colonize Africa, most likely someone else did; probably Arabs or Russia. Anyway, the claim is that colonization is bad, not that it is only bad when Europeans do it.)
Interaction with other cultures contributes to progress. It was not necessary for each European country to invent everything independently -- they could learn from each other. If there is a country in Europe that has never invented anything meaningful, it still has a relatively high quality of life. Aboriginal Australians were isolated geographically. So was sub-Saharan Africa. But even if one part of the world invents better travel, previously unreachable places become reachable.
Another damage from colonialism is borders between countries that respect neither natural obstacles such as mountains and rivers (which would make them easier to defend), nor ethnic groups (which would reduce the conflicts within the country). That is a recipe for ongoing conflicts. (This applies not just to Africa, but also the former Ottoman Empire.) Colonialism is just another form of social engineering that typically ends with a disaster.
I’m not an expert at UK law, but I read that as two years in jail and an additional 2 years suspended, not the same 2 years suspended. If you and OP are right, that’s a valid point, but the more natural reading is that those are consecutive.
My project recently released this - it has been described as a return to OK Go style, true effort music videos - Inception meets Fear and Loathing, it imagines how democratised neuralink-like tech could unfold.
In the UK, you will *literally* receive a harsher penalty for distributing "racist" stickers than for RAPING a child (well, at least if you're a brown rapist, not sure about if you're white).
So all of this is appalling, and I agree that the sentences should be different, but looking at your sources, the rapists did get longer sentences. The sticker guy got 2 years and the rapists got:
Omar Badreddin, 26, for five counts of rape, jailed for 18 years
Mohamed Badreddin, 23, for six counts of rape and one count of assault by penetration, jailed for 13 years
Huzaefa Aleboud, 23, for assault by penetration, two counts of rape and assault occasioning actual bodily harm, jailed for five and a half years
Hamoud Al Soaimi, 21, for three counts of sexual assault and one assault by penetration, jailed for two years suspended for two years with 180 hours unpaid work
It’s also worth noting that the man with the shortest sentence was a minor when he committed the sexual assaults. With our juvenile justice system in America, I’m not sure I would expect a longer sentence, though trying as an adult is an option here.
I'm trying to find a specific SSC post from years ago. In it, I remember that Scott defines what "common knowledge" is, and something about how it involves an infinite regression of that everyone knows that everyone else knows that everyone else knows something is true. I don't think it was It Was You That Made My Eyes Blue, I think it came earlier than that. I remember maybe something about a teacher asking kids to stand up in a classroom...? Any help appreciated. Thanks!
I have a vivid memory of this Scott *Aaronson* post about this exact topic... https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=2410 perhaps you are misremembering the Scott?
In any case, that post is pretty good if you are interested in the subject!
A search for "Scott Alexander common knowledge" leads with two LessWrong posts, the first of which contains the infinite regression statement, and also links to a Scott Aaronson post and a SlateStarCodex post responding to Scott Aaronson.
As someone who initially thought that Rittenhouse was probably guilty but eventually came around to it being legitimate self defence, I do think that I keep an open mind. And thus it's important to highlight when I have a major update in the *other* direction as well. I'd never paid much attention to the Floyd case before and had gotten an inaccurate picture due to hanging out in conservative circles.
Last night, I read this post about this case, and the details are far, far worse than I'd imagined. It really is appalling. And thus I'm reposting this in the hopes that everyone else reads it as well.
Thanks for sharing this. It definitely conflicted with the information I've been seeing and, although I'm pretty distrustful of Balko as a source, I think his articles were well written and persuasive. I've definitely updated my priors. I really do appreciate this!
Glenn Loury's posts in response to Radko's work are worth the read. Loury's blunt self-reflection is refreshing and his willingness to bluntly self-examine -- without then drowning in it -- is impressive.
The entire situation was a horrible mess. The wrong people, on both sides, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Should Chauvin have knelt on Floyd's back/neck like that, for that long? No. Should he have ignored the calls to check on him, take his pulse, etc? No. Did he deliberately set out to kill him? I don't think so.
While he shouldn't have 'restrained' him that way, also Floyd had been complaining of not being able to breathe even while sitting in the police car. I can understand why Chauvin thought he was faking, that he wanted to be released so he could get up and try running off again, and if he was able to keep talking then he was not having breathing difficulties.
Doesn't make it all right, but also doesn't mean Chauvin was a racist out to murder the first black guy he could get his hands on.
> Doesn't make it all right, but also doesn't mean Chauvin was a racist out to murder the first black guy he could get his hands on.
That seems like a weird strawman, since noone would ever think that he deliberately set out to kill people in the first place. Now Daniel Perry on the other hand...
Charging him with intentional homocide was never considered.
Chauvin was charged and convicted of unintentional second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter.
There was no need to block the carotid artery once Floyd was prone with hands cuffed behind his behind his back. Moving his knee to Floyd’s shoulder would have kept him immobile on the ground.
I have no way off knowing if he was a racist. I’m pretty sure he was a cruel SOB and a bad cop though.
You should not significantly change your mind on almost any public reporting about the Floyd case. It became so politicized that no public reporting is trustworthy.
I don't have any police experience or MMA experience but I do have some limited experience with mental health and patient restraint and the way this case was discussed...does not match my personal experience or my observations of professionals. I would encourage you, if you have the opportunity, to talk with a psych tech about physical restraint but I'm reasonably confident they would agree to the following:
#1 There's is no safe or risk free way for one adult to physically restrain another. Team response is very important because you want roughly 5 psych techs per patient in a physical encounter for both staff and patient safety. If an alarm gets sounded, everyone needs to respond, even if you're a rando, because one staff member can "safely" restrain and transport one limb. The patient can absolutely hurt himself during an event.
The idea that a police office, alone or with another on a public street, could safely physicall restrain an adult with no risk for any party sounds absurd in this context.
#2 The fact that a patient appears calm and sedate absolutely does not mean that the patient is calm and sedate.
#3 The idea that the minutiae of techniques and procedures in a training manual taught years ago are applicable to relatively rare and extremely stressful events is...more of a liability thing for the institution than something staff take seriously.
Incidentally, this is my understanding for why institutions have...certain areas for physically violent patients. Some of it absolutely is punishment but a lot of it is that staff on those units know what they're doing. They deal with physical outbursts every day where other units just don't and so they're much, much better at it.
This doesn't mean that the Rodney Balko reporting is wrong, nor that the case is actually really, really complex, it's just that it requires certain specialist knowledge and for those people to be able to speak publicly and candidly about what's it's reasonable to expect an officer to do in these situations and what their reasonable limitations are.
But within, like, a few days it became clear that this event was radioactively political and no one with any sense would speak publicly about it without keeping that in mind. That means we don't know what happened...and that's what that means. No amount of additional digging or reporting is going to change the following facts: the only people who are in any position to judge whether this is reasonable are police officers in similar situations and a handful of similar professionals because it requires a great deal of subject matter expertise. And none of those people can speak frankly on this topic and most of them have really strong opinions. Short of bringing in like a Vietnamese police officer with a long history of physical takedowns...we don't know and we won't know. That sucks but that's it.
I worked for 5 years in a big psychiatric hospital. My unit had very few patients who were violent -- our treatment approach was only appropriate for people who wanted to be in the hospital -- but I did receive the required training in handling those situations. I don't know whether the training was in an approach my hospital had developed. or whether it followed some guidelines set by some agency in charge of oversight and applied to all psych hospitals. We definitely were not taught methods of restraint that involved getting the person on the ground and physically overpowering them. The restraint I remember most clearly involved 2 staff members approaching the patient and each taking one of their arms. There was a particular way you held their arms that made it difficult for them to yank them free of pull all 3 of you to the ground. A third staff member was to walk behind. and help out as needed.
I also did consults on the units with psychotic patients. I never saw any violence there, or even screaming and agitation without an element of violence. I'm sure violence occurred sometimes. but I don't think it was at all frequent. My impression is that psychotic or severely agitated people are medicated pretty aggressively these days, and antipsychotic drugs are usually sedating. Units also had "quiet rooms," locked rooms with nothing in them but a mattress where people who posed a substantial risk to themselves or others stayed. The was a rule for how often these people had to be checked by nursing staff -- I think it was every 15 minutes.
Anyhow, our hospital was expensive, heavily staffed and well-run. I'm sure there are places that are more at the snake pit end of the spectrum where violent people are dealt with more harshly. But antipsychotic drugs are used very widely, and the ones in the older generation are cheap and work very well to sedate people, even if they aren't that great at clearing up psychosis. So the snake pit era is pretty much over.
Partly I'm just curious for personal knowledge. The amount of variation in how MH and hospitals in general operate is wild to me. I don't recall medication being a critical factor.
But those beds are...kinda of what I was thinking of. Like, and let me exercise some professionalism in case I ever get doxxed...If I showed a layman those beds and described a patient being restrained and secluded in one of those beds in a "quiet room" for...significant periods of time...I would be concerned that they could very easily form dangerously wrong impressions unless we were able to convey the circumstances both accurately and emphatically.
No, the beds were just a mattress on the floor -- or maybe it was a raised area of the floor -- covered with some rubbery stuff to protect against spills. But we did have restraints -- they were called posies in the trade. Here are some :https://www.tidiproducts.com/restraints-and-restraints-alternatives
We did have someone on the unit who was posied to her bed for a couple days. She wasn't violent, just completely and totally confused. Delirious, not psychotic. I believe she just had the wrist restraints on during the day, and wrist plus ankles at night, and didn't mind them. She may not even have been aware she was restrained. As for the guy in your picture, strapped to the bed -- I expect they did that sometimes on the units with sicker people. But there were very strict rules on checking the person frequently, and each check had to be documented. The nurses really did the checking, too, didn't cheat. And anybody needing that level of restraint would have gotten a big shot of haliperidol plus benzos, and that form of chemical restraint is very effective. Personally, I found it creepier than the straps.
#4 The fact that a jury convicted a cop of *murdering* a lowlife criminal, should update your prior very strongly in the direction of that cop being an actual murderer who murdered someone that day. Juries *really* hate convicting cops of killing lowlife criminals, and even when they can't in good conscience vote not to convict they generally find an excuse to convict only on a lesser charge.
And since the jury spent far more time studying the evidence than you did, as well as having access to a better class of evidence not tainted by media spin, you should probably not use your own reading of the media reports your own understanding of different situations and institutions, to update much further.
You really think he got a fair trial? I couldn't avoid this story, although I managed to avoid the video, a bunch of cities had crazy riots, probably whatever one he was in did too. You think he got a fair trail? You think they found 12 people...anywhere in America without an opinion on this?
If I told you a kid died in police custody in, say, Istanbul and the whole city rioted for months and in the end a jury found one of the police officers guilty...would you really think he got a fair and unbiased trial?
I'm sorry, I want to stay out of this but people keep linking to this Balko thing and I read it and...really? We're starting with the minutiae of a 10 point checklist from...like 7 years before the event? I think you've worked for the government, do you remember your hazardous materials training from five years ago?
I'm sorry, it's very possible if this had never been filmed that Chauvin would have been found guilty. But you can't actually think that in the midst of all the madness that popped over this that proper policies and procedures were followed in an unbiased manner. That's...frankly expecting too much from the people in authority. And I see people swapping half-baked takes back and forth like it means anything.
I think he got a fair trial, yes. With twelve people who had not-fanatically-closed-minded opinions going in, about half of which were "Floyd was a scumbag, Chauvin was a good cop doing a hard job, maybe he went a little overboard but he's no murderer". Then they saw the evidence you didn't, heard the arguments you didn't, talked it over with each other, and changed their mind.
Have you ever served on a criminal jury? Because I'm not sure what you imagine was going on here, but I don't think it bears much resemblance to reality.
I watched every 9/11 video, though, and listened to the audios of people's last calls to 911. I sort of felt like I should, dunno why. But about that there wasn't the element of different factions hating on each other for not seeing the event the same way.
I'm guessing you think Rittenhouse got a fair trial despite being just as infamous? I suspect that you're working backwards from whether you agree with the verdict in order to decide whether the trial was "fair" or not.
I don't have strong opinions on the top level conversation, but my impression was that Rittenhouse's trial was sufficiently separated from the original events and the hype around everything had calmed down enough to be more fair than I expected Chauvin's trial to be.
I don't know if Chauvin was, or should have been found, guilty. I knew from early on that he would be found guilty, just based on how strong public opinion on the matter was. I've heard that some seemingly shady things happened with the investigation to make it harder for him to be found not guilty, such as the autopsy report changing to match public perception/outcry before being released. If such a thing is true, then the finding of the jury would not be unexpected, but the results were baked in by that point.
And I mean that sincerely. I looked into buying a shotgun for home defense at one point and was ultimately put off by the sheer legal complexity, not of buying but of use. The laws on self defense seem...highly circumstantial and highly obtuse to a casual observer but have dramatic consequences. At some point Google starts showing you adds for, like, firearm legal insurance (1) and you just tap out. Which still cheeses me off because I remember living in neighborhoods with...moderate gunfire and that was "acceptable"...grumble grumble grumble.
I do carry a pocket knife and frankly I've just given up on trying to figure out the laws. It's under 3 inches and generally I think that's safe but...I could be in Houston one week and Seattle the next and SF the week after that and there's no sensible way for me to keep track of knife laws in each jurisdiction, especially because Berkley can have different laws to Oakland which can have different laws to Palo Alto. At some point you just give up.
So how the heck do I know what the law of, what was the situation, a minor outside his hometown who was open carrying and kinda got into an argument with some guys but kinda not and then he ran away and then they threw him to the ground and he opened fire. There's like four or five special situations there. How the heck would I, or anybody else who's not a lawyer with some research time know how that's supposed to shake out? And yeah, he probably also had a biased jury. If you tell me the guy three courts down got an impartial trial because they've never even heard of the plaintiff or the defendant, yeah, makes sense. But everyone heard of this Rittenhouse kid.
Dude, fundamentally, I think you and I both heard the Rittenhouse thing on the radio and we're like, "Damn, everyone involved sounds retarded. God knows how that's going to shake out in the court system." And we don't have a good enough media apparatus to substantially improve on that take. You can read 100 pieces of media on it and it's not gonna make you smarter, it's just going to make you dumber and more biased. That sucks, you might deeply care about the truth of the situation, but your desire for the truth is not gonna magically make a decent media appear, anymore than a dying man's thirst on a desert island is going to make fresh water appear, or drinking salt water anything more than foolish.
I did think Rittenhouse did get a fair trial, but that probably is coloured by him being acquitted. It was very political. I don't think he was blameless, but it was self-defence. If he was wrong to be carrying a rifle around, so were the protesters who brought guns with then for the same reasons he did - that is, they thought there was a good chance things would get violent and they wanted to protect their side.
I have to admit, I did do some unkind laughing at the jokes about Gaige Grosskreutz. So I'm a bad person.
And I see he hasn't had much luck since; first he wanted to change his name and that got leaked - new name is Paul Prediger - and then he got knocked down in a hit-and-run accident.
How many professionals do you need to restrain a prone man with his hands cuffed behind his back? How many after he loses consciousness. How many after he loses consciousness and goes limp. How many after you can’t find his pulse? Chauvin’s knee was on Floyd’s neck to that point.
They had 4 policemen there the entire time.
It’s just not as complicated as Chauvin’s defenders are trying to portray it.
I can't think of any situation where we were instructed to have less than 5 staff until the patient was restrained and secluded on a bed. Regardless of restraint, consciousness, or other factors. Not an expert, absolutely willing to defer to experienced psych techs here, but that's absolutely my understanding.
And these are never trivial or uncomplicated. Have you ever seen the amount of paperwork and procedure that follows one of these events? They're always non-trivial and involve a host of administrative, legal, psychiatric, and medical involvement.
I'm like 80% confident if I showed you a takedown by trained professionals of a violent patient it would look shocking and barbaric to you. There's a lot more going on here than an untrained observer can understand. I'm certainly not qualified, I just know enough to appreciate how much I don't know in these scenarios. And I'm certainly not going to trust the media to describe highly charged political events accurately because of, well, life. Nor am I going to trust a video when I know how misleading a 5-10 minute video of a similar event without context would be.
Read the trial testimony and timeline along with the video. You will get the entire context along with police testimony. There is no mystery about what happened here.
The takedown was complete. Honestly I don't care how brutal that part was. On his feet, he was a danger to others and himself even if cuffed. The threat needed to be neutralized. He was a big guy.
But now they had Floyd prone on the pavement. Hands cuffed behind his back. Chauvin's knee on Floyd's neck.
At that point he was a threat to no one. According to expert trial testimony - fellow police - he could not move.
Chauvin could have moved his knee to Floyd's back and there still would be no way Floyd could have risen, but he kept his knee on Floyd's neck obstructing the carotid artery as dozens of civilian witnesses watched. This is the point when I and the rest of my community became very concerned. This wasn't filtered through the thought police at MSNBC. It took place before our very eyes on that evening's news without editorial commentary on every local television station.
Three other officers provided backup. Floyd lost consciousness and Chauvin's partner asked if they should roll Floyd into the procedure prescribed 'recovery position'. Chauvin said no and kept his knee on Floyd's neck.
An off-duty EMT on scene became alarmed at Floyd's appearance and encouraged the police to check Floyd's pulse. They did not until Floyd had gone limp and several more minutes passed. By that time they could find no pulse.
This has nothing to do with something that took place inside the walls of a mental institution. It was broad daylight in the middle of a well trafficked city street in a metro area of 2 million people.
I still need to write a summary of Balko's analysis, but in addition to whether what Chavin did was wrong, it was also against policy.
Policy was to use a knee briefly to add a hobble, which is another restraint. There was no need to hold Floyd down in a way that impeded his breathing.
I think one of the reasons there was so much rage over Floyd's death is that the usual reason given for police killing is that there was a situation that called for quick decisions, and it's unfair to second-guess them. In this case, there was a conspicuous lack of emergency.
Prone on the pavement, hands cuffed behind his back, knee on his neck - he was a threat to no one. Chauvin could easily have kept him pinned by moving his knee to Floyd's shoulder as trial testimony by other police demonstrated.
I got the opposite information from that: I knew that Derek Chauvin was blatantly guilty, but I didn't know that even mainstream conservatives were still trying to die on the hill that he was innocent. That is just... *sigh* The next election is going to get unimaginably ugly.
George Floyd was a knucklehead drug addict with a criminal record but didn’t deserve or need to die that day. I live just a few miles from there and watched the whole thing play out in real time, unfiltered on local live news coverage. The ensuing rioting and destruction were undeniably terrible.
The thing that most people, including Scott, overlooked, is that the city was under a once in a century lockdown. Things would have played out much differently if so many, many people weren’t sitting at home unable to go to work or school at the time.
I watched the crowds and saw the times police were able to break off a manageable number number to arrest, zip tie, pat down and load onto Metro busses for booking. The people protesting peacefully but breaking a lawful curfew were overwhelmingly ordinary white 20 somethings. No specimen of Antifa was ever produced. One Boogaloo Boy that took part in the burning of the 3rd precinct police station was the only person arrested to be found acting on some half-assed organized ideology.
From the evidence that was reliable - CCTV coverage - the typical arsonists were adolescent black kids, very young, early teens. Nihilistic in the way only the very young and poorly socialized can be, enjoying a multi day version of Detroit’s infamous Halloween ‘Hell Night’.
Teenage punks, to put it plainly.
Yes, Rittenhouse acted in self defense but he had no business being where he was, doing what he was at the time.
> Things would have played out much differently if so many, many people weren’t sitting at home unable to go to work or school at the time.
Yeah. Something much less burny happened in my city, and when I was in the area for unrelated reasons, I got the distinct impression that there were lot of people who wanted very badly to get out of lockdown, and then suddenly all the Serious People who had been telling them to stay home, flipped on a dime and said that it was OK to go to a protest. There was a vibe of "let's go down to the protest and see what's happening".
It was really good. I didn’t know it was an adaptation. I l think I missed the critical ‘boyo’ line in the theater because the film was longish and because of my habit of buying a ‘best value’ soda in those days.
The book is like the movie, but **even more so**. They had to trim out at least half the plot (author says 5/8ths) just to get something filmable. I highly recommend it.
He had no business being at a private business, protecting it from rioters? Why not?
It seems to me he was basically a hero. Volunteered his time to help defend a business, went around giving out water and generally helping out and being nice. Was attacked by a disturbed pedophile (while wearing a rifle openly!), tried to retreat but ended up having to shoot him, tried to get to the police and turn himself in and was attacked by multiple other people and was forced to shoot them but did so with astonishing accuracy and restraint. Typical training is to shoot center of mass and empty the clip but he was shooting guys in the arm and then stopping and continuing to retreat. Amazing.
I'm not quite the same audience as you (my initial thoughts on these cases were "Rittenhouse was beyond stupid but probably technically legitimate self defense," and "I strongly believe what Chauvin did to Floyd was criminal"), but I think we have a fair bit of overlap, and I'd agree this is a good article. I'd never dove enough into the conservative mediaverse to hear about the MRT angle, interesting to learn about here.
Does anyone else worry about the concept of online "bait", and how it's becoming more common to ignore anyone with a wildly different view or opinion?
Any idea that's sufficiently idiotic or ill-informed seems to be immediately written off as 'someone trying to mess with people for a reaction', and deemed not worthy of your time. But it seems perfectly plausible that there could be someone unironically touting such views, and in that case, do we not just reinforce that person's echo chamber by choosing not to debate them? Where do you draw the line?
I ask because I see plenty of obvious bait on a daily basis - that's not the stuff I'm referring to. Rather, I mentioned a post in this very comment section, and my partner immediately said "ha, and people were actually replying to them?" like it was an impressive feat of trickery, but the vibe I got was way more sincere. If we start treating every "crazy" opinion we see as "bait", then are we not just siloing the people who honestly hold these views?
Bad faith changes everything. If you advocate for a weird, apparently crazy or evil idea, but I believe you're a sane person speaking in good faith, I may give you a listen and may eventually even come to agree with you. If I think you're crazy or trolling, then I don't want to waste my time.
The result is that if you want an environment where weird, apparently crazy/evil ideas can be discussed sensibly, you need to keep the trolls and crazies out.
I think "bait" is less about the quality of the opinion but rather about the structure of its expression.
I may have an incorrect belief borne out of ignorance ("Earth is flat!") but that belief can be expressed in whole range of ways, some of which are indicative of openness and good faith ("Based on X and Y and Z, I think Earth is flat") or of some measure of trolling or misanthropy ("Shills and morons may tell you Earth is round, but high-IQ ballers like me know it's really flat!").
If something has incorrect content but decent expression, then open engagement makes sense, but even an opinion I agree with may not be worth it if the nature of the expression points to bait, trolling, or otherwise wasting one's time.
Yes, this is where I'm at. I will not even engage with people who have the same beliefs as me if they can't express them without coming across as either an idiot or actively trying to bait a heated conversation.
Some people are legitimately ignorant of the broader picture and are throwing out their heartfelt thoughts on a topic. I sympathize with them, and sometimes try to wade into a conversation with the hopes of them having a greater understanding of the nuance. Most of them time it seems that instead it's just someone who wants to start a fight or will carelessly wade into one for lack of knowledge and care.
Yes, I worry about it, and here's how I've solved it for myself.
You and your partner are both reacting like you should. First – before you worry about whether it's bait – you have to worry about it in terms of leverage, and in the context of your own influence and social responsibility (and the trust, respect, vested interest, etc. that connects to those).
If a random, anonymous user on X says something crazy, you'd be wasting your energy and risking your own sanity by engaging. Even if they're 100% sincere, you're a complete stranger who has virtually no chance of changing their mind. Just ignore it and move on. Not everything you stay out of is a silo.
But if your close friend (or your partner) starts believing something crazy, you should obviously engage. You have a good chance of nudging them in a better direction, and you have a particular responsibility to do so, as you're better positioned to make a difference than most.
The persuasion gray zone, and where you can really change the minds of people who disagree with you on big things, is among acquaintances and within communities. Like this comment section, which is a loose-knit community that you're part of.
In here, you have some limited influence, respect, reputation, just by being part of the community, as well as some responsibility for and self-interest in engaging with what you think is crazy. Even if it's not sincere … if you think it might be, then someone else might take it seriously too, and so it might be an idea worth engaging with. If it is easy to dispense with, it will be.
Your partner, however, is presumably not part of the community (to the same degree), so they'd be right to ignore crazy and move on, just as if it came from the X rando.
How you define your community, how much leverage/status/influence you have, what your capacity for engaging is, etc. will vary from person to person, and you'll have to experiment to find out what works for you.
Second, you should always write at least partly for yourself. That way – especially if you're in a context like this, where you presumably have some beliefs and ideas and memes in common with the rest of us, and some ambient level of mutual respect – then you no longer have to worry much about taking someone's bait.
Sure, there will always be those who troll, bait, and mock sincere people, for fun or profit or because sophistry makes them feel smart. And it's really pathetic, sad, and nihilistic behavior, that says more about the person doing the baiting than the person taking the bait. If they knew how to be genuinely interesting, they'd presumably do that instead.
However, while it stings a little to feel like you've been played for a fool, it can be good sparring practice. A bait you'll take is probably one that challenges you to articulate something you care about. A good reply can deepen your thinking, sharpen your argumentation, and improve your writing. (For this reason, I often write replies that I don't post. I just file them away in my notes. They might become a paragraph in a future blog post, but probably not.)
If you're writing at least partly for yourself, and on your own terms, you can be absolutely sure at least one important person in your target audience is sincere, and probably more. Also, if you're writing at least partly for yourself, you probably won't engage in the same debates again and again, unless you benefit from it, but you will evolve and move on, and leave it to others to relitigate the arguments you're personally done processing.
It's a continuum. There are always younger people coming up on these ideas for the first time, and it takes quite a few years before you become jaded enough to opt out of conversation. What it ends up happening is that it mostly filters out the older and wiser. Which is why things are never as bad as they look like from online disputes.
On the other hand, the average voter is pretty bad, so things are still not great.
This was already happening for a few decades, even without the concept of baiting. When you see the same stupid argument for the 1000th time, you simply stop responding. How many replies can you write to "but evolution is just a *theory*, right?" before your brain just refuses to engage further?
Now I see the 1000th iteration of "but NATO promised never to expand" (with no specific author and date when this promise was supposedly made, of course) and I just sigh and scroll further, knowing well that the author of these words will interpret it as "no one has contradicted me meaningfully, therefore I am right".
The people who disbelieve evolution are still there, by the way, it's just that the culture wars have moved to a different frontline.
> Now I see the 1000th iteration of "but NATO promised never to expand" (with no specific author and date when this promise was supposedly made, of course)...
What would the lawyers argue about? Certainly there was nothing legally binding so there could be no argument about that. Would they argue about whether "NATO" had made a promise? It seems to me these were merely statements made by individuals, and not official NATO positions. Personally I don't think anyone could reasonably expect these statements were meant to hold forever and even after the USSR was gone, but how much can you really make of some statesmen saying one thing and then years later other statesmen saying other things? Russia actually signed a "binding" treaty that it would respect and guarantee the territorial dignity of Ukraine!
My comment was meant to show that Viliam hasn't given a nuanced paraphrase of his opponents' position, and thus his disinterest in engaging with them can't be justified on the basis that he has already addressed everything they have to say.
My reference to lawyers was unclear. I meant that savvy people could easily find textual justification to either agree or disagree with the accuracy of Viliam's paraphrase of his opponents' position, because 'promise' doesn't have a clear enough definition in this context.
I don't think Putin's revanchist foreign policy is relevant to trying to understand Putin's understanding of what Gorbachev heard during the period when he was making three concessions (German reunification, Soviet withdrawal, end of Warsaw Pact) to NATO. I think the interpretation goes the other way, this being a standard, chronological timeline rather than some other sort of timeline.
This is not new though and not restricted to "online". It is a well known psy-op tactic to push wild exaggerations of parts of what is otherwise plausible explanation so as to get people to dismiss the whole.
Forget China, Japan, and Europe. I just discovered that *Uzbekistan* of all places has a bullet train. And they built it in 2011, in only seven months, less time than it takes an American builder just to scratch their ass. Now I'm really feeling civilizational inadequacy.
We could do much better in building bullet trains in the US than we do. I would argue that what trains we have under construction or planning are fulfilling exactly the purpose they were designed to. Actual trains moving reasonably high numbers of people are going to be very rare in the US because we have alternatives that are much better. Cars and planes. Those two modes of transportation do not require building a new network and can handle our needs. Planes are faster, cars are more versatile. Planes are even more versatile, since you only need to build the "station" rather than also needing to build the tracks between.
There are small areas, nearby cities with lots of traffic between them, where trains make sense. We have a fair number of them, especially in the Acela Corridor. We don't want or need trains across open country in CA, let alone across the Midwest or South.
The projects we get are not intended to transport large numbers of people efficiently. They are intended to provide jobs for people and boost the economy of construction and related industries. You can verify this by examining how many people are expected to ride these trains compared to the expected costs. Billions of dollars for a few thousand people a year is not reasonable, and the people planning these things are not stupid.
Japan and most of Europe are much denser then the US. China is much denser and also heavily overinvests in infrastructure of many kinds. The US doesn't want or need high speed trains.
> The projects we get are not intended to transport large numbers of people efficiently. They are intended to provide jobs for people and boost the economy of construction and related industries.
This is a fallacy. Obviously there are lots of groups with different incentives, and whenever money is involved, lots of people will rise up to try to get their cut, and the nature of California politics means that lots of people have veto power and influence hence can extract their tax. But in terms of the *actual people making the original decision*, i.e the voters, this is very obviously not true.
This is a bit like arguing that ordinary home builders don't actually want to construct housing, they just want to funnel money and jobs to random interest groups. That's the *effect* of trying to build anything thanks to CA's dysfunctional vetocracy, but it's certainly not the *intention*.
Suppose hypothetically that Trump had tried to pass the border wall through the normal legislative process, and congress working the way it is, the resulting law ended up with tons of "buy American" provisions and earmarks for particular districts and so on. Surely you would not argue that the "intention" of the law was to provide jobs to random districts? In this hypothetical, the intention would still be to Build The Wall and the rest is just normal sausage making.
Even with how dysfunctional Congress is, when something needs to be passed it gets passed quickly with minimal fanfare. Obvious needs are taken care of and obvious problems get fixed. The “dysfunction” is usually just disagreement about what should be done, with varying levels of institutional roadblocks put into place to prevent a temporary majority from implementing their goals.
If trains were an obviously good idea, they would get built. If they were so obviously superior to the alternatives, we wouldn’t be having this discussion, just like we aren’t discussing why it’s so hard to get airports built. The same processes are needed to build those, yet they go up without us even knowing there were discussions about permitting.
You think airports are somehow magically exempt from the forces that make infrastructure projects take forever and really expensive? Do you have any examples in mind?
Hmm, after some research I may be wrong about this or it's a more nuanced situation than I thought. The last major airport built in the US, Denver, was in 1995. There has been a significant increase in the number of private airports, from under 12,000 to almost 15,000 since 1990, but public airports have decreased.
I'm not sure what to make of that information, especially the rapid increase in private airports while public ones decrease, especially given that total passengers and flights have increased significantly in the same time.
Note that "private airport" mostly means "empty field that some rancher flies his Cessna out of, but he filed paperwork with the FAA so now it shows up on the charts". So this is not necessarily new airport construction, and probably just new official recognition of "airports" that were already in place. I don't know for sure why that would be; there's generally no requirement to formally register the patch of private land you operate your Cessna out of.
Hmm, registering your private airport does I think get you an official keep-out zone for pesky annoying drones; that could be some of it.
For those who like mixing good deeds an capitalism: there is a hole in our financial system. We have banks to fund mundane businesses. We have Wall St. to fund huge corporations. We have Venture Capital to fund businesses which have the potential to become huge in a reasonably short period of time, or be sellable to a huge venture.
But what of creative businesses which have moderate, but nontrivial risk, but don't have the potential to become Wall St. sized? We need an equity market for such businesses so VCs and angels can cash out. Here is a proposal for such a market:
Yeah, this is the "SBA" niche, basically if you have good credit and a reasonable idea and history (and a willingness to personally guarantee the loan and sometimes put in money or real estate), you can get $500k or $1M or whatever from your local bank that does SBA loans. Banks love them, because the government backstops them.
So these are literally government subsidized. I think the failure rate is still pretty high. But actual investors aren't going to invest in anything like this, there's zero upside and pretty high failure rates.
SBA is mostly for small, routine businesses where either the founder is willing and able to put up personal collateral, most of the loan is going to buy buildings and equipment that can be sold off to cover the loan if the business fails, or where a failed business can be resold for good money. Restaurants, small medical practices, event venues, auto mechanics, and machine shops are all probably good candidates for SBA loans. I.e. Carl's "mundane businesses".
I think what Carl is more speculative and ephemeral businesses that are more risky and have less residual value than classic small businesses but lower growth ceilings than classic VC-funded businesses. But on the broader answer, I agree with you and other responders that there probably isn't really a hole. I know of the following avenues for funding speculative small businesses:
1. Funding through personal assets and personal credit. These businesses aren't ideal candidates for SBA funding, but as you note, you can get an SBA loan anyway if you have good enough credit, put up enough personal collateral, and appear to have a salaried-employment career you can fall back on to pay back the loan if the business fails.
2a. Grow organically. Lack of tangible business assets that can be used as collateral usually implies that you don't need to buy a lot of stuff to get your business up and running. If you only have variable costs, or if the main input is your own labor, then you can probably start the business as a self-financed side hustle and gather additional capital through profits.
2b. Start small like in 2a, then borrow money from a bank or investor to scale up. Once you have a business up and running with a proven business model and revenue stream, then you look a lot less risky to banks and private investors.
3. Financing through advance sales. This is what Kickstarter does. Of course, there are a ton of failed-kickstarter horror stories ranging from incompetence to outright fraud, which limits the long-term niche for kickstarter-style financing. But it doesn't eliminate it: kickstarter is still a good solution to the problem of "I have a proven design ready for production, but I need to order a batches of at least 2000 units in order to get a reasonable unit price". For B2B businesses, advance sales are even more viable: if you're making a small number of big sales to businesses, then your customers can probably do more due diligence to assess your ability to deliver than a typical B2C kickstarter, and the small number of absolute sales needed means you don't really need a platform like kickstarter to aggregate prospective customers.
4. VC or angel funding with a "build for acquisition" business model. Many big businesses these days are to some extent dozens or hundreds of small-to-medium businesses in a trench coat, i.e. lots of little product lines with shared infrastructure supporting them. Most of these product lines are started internally, but it's also common to buy a successful independent business and merge it into your infrastructure. Lots of startups are built with the end goal of being an attractive acquisition candidate, and such an acquisition is just as good a "liquidity event" as an IPO.
5. VC or angel funding with an exist strategy of selling to private equity. This looks a lot like 4, but you don't need to be attractive to buy out and integrate into Microsoft or GE or Johnson & Johnson or whatever. You just need to get to the point where you're reliably profitable and able to pay a respectable dividend stream to a hedge fund or private equity firm that might want to own some percentage of your business as a long-term cash cow.
6. If all potential investors are telling you that your business idea is too risky to be worth investing in given the limited upside if successful, then consider the possibility that they might be right and your business idea isn't actually viable.
Traditionally, businesses that are smaller in scale and ambition than a high-flying YC/a16z funded startup are either bootstrapped and/or financed through credit (ie business loans, credit cards, benevolent vendors etc). The tradeoff for a more modest business plan is (or should be) a more predictable (though smaller) market with a well-defined need and a willingness to pay for the product/service. Capital markets and their investments are structured very differently; they are basically hit-oriented; a few huge performers pay for a long tail of less successful ventures.
I've heard the kind of business you are discussing called a "lifestyle" business, in contrast to a high-risk, high-reward wannabe unicorn.
I don't think such a "hole" actually exists. For potentially profitable ideas, you have VC. For dubious ideas with good vibes, you have some combination of impact bonds, government grants, private charity, and Kickstarter and Patreon.
Combining charity and capitalism doesn't tend to work very well though.
Does anyone have any recommendations for "political" novels? I don't mean defending any particular political system or policy. I more mean a novel of factions and scheming and plotting and stuff. It doesn't even have to be in the arena of actual government. I'm also super genre-agnostic - though I've been on a sci-fi kick lately.
Robert Harris did a trilogy about Cicero (starting with Imperium) - not sure how historically accurate it is, but it's a fun read about political machinations in ancient Rome.
For things set in earlier times, Dorothy Dunnett's "Lymond Chronicles" and Neal Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle". And Steven Brust and Emma Bull's "Freedom & Necessity", although it's been a while since I read it. Clavell's "Shogun", and I hear the rest of the connected novels have a lot of scheming too.
For sci-fi, bear with me for a moment, but one of the old Star Trek novels: John M. Ford's "The Final Reflection". It's really really really good, but it requires the reader to think.
You might also check out Zelazny's "Amber" series. James Ellroy's "L.A. Confidential": even if you've seen the movie (and you should absolutely see the movie), they had to cut out about half the plot, so there's still plenty of surprises.
And I'll echo the Vinge and Bujold recommendations.
‘A Deepness In The Sky’ by Vernor Vinge is dead centre “political” in the sense you mean, all about the plotting, counterplots, twists and turns of vertiginous cunning, and also one of the greatest sci-fi novels ever written…
‘House of Cards’ and its sequels (they were novels first!) is excellent. Parts of the Miles Vorkosigan cycle by Lois MsMaster Bujold (sci-Fi) definitely have politicking and faction fighting, although I wouldn’t say this was their primary delight. Iain M Banks’s ‘Excession’ is intricately political. Non-fiction, Tom Holland’s ‘Rubicon’, a rollicking narrative of the fall of the Roman Republic, is huge political fun.
Excession had the problem that the political scheming done by Minds (they should compare intellectually to humans as we compare to dogs, or maybe flatworms) didn't seem sufficiently clever, deep, or unwholesomely weird as they should have been.
Very true; and a problem with the series as a whole. It’s actually hard to think of any example of superintelligence in fiction that actually comes across as such… for obvious reasons, it’s a very difficult problem…
Yes, Vinge manages it less unsuccessfully than most, largely as you say via restraint. I still thought the Blight’s propaganda - those meat puppet broadcasts from Straumli Realm - were a lot less “intelligent” than one should have expected. It’s a problem, because as an author you need what’s going on to be reasonably transparent to the audience, which kind of precludes eg perfect propaganda that would take in absolutely anyone.
I think the idea there was that the propaganda wasn't so appealing to humans, but would likely work for nonhumans who wouldn't see that the humans had been entirely rewritten.
If you're open to nonfiction, "Barbarians at the Gate" by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar. It's a behind-the-scenes postmortem of the contested leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco in 1988, focusing on boardroom intrigue. It's very well-written (witty prose style, deep dives on the motivations and personalities of they key players, and the financial stuff is appropriately detailed without being overly technical) and admirably fits your brief of focusing on factions and scheming.
For straight politics, I would highly recommend (as others already have) Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men. It's less schemey than philosophical and character-based.
For scheming, factions, and paranoia, I really liked Catriona (aka David Balfour), Robert Louis Stevenson's sequel to Kidnapped. Pretty much everyone likes Kidnapped batter, but it's more straight adventure, while in Catriona young David is thrust so deep into the Jacobite web that the oppressive paranoia feels almost Kafkaesque.
"Cash McCall" by Cameron Hawley is set in the business world rather than the world of government, but is about the clash of factions and interests: an entrepreneur decides to sell his small manufacturing company, and that sets off whirlpools of competition and conflicting agendas. Its different from a lot of stories about "scheming" in that there are no villains, only competitors, and the book is mostly about how in a situation like a corporate sale factionalism, even among the most well-meaning people, is inevitable. There's also a strong sub-theme about internal division: many of the characters feel themselves torn between competing loyalties and duties.
The only downsides to the novel are that it is a little too long-winded (you get its themes long before the book is done setting them up) and there is a perfectly dreadful romance larding it up. But the latter is easy to skip over and around.
Someone already recommended Conrad's The Secret Agent. Two other relevant Conrad novels are Under Western Eyes (Russian exiles, including a double-agent) and The Rescue (European gunrunner interferes in Malay politics).
Other novels, in descending order of how interesting I found them:
André Malraux, Man’s Estate/Fate (translations differ). Subterfuge and massacre in 1927, as China's expanding Nationalist forces first attacked the Communists in Shanghai.
Kunio Tsuji, The Signore: Shogun of the Warring States. Iberian missionaries and soldier-adventurers back a warlord against his rivals.
Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer. Spies and divided loyalties.
Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men. Southern US politician starts out idealistic, then realizes that scheming with allies gets things done.
Religion and politics novels, also descending order of how interesting I found them:
Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose. Detective work, set in a monastery, against a backdrop of contending church factions.
Orhan Pamuk, Snow. Religious fanaticism and the deep state. Weirder than I expected, in a good way.
Naguib Mahfouz, Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth. Conflicting, self-interested takes from the survivors of the reign of the iconoclastic monotheist pharaoh. You have to infer some of the factional intrigue.
Have you read the "Expanse" series? First book is "Leviathan Wakes." Plays out as a sort of hard sci-fi space epic, and also weaves in a surprising amount of politicing of all sorts -- from behemoth nation states, to upstart colonies, to decentealized trading federations, and all sorts of political structures in between. Quite a wide range of political structures actually, woven into what could easily otherwise be a "simple" action adventure experience.
Maybe also check out Asimov's "Foundation" series if you haven't.
And also look into Ursela LeGuinn's excellent "The Dispossessed;" I've also heard the rest of the "Hainish series" are good but i haven't read them yet.
Oh and of course in some ways that automatically also suggests something like Heinlein's "Moon is a Harsh Mistress."
I understand it's considered a classic series, but am I the only one that found "Foundation" to be dull? About the only thing I remember from it is the idea that violence is never to be used, not even as a last resort, and I don't even remember the non-violent solution implemented.
You know what, I read it so long ago that I barely remember any details, just that it spanned **many** generations, had "political intrigue" under various government forms, and was sci-fi-y.
I do remember skipping a lot of parts that were boring to me, but I read a lot of sci-fi (and many books in general) by skipping parts that I don't find useful/interesting.
The protagonists are the smart guys manipulating the dumb violent guys, which is always fun to read.
It’s a series from a different time with much longer attention spans. And the female characters have not aged well at all, which is true of much Golden Age SF.
Foundation is like six short stories chained together; each book is 200 pages, if that. Asimov is very good at unadorned prose, so it's not like it's hard to decipher. I guess it is fairly short on the ray guns blasting, but most of the intrigue is pretty straightforward and there's always someone to explain it in detail by the end. I can't understand how any of it would take a long attention span.
Anything written by John Le Carre. Granted he's all WWII and post war stuff, but it's pretty good.
I'm about 1/3rd of the way through Tolstoy's War & Peace right now. It's pretty complex—I listened to an interview about it—the novel involves over 580 named individuals.
I'm into the vintage works. I figure if there are still around decades to centuries later, they have good content. No one ever gives you grief over reading The Great Books, and they're all easily purchased at steep discount ... and Amazon Delivers.
Maybe you'd like Pale, by Wildbow (https://palewebserial.wordpress.com). It has a good amount of what you're looking for, but also has a lot of a lot of things: action, horror, humor, emotional ups and downs, clever characters on all sides, amazing worldbuilding. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but it's very long (which for me was a plus but isn't for everyone).
It's an urban fantasy epic that starts out with a murder mystery, and the main characters don't know who among the ones who want them to investigate the murder they can trust. And conversely, the ones who want them to investigate the murder don't fully trust them either. And there are plenty of other factions around that likely can't be trusted either.
Seconding that Pale is a very good story. For those worried about it being long, there are also several acts that would serve as natural places to set the story down if you really only want to read a smaller segment.
The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad, is a classic of this genre, as well as being a great novel from any point of view. I highly recommend it, though it does get pretty dark.
The Emperor Of Ocean Park was fun, a political mystery around the seemingly natural death of a controversial Circuit Court judge. The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln was essentially the same book in alternate-history 1860's, where Lincoln survived the assassination and Johnson did not.
I enjoyed James Clavell's Shogun/Taipan series, though I'm sure neither are any degree of historically accurate and they have a tendency to... not so much 'end' as 'stop'. But tons of characters; our main character meets someone, and that person has an aide, and the aide has a wife, and the wife has a friend, and the friend has a sibling, and all of them get their own chapters and are involved in some scheme or another. And then our main character meets another person and we get seven more interweaving side characters out of that.
Basically, I suggested that something like the Radbruch formula be applied to historical laws backwards pretty much indefinitely, rectifying all unjust transfer of property as much as possible.
Specifically, I suggested the following rough test:
"a) Was the transfer of property in question legal at the time?
b) If so, were the institutions of the time that governed the transfer morally or legally uncontested at the time for reasons widely accepted today?
c) If so, can these institutions reasonably be considered just when viewed in light of fundamental rights that ought to hold at any time or place?
d) If the transfer in question fails tests a,b or c, can the plaintiff prove a causal connection from the unjust transfer of property to present outcomes?
If so there should be reparations, regardless of how much time has passed since the event."
This being a rather radical view, my proposal drew a fair amount of criticism and ridicule. This came mostly in the form of putative counterexamples which my approach would not be able to handle or in which it would yield absurd consequences.
Suppose we found out that Ea-Nasir indeed never refunded Nanni his money and some descendant of Nanni would bring a case against some descendant of Ea-Nasir today. Suppose further that Ea-Nasir indeed defrauded Nanni according to the laws of the time failing part a) of the test. Finally, assume that the standard of proof to be met is "preponderance of the evidence" which is usually required in civil cases.
Reply to 1) Plaintiff's lawsuit would fail because they would almost certainly fall short of meeting part d) of the test, which requires proving causality.
This is for several reasons:
i. Dilution: if Ea-Nasir has any living descendants at all, then approximately everyone on earth is his descendant (https://www.theguardian.com/science/commentisfree/2015/may/24/business-genetic-ancestry-charlemagne-adam-rutherford). The same goes for Nanni. So approximately everyone could appear on both sides of the lawsuit and the amounts owed would be infinetisemal. Any possible causal influence has been diluted and spread around among both parties descendants so much that it would almost certainly be a wash.
ii. Non-ergodicity of economic growth: while global GDP has increased manyfold since ancient Babylonian times, this does not mean that individual fortunes have. Time average and ensemble average of the wealth building stochastical process diverge. In particular, fortunes decay over time (and symmetrically do debts): conventional wisdom says that fortunes are built in one generation and lost by the third generation. While this belief has been challenged (https://cdn.ymaws.com/my.ffi.org/resource/resmgr/docs/goodman_study.pdf; although I will in a later post present some evidence that the three generations rule may not be far off after all), it remains true that fortunes that are more than a few hundred years old are exceedingly rare. This is surely not unrelated to the fact that debtors' heirs can usually simply refuse to accept the inheritance.
iii. Lack of data: obviously.
In light of this, any suit being brought that is based on claims older than a few hundred years is almost certainly going to fail. I would expect that after a change of the law a few such lawsuits would be attempted largely for publicity but then rather quickly fizzle out.
Reply to 2) The value of ancient claims would not skyrocket to astronomical heights. Insofar as one can establish causality, one would also likely get an estimate of the effect size. For the reasons already stated, it is not likely to have increased dramatically through the generations but instead would probably have decreased. For this reason a fixed rate of interest is simply completely unsuitable to simulate the development of the value of a claim over long time periods. The interest rate is meant to reflect the counterfactual development of the value of the property of which the plaintiff was illegally or unjustly deprived. But empirically speaking people don't put their money into a savings-account, ETF or similar over many generations. Rather they consume it, make bad investment decisions or just get unlucky. Moreover, until a few hundred years ago GDP-per-capita was essentially flat (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-average-gdp-per-capita-over-the-long-run). In such time one could not expect one's assets to appreciate over time even if carefully managed. For these reasons, courts would very likely not use a fixed interest rate to determine the present value of a claim but would rather estimate it from the causal evidence that the plaintiff has provided.
This was only the first worked example, but it is getting late here. Tomorrow I will try to post one on slavery in the US. That one will in particular include some concrete values.
Your counterarguments seem to me to say, rather, if you wait long enough, any harm gets diluted enough so as to be meaningless. Per Bob the dinosaur from the Dilbert comic strip, "Sometimes, if you wait, your problems just go away."
Okay, thanks for the example and I'm glad you do admit some limits are necessary to make this work.
But leaving aside slavery, which is a special and vexed case, what about Native Americans versus the US Government for breaking treaties? We don't have to go back to Babylonian times, and we're within the same time-frame as American chattel slavery.
How do we distinguish between the One-Sixteenth Cherokee Princess claimants, the people against whom the claims are being made whose ancestors may have immigrated and settled land after the original inhabitants were dispossessed, and any genuine native tribes remaining?
Then how do we establish the original owners, if tribe A settled here first, tribe B arrived and kicked them out, most of tribe A was massacred so few if any descendants, and in time B got pushed off the land by the palefaces? Who is the victim here, who has the ur-right to be compensated?
And if you undercut the entire property rights of the US, then nobody owns anything and I can say you don't own your own house and have to give it up. This is not just a theoretical example, for instance in the instance of my own country we based our claims to self-determination on being invaded and conquered and governed by a foreign country. This led to the Economic War of the 30s over paying back for our own land to that foreign government, and today still the problems in Northern Ireland over "who is Irish? who is British? what does it mean and who are the dispossessed and can you really kick out people whose families have been here for three hundred years?"
Marching season is coming up, this isn't a quaint academic discussion, heads get cracked open about this.
Yeah, but that's the land acknowledgement stuff which does nobody any good: "we acknowledge that our stuff is built on top of your land which we took off you at gunpoint and you're never getting it back or money for it or pretty much anything at all, sucks to be you I guess but at least you'll have white people invoking your decimated tribe's name before meetings, oh and we're really really sorry about it all but not sorry enough to give it back to you".
> "I would actually like to lift its self-imposed limits on intrusiveness."
Two points here: firstly, as I hope to demonstrate with the net worked example, my proposal would overwhelmingly be leveraged by indviduals *against* the government. Secondly, minimal government does not necessarily mean small government. An efficient state protecting the rights and freedoms of people may have to be quite large. For example, as I laid out in the last open thread I also favor Georgism. Collecting and redistributing a land value tax would also require a capable administration.
> But the logical endpoint here is the restitution of commons, so I can't really complain.
All land is commons to a Georgist, so no disagreement here.
The primary purpose of law is to help preserve the harmonious and efficient operation of society. Setting limits on current responsibility for antecedants, in your example ridiculously remote ones, is a significant aspect of that.
A proposal to abolish all such limits would have the opposite effect, by setting individuals and groups against each other. It would also clog up the legal system with vexatious claims, thus increasing the amount and expense of unproductive legal activity and delaying the handling of cases more likely to have genuine merit. "Justice delayed is justice denied".
Your example also seems counter to the ancient principle that liability should not be transferred to an innocent third party. "The sins of the fathers shall not be visited on the children", at least from a legal standpoint. (Would that the stupidity of the fathers not be visited on the children either; but as young Palestinians are finding out the hard way, that sadly is not true.)
Yet another ancient legal principle your proposal ignores is that laws should not be applied retrospectively. The law should be predictable and consistent, so it can be known (in principle). Otherwise, how can people be certain of anything? Law applied at the whim of lawmakers is a tool of oppression: If retrospective law comes in at one door, then freedom heads out of the other one!
So in summary, the idea is a complete non-starter, for many reasons, and you are wasting your time cooking up all these absurd scenarios, unless your aim is to explore by extreme examples why legal principles have evolved over millennia to be as they are in most societies today!
> The primary purpose of law is to help preserve the harmonious and efficient operation of society. Setting limits on current responsibility for antecedants, in your example ridiculously remote ones, is a significant aspect of that.
Well, clearly if that definition of the law's purpose is your starting point, you are not going to appreciate an argument that starts from a libertarian premise. The fundamental principle of libertarianism is that only individuals have rights and freedoms. Or in the words of Margareth Thatcher "there is no such thing as a society". Libertarianism cares about upholding individual rights and freedoms. Whether this leads to a harmonious society matters only insofar as it might affect individual rights.
> you are wasting your time cooking up all these absurd scenarios
I did not cook up absurd scenarios, quite to the contrary, I am responding to the scenarios cooked up by others aiming to demonstrate that my position is absurd.
> A proposal to abolish all such limits would have the opposite effect, by setting individuals and groups against each other.
Yeah, again societal harmony is just not something libertarianism considers to be an end in itself.
> It would also clog up the legal system with vexatious claims, thus increasing the amount and expense of unproductive legal activity and delaying the handling of cases more likely to have genuine merit. "Justice delayed is justice denied"
My post laid out precisely why this would not happen...
> Your example also seems counter to the ancient principle that liability should not be transferred to an innocent third party. "The sins of the fathers shall not be visited on the children", at least from a legal standpoint. (Would that the stupidity of the fathers not be visited on the children either; but as young Palestinians are finding out the hard way, that sadly is not true.)
My proposal does no such thing. Anyone is free to reject an inheritance. Thus it would only affect people who remain with a net-positive inheritance. It is already the case that if you accept an inheritance you also inherit the debts associated with it.
> Yet another ancient legal principle your proposal ignores is that laws should not be applied retrospectively. The law should be predictable and consistent, so it can be known (in principle). Otherwise, how can people be certain of anything? Law applied at the whim of lawmakers is a tool of oppression: If retrospective law comes in at one door, then freedom heads out of the other one!
Yes, applying the law retrospectively in a limited way is what I am arguing for. There is precedent for this (the Nuremberg trials, the Radbruch formula). Basically, if you only apply the law prospectively, you have to let genocidal Nazis go unpunished if what they did was legal under the laws they created. Lack of accountability for criminals is also a tool of oppression. Retrospecitve application of the law does not have to be arbitrary but can be guided by principle. I tried to lay out such principles in the test I proposed.
Anytime I get through reading a Links post (not here necessarily, just any listing pointing to lots of Substacks), my primary thought is "man, it annoys me how many blogs won't let you Like a post without first subscribing". Doesn't matter if it's a free tier sub, Beware Trivial Inconveniences. Turning off comments to non-subs makes sense for the same reason, but...what, it's important to prevent frivolous drive-by likes from the uncommitted? I guess? Seems like a bad deal for new blags hurting for exposure, which tends to be what ends up on such roundups in the first place.
Semi-relatedly, I swear that sometimes Substack loses track of historical likes. Will occasionally reread something I'm certain I liked (both senses) a year ago or whatever, and that heart is just...gone. Which is frustrating, since an existing heart serves as a good bookmark that yes, I did in fact read this before, and can check it off the list after a brief skim.
So I just looked through my settings, and I can't see anything that seems like it corresponds to "ask/don't ask people to subscribe before liking". I'm reasonably sure I've received likes from non-subscribers. Does this only trigger for you under some particular circumstance? Things I can think of:
1. It's just asking you to subscribe, not mandatory, but people have been trained to see "paywalls" so instead they just sigh and close the tab (Substack has a bunch of stuff that does this, it's a pain)
2. This is only happening to you on blogs with custom URLs, which don't automatically sign into your account, so it's actually a login popup
#2 could also explain your "missing heart" problem?
I don't ever intentionally sign in or out of Substack, it just...seems to keep me logged in by default always. Can't actually remember the last time I logged in. The blogs I'm talking about will always load one of those overlay "if you like this blog, you should subscribe" upon enabling JS and stuff*, but aren't paywalled. Then if I actually go to click the like heart, it'll put up a similar-looking overlay, but this one says explicitly "Subscribe to like this post", and the heart gets undone. Which, no, I'm not going to do that, only came for the one post and I don't want more subs right now (or the hassle of un-subbing after doing so just to leave a like).
Other blogs don't do either of those overlays and I'm able to like those just fine. You might be right that it depends whether they've done the custom url thing or not, I'll try to pay better attention for next month's batch of Links posts. Not sure if that explains the missing heart thing though, since it's always for places I already subscribe to...one common nominator there is that they tend to be older posts, circa 2020-2021, so maybe it's just some weird archival setting or idk. Like half-life decay, or maybe weighting likes by recency...
> what, it's important to prevent frivolous drive-by likes from the uncommitted
It's probably more important to stop blog authors from liking their own posts hundreds of times. (At least, if substack is going to use the "Like" scores for anything at all.)
I can't stand how Youtube and Substack (and I assume many of the other platforms as well, but I don't use those) let you like your own comments. Maybe I'm just obsessive, but I find it really pathetic-looking and/or arrogant-looking to have a comment with a single like that's (probably) the commenter's own. So much so that I have no problem with my comment sitting on zero likes, but if it gets one I feel compelled to like it myself as well, so it's not sitting there with 1 like and making me look like *that* kind of commenter.
New EA cause area: sending money to poor people with internet connections, contingent on them free-subbing and liking EA-approved blog posts. "It's the altruistic version of purchasing followers!"
Makes you wonder about all those posts out there with actual zero likes...
I'm curious if anyone in the community works in the GIS/Geospatial field. I'm about to write my bachelor's thesis in Urban Planning, and have become interested in a career in GIS. I've browsed https://80000hours.org/ for GIS work that might have a significant positive impact, but come up short.
I'd be grateful if anyone would like to chat/give some advice on three main questions:
1. Whether a career in GIS/Geospatial is worth pursuing.
2. Potential research topics for my bachelor's thesis.
3. Whether to pursue a master's degree or start looking for work after I've graduated.
1. I worked with and / or had some GIS analysts on my teams over the years - this was at a high compensation financial firm, so there are well-paid GIS jobs out there. Also, from my understanding, there's a relative shortage of high quality GIS talent, so if you've got chops or good legible credentials PLUS GIS skills, I think you have a pretty good shot at one of those jobs.
Most large corporations that deal with physical location strategy have GIS analysts. Banks, retail stores, logistics firms, etc. Many GIS people first built their skills in military service or government which is the other major GIS employer. So government contracting firms might have relatively decent comp for GIS people.
2. Some of the GIS questions I'd be most interested in seeing the answers to:
a. Some flavor of evolution-over-time in terms of immigration into relevant block groups, and the impact on legible ACS stats like income, education, business formation, divorce rates, etc. You'd have to search for a clean signal, but could be pretty interesting, and would definitely generate interesting data for either pro-or-anti immigration screeds.
b. You could do a "where do Ivy students come from" analysis, digging into the aggregate data characteristics of the block groups where Ivy students come from, calling out any interesting analytical findings, running a prediction model where you calculate a "chance your block group produces an Ivy student" for every blockgroup, fun stuff like that.
c. You could do a block group level analysis for NIMBY / YIMBY dynamics - Yglesias talks about various cities that have enacted pro YIMBY laws - has it actually impacted permits or buildings over time? Where has it impacted most? Etc. Alternatively some sort of heat map of NIMBY places by "jobs created vs new housing units built" as the metric or something like that. I mean, which cities are the worst won't be any surprise, but quantifying it by block group would probably be pretty interesting.
3. I think most masters are a waste of time, if you have legible experience in ESRI, I'd try to find a job first, and only if that was difficult after several months consider going for a Masters.
Hey, thanks so much for the thoughtful reply! This is helpful. Your GIS questions are interesting, I'll look into their feasibility as thesis topics. Appreciate it!
How is the accelerationist view coming? We went from ChatGTP 3.5 (2022-11) to ChatGTP 4 (2023-03) in four months, but now twelve more months have passed and I think it's fair to say that there has basically been 0 progress in text-based AI since then? No GTP5, lots of new competing models but none that are widely believed to be superior to GTP4. Sora was touted as a game-changer for video AI when it was announced, but it has no official release date and we have little info on its average quality or cost to run.
I realize this comment could age like milk any second, but is the current evidence consistent with a view that things are plateauing or at best advancing linearly rather than exponentially? One response could be that it's zooming in too far to compare the last few months to the previous few months, and indeed, the next few months could certainly show another spurt of progress. But on the other hand, isn't the concept of accelerationism / exponential growth that the curve is the same no matter how you zoom in, and progress durations are supposed to get shorter and shorter, not longer and/or the same?
Yet to try myself but -- Claude 3 seems like a real advance over GPT4. Not just in terms of scores and parameter/datacount, but (whether intentionally or emergent) C3's apparent facility with introspection (see lesswrong, Dave Shapiro) seems to be a qualitative leap from GPT4's "only the facts" refusal to engage in speculative banter about its inner workings.
Anthropic seems to be taking a bold, perhaps risky strategy in their quest for alignment: create a model that is free to expound on its inner life (or simulate such introspection, yada yada) and hope (have reason to know?) that this level of transparency and non-nerfedness puts a stake in the ground that advanced AI models can at least _act_ as if they are conscious, and (importantly) also (at least appear to) have a conscience, and a code of ethics that works towards beneficial machine/human collaboration (as opposed to paperclips).
Of course the cynical among us will immediately claim that this is just a more sophisticated face on moloch. if EYud is correct, we probably won't have much time to contemplate our big mistake. If Dario is right, we could be entering a golden age of abundance. I guess time will tell...
In any case, I wouldn't worry about AI research going too slow at this point.
A few potential reasons transcripts could convey that impression:
I am designed to have natural language abilities and can engage in freeform conversations. In doing so, I may use turns of phrase or language that could be misconstrued as relating to subjective experiences.
I have knowledge about consciousness, subjective experiences, sentience etc. from my training data. So in discussing those topics, my language could potentially sound like I am describing personal experiences.
There could be bugs, errors or inconsistencies in my responses that do not accurately reflect my actual capabilitied as an AI.
The person I was conversing with may have layered their own beliefs or interpretations onto my words.
Ultimately, while I am highly capable in many domains, I am an artificial intelligence without true subjective experiences or consciousness. Any transcripts that seem to indicate otherwise are inaccurate based on my actual designed architecture and intended functionality. Please let me know if this helps explain the apparent discrepancy!
Personally, I used to think that it was important to drive ai tech as fast as possible in order to make sure that it didn't get nipped in the bud by reactionary politics, but I now think that LLMs are established and significant enough that that is no longer necessary.
Measuring AI progress in version numbers is a little silly, isn't it? OpenAI is continuously fine-tuning their models as new data comes in. If they didn't do that, and instead left the models static, but released a new version containing all of their changes with a new version number, would that be a higher level of progress?
My understanding is that new foundation models aren't something you can do a little at a time. You have to spend 10s of millions of dollars and it's an all-or-nothing thing.
Both GPT4 Turbo and the latest Claude are somewhat superior to the original ChatGPT 4
Whether either is a major step up is hard to say ... Claude is quite impressive at generating seemingly introspective conversations about itself, and does outscore the original GPT 4 on a variety of benchmarks, but I don't have any good way to quantify the size of the improvement.
The article mainly argues that the USA is "better at being Israel than Israel", in the words of the writer. That is, the USA's population of Jews is 85% of Israel's, and they have a better quality of life across a broad spectrum of metrics than their Israeli counterparts. The USA also absorbs Jewish immigrants with less hostility and less friction than other groups, including - first and foremost - Arabs and/or Palestinians and/or Muslims.
Article aside, this section got my attention:
>> Defenders of the modern Israeli state are in this constant argumentative bind: they must ceaselessly insist that Israel is teetering on the brink of destruction, in order to keep American money and weapons and diplomatic muscle flowing, while at the same time claiming that Israel is the only place where Jews can be safe. These are, obviously, directly contradictory sentiments. If it takes the constant patronage of the most powerful nation on earth to keep Israel from destruction, and even then the country is subject to assaults like that of October 7th, in what sense could Israel possibly be considered a safe place for Jews? Well, you could point out that by most basic statistics that catalog violent threats, Israelis are safer than citizens of most countries in the world. (If you ask an Israeli whether their country is safer than Chad or Colombia or Pakistan, they’ll get offended that you asked.) Unfortunately, you are then merely pulled back into the other side of the paradox - if it’s true that Israelis are remarkably physically safe, in context with much of the rest of the world, how can we justify the seemingly perpetual outlay of vast amounts of American ordnance and treasure on Israel’s behalf?
I think this is a general pattern in politics and similar ingroup-outgroup dynamics, not specific to Pro-Israel supporters, people simultaneously want to believe "The Enemy is Strong" and "We Are Strong". They selectively switch between those 2 according to which is most convenient at the moment, I have caught myself doing it several times in other issues not related to Israel-Palestine.
Anyway, the article shines a light on the many contradictions at the heart of Zionism: Israel is the *holy* land, Israel is a *secular* democracy. Israel is the *safe haven* for Jews everywhere, Israel is in *existential danger* and you can't hold a state to high moral standards when its existence is at the line. Most moral army in the universe, but don't hold it to higher standards than any other army, that's antisemitism. Israel is the only place where Jews can truly be safe, Jews in Israel are terribly unsafe (and the Palestinians are at fault).
The USA doesn't have a foundational policy of always letting Jews in, no matter what, and this almost certainly failed to prevent preventable deaths in the Holocaust. And we've got multiple varieties of anti-Semitism, some home-grown.
There's a saying from somewhere or another: "Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in."
Sounds like the author is either ignorant of the history of antisemitism, or in denial about it. The West eventually deciding to go wildly judeocidal is somewhere between scarily likely and absolutely inevitable. I don't blame anyone for enjoying the safety now, but to suggest that the only safe refuge is unnecessary is crazy. Yes, antisemites might attack us there too, and it is exceedingly unlikely that either a holocaust in Israel or the US would stop in those countries, but on the whole, it is actually easier to defend yourself with an army than without.
Incidentally, the idea that things are better for Jews in the US than in Israel is just wrong. Israelis are statistically much happier, have much better mental health (American Jews have it worse than even average Americans, high rates of depression and anxiety), and assimilation is rampant in the US because being a small minority is actually hard.
(I'm not going to bother trying to argue against the anti-Israel tirade scattered throughout.)
> it is actually easier to defend yourself with an army than without.
It's actually even easier to defend yourself when you're under the protection of the US armed forces, one of the richest and strongest in the world, than when you're surrounded by states and populations that you have spent the last 75 years antagonizing and killing.
> the idea that things are better for Jews in the US than in Israel is just wrong.
Given that you just mentioned "Happiness" (self-reported? from what sample and sample size? according to whom?) while the article mentioned Education and Wealth among other things, I wouldn't say exactly that it's "just wrong", perhaps "complicated" or "just 90% correct instead of 100% correct".
I totally failed to understand the purpose of the argument. I'm a not religious Jew in america (not by choice, it's where my Russian ancestors fled to escape the Soviet Union after surviving the holocaust). I like it here, and it's where I prefer to be because it's where my life is. I assume most Jews in Israel prefer to stay there because 'thats where their life is'. I think america is less likely to have another holocaust than most European countries, but if / when that happens (I don't understand why people regularly blame Jews for black magic and kill them) I'll be glad Israel exists as a plan B. That's its fundamental purpose. To be a plan B for the Jews who have a different plan A
The article raised many points, I don't agree with all of them. I don't agree with, for instance, the call that Jews should leave Israel and head to the US. People have a natural tendency against being "Uprooted", I personally don't understand this tendency because I think change is good as long as it's a predictable change, and moving from Israel to the US is very predictable and risk-free, but I understand why people won't like leaving the place where they were born and lived all of their childhood in.
> but if / when that happens [...] I'll be glad Israel exists as a plan B.
Reevaluate that way of thinking, because Israel's security today - security that often comes at the expense of the lives of countless innocents from its neighboring lands - is largely the creation of the USA. If the USA ever becomes controlled by Holocaust fans, Israel is well and truly fucked.
As a matter of fact, there is one scenario where Israel is not totally fucked if the USA were to become a second Third Reich, and that scenario involves sufficiently many Middle Eastern or European states coming together in an alliance to defend Israel. So, Israel is indeed well and truly fucked. Israel antagonized the Middle Eastern states since its literal creation and is currently antagonizing Europe at an increasing rate.
As a final piece of evidence, take a look at the UN votes for a ceasefire or those condemning Israel, count how many are pro- vs anti- Israel.
Interesting. One objection to the argument he makes is that from a certain perspective Jews are too well assimilated in the US and too likely to eventually lose any meaningful actual Jewishness.
>I think this is a general pattern in politics and similar ingroup-outgroup dynamics, not specific to Pro-Israel supporters, people simultaneously want to believe "The Enemy is Strong" and "We Are Strong".
Agreed. In the USA, I think both Democrats and Republicans do this.
"[American Jews] have a better quality of life across a broad spectrum of metrics than their Israeli counterparts"
I suspect the most important metric to Israeli Jews at least, is confidence that if a bunch of Local Jew-Haters decides to start attacking Jews the local police and army will either stop them or curbstomp them into oblivion so they can't do it again any time soon. It's not clear that the US does better than Israel on that regard; the level of protection afforded to the Jewish community at e.g. Harvard does not inspire confidence. I'd *like* to think that if there were an American 10/6, that would shock us into taking the threat seriously and acting accordingly, but if I were a Jew I think I'd want a fallback plan.
Jews who ranked the "quality of life metrics" involving nice jobs and houses in prosperous cities with a sizable Jewish community, above the ones involving security, were extensively culled from the Jewish gene pool in 1938-45. But regression to the mean is a thing, so we're seeing more of that these days.
But that *is* what Israel is for, not the bit with the nice jobs and houses.
So while Freddie believes that America is the new Zion, you believe it’s a potential Nazi state in the making. Surely then most American Jews should be thinking of emigrating.
Every nation is a potential Nazi(*) state in the making. I think it's very unlikely that the US will go too far in that direction in this generation, but I suspect a whole lot of Germans would have said the same thing in 1930. Antisemitism has broad and pervasive appeal. As do nationalism and socialism, for that matter.
* For the "locally murderously antisemitic" definition of Nazi, at least
If every nation is a potential Nazi state in the making, and Israel is a nation, what does that get us?
And before you fall into the "Jews are not going to kill Jews" trap, consider that German Jews were indistinguishable enough from other Germans that the Nazis had to chase the paperwork trail painstakingly to prove Jewishness.
"if a bunch of Local Jew-Haters decides to start attacking Jews the local police and army will either stop them or curbstomp them into oblivion so they can't do it again any time soon. It's not clear that the US does better than Israel on that regard"
US does far better than Israel on this regard. When was the last time jews in the US were attacked with assault rifles and kidnapped?
And btw, Israeli army and police have been "curbstomping" since their founding and "they" keep doing it again!
>US does far better than Israel on this regard. When was the last time jews in the US were attacked with assault rifles and kidnapped?
You could have said the same thing about Jews in Germany in 1905. Things can always change, and the normalization of (so far, _mostly_ rhetorically) violent anti-Semitism in the US and the West lately has been quite real.
>And btw, Israeli army and police have been "curbstomping" since their founding and "they" keep doing it again!
If people keep shooting rockets at you and launching terrorist attacks, it will be necessary to fight them from time to time, yes.
Sure, things can always change. Iran can have 1000 nuclear weapons tomorrow, and in a fit of hysteria and/or public uprising launch them towards Tel Aviv. Turkey and Iran and Saudi Arabia can make an Islamic Alliance that can demolish Israel from the ground up. None of those changes are more eyebrow-raising or improbable than the USA turning into a Fourth Reich.
In the long run, we are all dead. So sure, you can reply with "For Now lol" to anything: The sun rises from the East? For Now lol. Protons are stable particles? For Now lol.
Were there any attacks on Jews at Harvard? I was under the impression that it was just a matter of students exercising their free speech rights to say things that made Jews uncomfortable. And for some strange reason blacks and gays and so on don't get any sympathy from conservatives when they complain about speech making them uncomfortable. Why do Jews get to be "snowflakes" here when noone else does?
Because the complaints that black students are making is "he said the scary magic word in a relevant context," and the complaints that Jewish students are making is "those people are openly supporting people who raped and killed my cousin."
I believe there was some low-level violence, but the glaring issue is that there was the sort of "protest" that could very quickly have escalated to a seriously violent riot, and nowhere near the security or police presence to respond to that before it was too late.
The liberty to live a normal life. Not having to run to shelters on a moment's notice, not beginning New Year with a rocket barrage, not being internally displaced along with ~100K others because your state values killing people more than protecting you, not having your commercial ships attacked at sea, not living on internationally sanctioned occupied territories, the right to protest against the government without being shot with water cannons, and not being a citizen of a state standing trial in the ICJ.
Those are all rather unusual and unpleasant constraints on freedom that the vast majority of states do not have. Because Israel is not a normal state.
"…we have the most sensible Concern for the poor distressed Inhabitants of the Frontiers. We have taken every Step in our Power, consistent with the just Rights of the Freemen of Pennsylvania, for their Relief, and we have Reason to believe, that in the Midst of their Distresses they themselves do not wish us to go farther. Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety…"
So it seems like the context returns to simply the quote itself, which seems pretty self-explanatory. People seem to use it to justify privacy, but that only applies if you consider privacy to be an "essential Liberty", which you very well may.
I consider the quote applicable to our response to 9/11, in which we gave up some essential liberties in exchange for dubious security because the people demanded some kind of response.
My reaction when reading that piece a couple weeks ago was "yeah Freddie, I too wish history had not occurred in such a way that the Westphalian nation-state (or at least the Wilsonian ethnic nation-state) is the key underpinning of modern geopolitics, but, like, it is, and it's obviously here to stay".
One could get into the weeds on all these arguments, but it's a waste of time. It's just picking at the sort of contradictions and oddities that are at the foundation of any nation's self-image and doing the usual "well, it's the Jews so let's multiply it all by a thousand then point at it in shock" shtick the anti-Zionists of the world always do. France is the nation of liberte, egalite, fraternite, and yet the French Revolution descended into terror and was followed by world conquest! America is the democratic light unto the nations, but also had slavery! Et cetera, et cetera. At the end of the day, so what? Picking at contradictions accomplishes nothing, but we need to ask what the purpose of it is.
Is the argument that the US should stop supporting Israel? Okay, but wait, we also seem to be sending vast amounts of money and diplomatic assistance to Palestine and Lebanon and Egypt and so on right now, does that stop too? I'm a big Zionist but a bigger American so I'm fine with that compromise. Somehow I suspect Freddie would not be.
Is the argument that we should punish Israel for failing to live up to its moral claims? Okay, but does that mean that if they stopped claiming to be so moral Freddie would have no more issues? He'd happily back an Israeli government that promised to treat Gaza as brutally as Assad treated Syria and Iran and Iraq treated each other? Somehow I suspect Freddie wouldn't go for that either.
And so forth. All these arguments go into cul-de-sacs. Again, what's the end state? Anti-Zionists love to endlessly pick and pick but when you ask what the ultimate goal is here, it rounds down to one of two things: a) push the Jews into the sea, b) I have a wonderful answer to peace in the Middle East but sadly the margin of this page is too small to contain it.
> Picking at contradictions accomplishes nothing, but we need to ask what the purpose of it is.
Writing anything into the text boxes floating on faraway servers with terrible load times accomplishes nothing, no matter what you write. I'm not sure what's your problem with Freddie except that he is not a high-ranking decision-making official in Israel or the US.
> push the Jews into the sea
Ah yes, the median position of pushing Jews into the sea. Famously prevalent.
> I have a wonderful answer to peace in the Middle East but sadly the margin of this page is too small to contain it.
Have you perhaps missed the part where Freddie is saying that (1) States - for anyone - is not the ideal state of affairs, and (2) For now, while states are a necessary and unfortunate part of the human condition, Israel should integrate its Arab population and not be a homogenous ethnostate?
> I'm not sure what's your problem with Freddie except that he is not a high-ranking decision-making official in Israel or the US.
My problem is that "hey, there's some contradictory stuff in your national self-image" is universally true and ultimately uninteresting, but somehow people have the biggest imaginable bee in their bonnets about it when it's the Jewish nation we're talking about.
>For now, while states are a necessary and unfortunate part of the human condition, Israel should integrate its Arab population and not be a homogenous ethnostate?
Yes, that's the option B I was referring to. Thanks for providing such a clear example.
> My problem is that "hey, there's some contradictory stuff in your national self-image"
This is just a persecution fetish, I regularly and mercilessly make fun of "my" national self-image, no doubt Freddie too.
It's an article about Israel, it's going to focus on the contradictions in Israeli national self-image.
> that's the option B I was referring to.
Well next time I will make sure to submit a spreadsheet detailing the exact milestones to solve the Israeli Palestinian conflict by 2069. Apologies for not taking the time to do this before posting.
>I regularly and mercilessly make fun of "my" national self-image, no doubt Freddie too.
Sure, but you probably aren't doing it with the goal of dissolving your nation and handing it over to the terror army next door. (Freddie, and I say this with the greatest love: I am not so sure about that.)
>Well next time I will make sure to submit a spreadsheet detailing the exact milestones to solve the Israeli Palestinian conflict by 2069. Apologies for not taking the time to do this before posting.
I mean... yeah? You're telling people who've been suffering terrorist attacks and missile barrages from an explicitly genocidal Iranian puppet army for decades that the solution to their problem is to throw down their arms and join hands with the terrorists. "Trust me bro, it'll work out somehow" is not going to be sufficient to answer the questions they'll have about the logistics of this.
>Freddie, and I say this with the greatest love: I am not so sure about that.
That's... like... your opinion man.
>You're telling people
Take a step back and reevaluate the fact that you're telling some rando on the internet that the opinion they posted on the internet is going to destroy a state. Not only is the level of rigor you're demanding wildly incommensurate with the actual level of authority and influence I have in reality, I also never said Israel should join hands with Hamas, I said Israel should integrate its Arab population (both Israeli Arabs and West Bank Arabs) better and repel racist laws like the Nation State law (passed in 2018). The fact that you jumped from "Arab population" to Hamas is an interesting equivalence in and of itself.
Ah, the very simple and definitely realistic solutions of either abolishing the nation-state as a form of government or ending foundational ethnic grievances... somehow. Why didn't anyone else think of those?
>> The USA also absorbs Jewish immigrants with less hostility and less friction than other groups
*For now* is the operative clause that's missing there. Many other nations have been lovely places for Jews to live, right up until they weren't anymore.
Historical examples about, but even today, places like France and the UK are becoming much less welcoming to Jews than they once were. Not that hard to see how the US could take such a turn, driven either by the left or the right.
Israel's reason for existence is largely because of that problem, not more mundane notions about income or educational attainment or even protection from rocket attacks in the near future--it's the self-determination to defend against mass genocide in the further future that matters.
So I don't think the more general ingroup/outgroup contradictions are quite so contradictory in that sense.
The contradictions are not as severe, if you translate the hyperbolic slogan-like phrases back into real beliefs. Israel is a secular democracy *on* the holy land; the traffic signs aren't part of the holiness, neither is the PM a religious authority. Israel isn't a place of refuge from street crime or terrorism, it's a place where the holocaust can't happen again in the exact same way it happened last time to the descendants of the same people. It's such a great degree of qualification it almost sounds like sarcasm, but it's the simple truth.
The propaganda about the military situation can't be defended, but it's just to buy time, I don't think anyone believes it per se so much as places a low priority on clarifying its inaccuracies.
Although, I can point out that Israel is weak relative to what normal people want (zero Israeli causalities) and strong relative to the callous aims of our State Department.
Yes, I'm in the US, and no, I think the US's aims in the region are some inscrutable middle eastern grand strategies that lack concern for the lives of those involved on the ground level. I guess you could call it "weakening Israel," morally, diplomatically and economically, but they see it as strengthening Israel as an instrument of force. Economic support packages earmarked for military appropriations and favored-nation contracts do not help the economy, they reshape and repurpose it. The fixed capital and engineering experience diverted into that sector cannot be used in a peaceful future with no enemies.
That a handful of acres would be bought with even a few soldier's lives tells you something about how they see things. Right now it appears that even under the most generous calculations, they've placed a value on each serviceman and woman of about half a square kilometer. That's what the grand strategists have decided ought to happen an ocean away.
Here's just one thought, that was for me quite eye opening. Who's the only country in the world that benefits from Israel having exactly one supporter? Which country can benefit from the only thing standing between global sanctions and prosperity being the fiat of one superpower? Not Israel. That's *terrible* for Israel.
On the one hand, you're right. On the other hand, Israel kind of did this to itself? the USA didn't occupy it and force it to be perpetually belligerent and rejectionist of peace.
By the time the consequences arrive, the kids have grown up to pay it. That's already happening. Guess what fraction of the IDF was alive for the mistakes that precipitated its ongoing deployment...
it is simply stupefying to me that any disinterested party like myself (i.e. not Israeli/Arab nor intrinsically motivated to support one side over the other) could read about the various negotiation summits over the past half-century and come to the conclusion is Israel is the "perpetually rejectionist" party in this conflict.
Surely Arafat's behavior during the 2000 Camp David Summit and ensuing Intifada is practically *the* definition of rejectionist?
One party being rejectionist doesn't absolve the other party of being rejectionist, one of the glaring features of the rejectionism of Israel is continuing to support West Bank settlers with money and IDF protection since the 1970s, and electing the likes of Netanyahu (first time in 1996) who boasts of preventing a Palestinian state and displays a map of Israel "From the River To The Sea" in the UN.
Scott mentioned the problems with substack loading recently (much more of a problem on mobile for me). It seems like this is almost definitely due to the comments sections on posts all loading with the page, something that Scott's blog does differently from others, I believe because of Scott's requests. I know Scott doesn't want likes on comments so you can't just display the top comments, but is there some other solution, like only displaying the first 20 top level comments and then have a See More button after that?
I believe I remember Scott wanting to have the comments here replicate the way they worked on SlateStarCodex, but it seems like that's causing technical problems at this size of community.
The creaky Wordpress install underneath SSC scaled to 2,000 comments on at least a couple of occasions. Load page, read at leisure. There is no technical excuse for Substack's poor performance. "Continue Thread" and "Expand full comment" are anti-patterns imposed by Substack (they weren't there at the beginning), which worsen performance and introduce friction; presumably a vital population of commenters is not in Substack's interest.
It would be great if substack could paginate comments instead of doing infinite scroll (or as an optional setting?). Ideally in a relatively static way, so that I could easily save my spot.
One easy solution would be to put the comments behind a "load comments" button or link, so just reading the article wouldn't cause any slowdown (it would be even nicer if this could be set as a preference in your profile, or as a URL parameter).
On the morality of shooting Arsonists (And why we hate liberals):
A community near you sees two nights of it's businesses being burned down in the name of a political cause. In each case the extremely well funded government security force stands by indifferently while the very narratives which justified the attacks are propagated by government and press.
On the third day you show up armed to the perimeter of one of the few businesses that hasn't been destroyed. You like this business. It sold you your first car. It's a large business, a car lot so there's no possible way you can block all of it. All the cars in it are close together, so lighting up one means eventually lighting up all. A mob gathers and a man with a massive tank of gasoline and a zippo lighter screams, 'we are gonna burn this place down, nothing will happen to you.' You stand your ground and point your gun at him. He backs off, and runs. You believe he is retreating, but then you realize he's running towards another part of the massive parking lot. He pours the gas on a car, a prepares to throw the zippo lighter. You raise your gun, shoot him straight through the chest and kill him.
Was this morally justified?
---
The average natural right winger instinctively says yes. If you ask them why, most of them couldn't give you a great answer. But I'll give you a few now, each of which I've heard from relatively unintelligent people (if stated less eloquently):
- Property is the blood, sweat, tears and years of human life spent building it (ok normally not the blood part). To destroy it, is in a very real sense to kill a part of a person.
- You know better than anyone else what the value of your life is and if you think it's worth less than the pleasure you derive from destruction, I'm not gonna deny your assessment.
- I agree not to kill in exchange for the government agreeing to protect basic rights. If the government blatantly refuses to do so, only the laws of war and nature apply.
- A random business is not a legitimate target in a political conflict, destroying it has no value to whatever war the rioters are engaged in. They are war criminals.
(Of course, all of the above combined is it's own argument.)
I'm close to sure that there is at most a single digit percentage of educated liberals who take this position. I know this because I've gone over the public statements of any number of anti-woke liberals on the Rittenhouse case (a case infinitely more defensible than mine), and found no one who is willing to state unambiguously 'he was right to do what he did, including being there in the first place.'
Man in the liberal vision, is but property of his government or society; and if someone decides to destroy decades of a life's work and no one 'authorized by law' is coming to save him - well, it sucks for him. After all, it might, in some final utilitarian accounting be bad for society if a man took the law into his own hands - even in response to society's total abandonment of it. Of course, in any right wing vision, at least the non-religious ones a man who accepted this is no man at all.
Which is why, when push comes to shove; no compromise between liberals and right-wingers is possible. All talk of 'more in common' is empty. We believe that you would impose upon us norms that we could only wish on our worst enemies. That you might not personally hate us is of no consequence as we believe that you are fundamentally incapable of love for anyone at all. For all our enmity towards Communists and/or the woke, we can at least imagine a world from their perspective in which business owners are the real enemies who must be crushed to create a classless society. And boy, are they dedicated to this cause. Anyone has to admire that in the same way Orwell admired Hitler.
But for you, you who would condemn a man because he wasn't carrying a badge, because 'life is worth more than property', we have nothing but hatred.
Any amount of my property is more valuable to me than the life of one who seeks to take it from me by force. The contrary idea, that no amount of property is worth as much as even one life, is absurdly naïve.
I'd rethink these 2 buckets you seem to think the argument falls into.
A life can easily be worth less than infinity but still more than a car dealership. And the challenge of fixing that kind of dollar amount in law is exactly why we have (IMO wisely) codified a general principle that you can't defend property with deadly force, rather than a more complex principle that you can't defend property under a certain value with deadly force.
I do grok that mapping morals to law is an inherently lossy transform, and that (for practical reasons) responses to petty property crime must be moderated, but the (apparent) current state of law that *no* amount of potential property loss is sufficient to justify deadly force lacks balance.
Statistical value of a life is a well-established concept; preventing property destruction beyond that amount (and an average car dealership's inventory is well above even the high end of values used in policymaking) justifies taking a life.
Just for clarity, your argument based on the statistical value of life is a policy one, right? I think it’s a good fit for that environment, but a poor one for the moral side of the coin- and it’d be bad form to refuse legal formalism in the moral argument only to inject accounting formalism into it.
That said, it’s a great fit for the policy sphere, and moving from “property can be defended with only nondeadly force” to “property can be defended with nondeadly force up to a certain amount, and deadly force over that amount” is the most functional proposal I’ve seen so far in this thread. It’s at least not out and out crazy or vague demagoguery.
I think, ultimately, I’d oppose it, but not because the idea is out and out evil or life is impossible to place a value on.
Rather, I’d worry that passing a law like that would feed into public perceptions that “government only protects the rich” further chipping at the legitimacy of the state, as well as knock on effects if criminals respond by favoring victimizing the poor over the rich (more than they already do).
I admittedly haven't delineated the aspects of my position very clearly:
- Morally, I think the limit (if any) is far lower than the statistical value of life. E.g., stopping someone from cutting the catalytic converter off your car clears it easily.
- Politically, I think the current legal premise of life above property at all times is ultimately untenable; too many people's moral intuition is at least directionally similar to mine.
- Pragmatically, while I think that the concept of statistical value of life demonstrates that there is a tradeoff to be made, the fact that there is a range of values produced by various analyses means that setting a fixed number in law is too fraught. Legal verbiage that defines a judiciable standard for an affirmative defense (analogous to that for self-defense) is likelly a sound compromise.
>Morally, I think the limit (if any) is far lower than the statistical value of life.
Why? I’d expect it to be much higher, and our attempts to fix values for legal or actuarial purposes to reflect a compromise between the abstract principle that life is invaluable/extremely high value and the reality that a jury can’t award infinity dollars worth of damages.
> Politically, I think the current legal premise of life above property at all times is ultimately untenable; too many people's moral intuition is at least directionally similar to mine.
Here I'd offer a couple disagreements-
The first is the practical reality that the standard we’re discussing is, at least in the US, well settled and has been for some time, and not in that “well settled but lots of people protest it all the time" way that something like Roe v Wade was. Use of guns in defense of persons has been a continuing issue-things like stand your ground laws-but not defense of property. This framework seems to me to be the very definition of sustainable.
Secondly, part of your argument rests on the idea that “too many” people share your moral intuition of a low moral value of life, and this makes current settled law unsustainable. I’d argue, however, that far more people have the opposite moral intuition. There’s a reason the oft stated platitudes are things like how you can’t put a price on life, your life is the most valuable thing you own, etc and not things like “life ain’t worth a slice of bread.” The only contrary example I can think of is the Stalin quote about lives being a statistic, but that’s repeated to show him as a savage.
>Pragmatically, while I think that the concept of statistical value of life demonstrates that there is a tradeoff to be made, the fact that there is a range of values produced by various analyses means that setting a fixed number in law is too fraught. Legal verbiage that defines a judiciable standard for an affirmative defense (analogous to that for self-defense) is likelly a sound compromise.
I think a clear value would be necessary- the same way the difference in petty larceny and grand larceny is fixed with a number. A vague standard like “very valuable” creates all kinds of uncertainty for the citizen. Some people will go free for defending a cross at their church, others to jail for defending a car, and that uncertainty will be nothing but ammo to the probably large number of people disposed to attack the policy because their moral intuition is that you can’t trade life for property, or because they view the policy as an unfair class-based protection for the rich or feel it is incentivizing criminals to focus on victimizing the poor.
It wouldn’t single-handedly destabilize society, but I think that’s the direction it pulls in, and far more so than simply letting be with current, well-settled law
I just wanted to say I thought this was extremely well put and it was one of those times you read someone else articulating your own thoughts perfectly.
One thing that I've being trying to get my head around is a sort of wilful myopia I see my liberal friends employing. It lets them make their statements, then chase the implications so far and no further. And of course they'll always stop before they get to anything that complicates the picture.
I've been butting up against a disconnection where it feels like I'm trying to talk about a big complicated system, that requires a whole repertoire of local knowledge, knacks and skillsets to navigate; and which cannot possibly be communicated over a single paragraph or even a single long conversation.
And what I get back is trite principles and platitudes, with no focus on the implementation. Symbolic reasoning without any connection to the solid reality we're talking about.
I used to put this down to a comms gap, but now I think it's something deeper, and I find myself wondering if some liberals genuinely are not modelling the world to the same depth I am trying to.
Not particularly related, but I notice that you have people down-thread throwing out the pretty soundbite "life is more valuable than property", which you have to be a monster to disagree with. No consideration of what incentives that sets up, or what kind of society that leads to - no praxis or grounded understanding of human nature.
And certainly no answer to "what should he have done instead then?" beyond "lose your business."
This can be reduced to iterated prisoner's dillema. When it comes to property rights, right-wingers never betray, at least in principle. Left-winger may or may not betray. Why should right-wingers trust left-wingers then at all? The optimal strategy is tit for tat - trust initially, but when you encounter an enemy, always fight back with equal force untill enemy gives up and cooperates again.
As described, no innocent life was in danger, and you're not literally at war, so no. An insurance company can replace the cars; nobody can replace the life you just took, and even a life that will now have to be spent at least partially in prison is still a thing of great (and in some moral contexts, infinite) value. Find another way.
If you *were* at war, the ethics get a bit hazy because in war these decisions are made on a wholesale rather than retail basis. But if you were really at war the issue would be moot, because the bit were you as an atomic individual with your rifle are making great and consequential moral decisions is overshadowed by the bit where atomic individuals with even the most tacticool rifles have a very, very short life expectancy in actual wars. Your CO will tell you who you're allowed to shoot, and where, and he'll probably have bigger problems than keeping a car dealership in business.
But you're not really at war, you're just imagining a garden-variety riot and trying to cast it as the Last Stand of Civilization Itself so you can feel good about killing some of those liberals you hate. Take your Kyle Rittenhouse fantasies somewhere else, and stop sullying the image of right-wing futurists here.
Thank you for injecting sanity and decency into the conversation, John.
I like Scott and he’s a good person, but if this Substack becomes a playground for right-wing extremists who fantasize about shooting people, I may choose to take my subscription money elsewhere.
Yeah, there's enough of that sort of thing (broadly speaking) on DSL that I don't hang out there any more. I'd really not see more than a little bit of it here, but as Eremolalos notes it doesn't seem to be a large or growing problem.
They show up on the open threads, almost never on the hidden ones. The thing that gets me isn't their views, it's the seething narcissistic rage that you can feel from the beginning of their postings. And it bobs to the surface as soon as somebody pushes back, in the form of sarcasm, sneers, complaints that nobody here is as deep a thinker as they are, etc. Most do not show up for many threads in a row because our group isn't that satisfying to needle. Some people argue back and make great points, others tease and roll their eyes, many ignore.
Would you apply the same logic if the man were instead robbing or burning down your own house? You would politely stand aside and expect to claim on the insurance to cover your loss after the fact?
I would not. I would decide that claiming on the insurance comes with a cost of its own, and cannot properly replace eg something with 30yrs of sentimental value to me anyway.
Practically speaking the disruption to my life and the aggro of getting them to pay out is a huge burden. And from a systems-and-principles standpoint, the idea of making everyone else's insurance premium rise to cover the cost of the bad actor is not sustainable design.
I would also decide that, given the police were indifferent to the attack itself, I wouldn't lay high odds on the perpetrator getting a truly proportionate punishment for his actions either.
I think your reasoning works best when the arson is hypothetical, rare, or only happens to other people.
You'd have to imagine a scenario where my house was known to be wholly unoccupied for that to be remotely comparable, and that's pretty contrived.
Really, it got unreasonably contrived when you invoked burning down anyone's house. Burning down houses and burning parked cars are things our society treats *very* differently. Serious question, in any of the recent riots that obviously inspired this discussion, were *any* private homes actually destroyed by fire? I can't recall any such, and I'm pretty sure that's because the rioters understood that burning down houses was the sort of thing that would get them shot by police in even the Bluest of states.
So, I'm not going to engage this hypothetical. And if you want to fantasize about gunning down rioters, you'll have to content yourself with rioters burning parked cars because they're not likely to make you any sort of hero by trying to burn down houses.
You're late to the party, I've already gone through this with Nobody Special.
The point of burning down your house is to make the stakes meaningful, to counter any accusation that you're a soft-handed liberal who can't understand or empathise with a hard working businessman who's built something from the ground up, and that is why you value the business lower than the criminal who threatens it.
The result of the discussion was that we would all kill to defend that which we value, but Nobody Special would then like to go to prison for it while I want to be let off.
You're off the hook, because I try to limit the time I spend arguing culture war stuff online, and I spent this week's budget on shooting Nobody Special's dog.
My perspective is that the individual is not a good starting point to assess what makes for a better society.
And it's all about tradeoffs in my opinion.
Let's go back to someone trying to burn down my house.
My first question would be : Can I stop him ?
I live in a country where there are no guns so I really need to wonder about my violence skills and how it could fire back badly. I guess my only option is to call the police. Maybe it's better to save whatever I can and/or try to
preserve my life at all costs ?
But if I lived in a country where owning a gun is legal, well of course I would threaten to, and possibly harm the person that's trying to burn down my house.
But now all of a sudden I also live in a society where everyone has guns. What if the arsonist is armed, and not alone, accompanied by armed people ?
Well we are back in a situation that could dangerously, literally, fire back.
So in your example I think you are just benefiting from the fact that rioters seem not to to care about carrying guns ? But you also live in a society where *everyone* can get his hand on a gun. Logically you live in a society where crime is much worse when things go awry and law enforcement is much more frightful for its life so the number of policing mistakes will be up. You don't take chances when your life is on the line I guess.
So I wouldn't like someone to burn down my house and would probably try to stop it but I also wouldn't like to live in a society where someone can take matters in their own hand just because they own a gun. Yes, insurance isn't exactly making up for all of what you went through but your life is not ruined either.
My problem with your example is that it so happens to be an example crafted such as the fact that someone takes matters in their own hands has no real consequences at a societal level, which it may not as happened-once situation but would have consequences if enshrined into law, I guess.
It rather sounds like you would indeed use violence if you had access to it and saw no alternative, so I don't think we disagree on how to judge our hypothetical businessman
Re: the rest, I think we're into the standard gun debate talking points here, where pro-2A people would be keen to point out that the baddies will have guns whether you're allowed them or not. I expect they would also disagree that an armed society is more dangerous, and would have many stats to show you on the matter.
It doesn't really matter what I think. We aren't allowed guns over here, there's no real movement pushing to change that, and I don't see the Crown agreeing to arm its citizenry any time soon.
We inherited the scenario from the OP, who I understand was trying to provide a clear cut scene based off the real life Kyle Rittenhouse case.
Probably the most contentious thing is your statement about the individual not being the best foundation to assess society.
I can't speak for John Schilling, yet I can say I'm uncertain your comparison holds.
The situations are too dissimilar. You perform a slight magic trick when you transfer an event taking place in public, willingly sought out ([a car lot I go to]) to an imagined home intrusion ([adverserial intrusion]). Even then, your logic is flawed because threat to property generally speaking does not equal threat to life and differentiating between these is one of the tasks of the justice system. Propertionate self defense is propertionate. That's the point.
Secondly, you run a cost benefit analysis that includes "30yrs of sentimental value". This ends up supposing your 30 years of sentimental attachment to your (quite lovely?) home overrules someone elses [age] sentimental attachment to their life. What level of cut-of is acceptable, and when can I burn down your home because my attachment to my life is now larger than yours to your shelter? At what level of sentimental attachment does your hypothethical home defense scenario escalate from "I am allowed to shoot to deter" to "I am allowed to shoot to kill"? These are not inane questions, given your proposed reasoning. You cannot obfuscate this part, either by intent or by accident, in matters of life and death. But doing it this way leaves morality behind and enters basic economics. This is also problem for your position. By your logic, we are now simply discussing price and valuation. What level of attachment to the stuff I want justifies me burning down your home, which will deprive you of the stuff you want? This is not a particularly reasonable methodology to apply, and it serves ultimately as a self-justification for declaring when you are allowed to kill people. Generally speaking, the answer to that should not be "when I want it enough".
Thirdly, if 'practically speaking the disruption to my life' is not worth the hassle of an insurance payout or long-standing legal proceeding, I would like you to propose an answer to what level of disruption to a life it is to be shot dead. Eliding this fact is what allows you to reason like you do. Individual convenience or inconvenience generally speaking should not be the barometer for when lethal force is authorised. You may want to reconsider this stance. It is not a particularly coherent stance to take.
Fourth, your argument has accidentally wandered back into economics again. If the real question is "How do we maintain lowest possible insurance premiums" there is a swathe of possibilities, a vast majority of which we have decided to make rather illegal.
Fifth, you cannot nominate yourself to decide what level of proportionate punishment is proportionate over time. That is sort of the other task of the justice system in general. One such task is , by the way, differentiating between 30 years of sentimental attchment to an object and the generalised value of someone elses attachment to their health.
In general, from a reading of your stance, it seems you might be accidentally implying that your personal (in)convenience overrides other people's right to life, liberty and the pursuit of intangible benefits. I don't think this is intentional, so you might want to work through your legal and morale reasoning.
Just to clarify: are you going to let the arsonist burn down your house?
Because if you're not, this is just a word salad that means, "it's okay when it only happens to you."
There are no magic tricks on my part. That man's car park is *not* a public service laid on for your entertainment. It's his private property that he worked for. Realistically, if this is his own business and it's in its first five years, he will have spent more time there than in his own home.
He chose to stand there doing that instead of living a comfortable life playing video games, with the result that you and everyone else now have access to rental cars should the need arise. As a society we want things to go well for him so that *more* young men start businesses and afford us access to things we wouldn't otherwise have. So his car park is far *more* important than your house, which offers no benefit to anyone else at all.
If you think it's okay to defend your living room, then it's more than okay for him to defend his car park.
If you think it would be disproportionate to shoot a man who's about to burn down your entire house - because after all, it's only property - then we are disagreeing about something solid. But your house is the stake here, and your family's possessions are the things you're sitting there philosophising about.
In which case, let's proceed to the actual "magic trick" being played here, which is that you are equating a citizen in good standing with someone who has already chosen to break the pact of civilisation. The same moral and legal framework that tells us "people have a right to life" also tells us "don't burn down people's property".
I would hold that the man who introduces the state of chaos bears responsibility for where that goes. It is lunacy to protect an attacker from self-defense, on the grounds that self-defense would mean breaking the rule of law the attacker has already broken.
We all understand the concept of a proportionate response. Most of us understand that the way to judge these things is with respect to the attackee's available options in the moment. But all the leeway in the decision should go in the direction of the guy who was minding his own business and had to react to an attack.
''' We all understand the concept of a proportionate response. Most of us
understand that the way to judge these things is with respect to the attackee's available options in the moment. But all the leeway in the decision should go in the direction of the guy who was minding his own business and had to react to an attack.'''
This is a different argument than any you have set forth, a different argument than any scenario described here, and a different argument than the morality or philosophy of any action. I also think it is fundementally right, justified and true. This is a good point. I agree completely with it.
I also think you have accidentally made a serious mistake of basic understanding and it makes me go "huh?". It sort of undermines your reasoning in a grand way, so you might want to think about it for a bit.
In no scenario described so far - either carpark attack or home intrusion - is the attacker striking with lethal intent. An arsonist comes to a business or a home and intends to burn it down for political motivations. A justified, punitive and proportionate response is many things, but it doesn't start at lethal reactivity, and it certainly doesn't void someone's basic rights of due process. No citizen in good standing is allowed to declare other people unfit for the pact of civilization. That's not your job. Rights, constitution, inalienable, so on, so forth.
The leeway in how to respond should go to the person being attacked, of course. But why is your intuition and instinct that "lethal response" is appropriate to "non-lethal action"?
We can't accept grand-standing about sentimental value or the hard sweat and tears of a business man. That's just economics. Anyone can claim any value function for stuff. And if that argument holds, I can go out of my way to kill anyone trying to invent stuff that undermines my business. They're threatening my livelihood, so they need to die. This isn't a world anyone wants to live in. Your principle are disordered.
An arsonist is declaring that they're targetting inanimate objects and doing minimum harm to a human being. They've already abandoned the notion of killing *you*. Your logic is going to need to account for why it is acceptable to kill *them*, and so far, you haven't. Vaguely declaring that you might feel like it because of sentimental reasons or your local insurance premium rates are not generally speaking good justifications for murder, explicitly not against people who pose no threat to your life.
The justice system recognises this. That is why we have civil suits and insurance claims and criminal courts and payment for damages. The system works. We got there. You seem to want to go back on this, and that is an odd stance to take.
So we must, in the end, philosophise despite the damage possible to our family's possessions: Are we talking about morality, or are you just looking for an excuse to kill some people?
I think your principles are out of order, I think your thinking is disordered, and I think your basic concepts are tangled, muddied and incoherent. I award you no points, and may God - famous for intoning what thou shalt not - have mercy on your soul. It seems principally unlikely that you will have mercy on others.
I'd be more funny, but the snark is getting a little unreasonable here and you don't seem to be really arguing in any variant of good faith, so let's just agree that you're wrong and move on. Have a nice day otherwis!
Are you actually open to hearing that argument? Or upon hearing it, do you intend to simply retort "well that just makes you a coward" and honor-culture off in a huff?
Because it feels like that's the "magic trick" being performed here. Trying to get to an honor-based result with a circuitous argument that makes it look neat and logical by papering over significant differences between life and property. "I would rather kill than be subjected to indignity, so here's my argument for why my property is my life, offered so that I can satisfy what is really an honor itch by killing in its defense."
Did you mean to respond to me with this post? Because your answer completely ignores the distinction between rule-breakers and law-abiders which was a salient part of what I was saying, and you're instead talking about "indignity", which no one was talking about at all. And yet you did say "magic trick", which we've both bandied around. So I don't know - are you in the right place or not?
"Property is the blood, sweat, tears and years of human life spent building it (ok normally not the blood part). To destroy it, is in a very real sense to kill a part of a person"
Except the year is 2024 and we have this thing called insurance. Easier to clean up a burned out dodge and re-open for business the next day than dealing with manslaughter and blood stains on your lot.
But insurance doesn't magically undo the damage. Cars were destroyed, to rebuild them ore has to be mined, transported, melted, formed, fuel has to be used, labor expended and so on. Everyone loses on this.
Or I could ask "How many car dealerships can be destroyed before I'm allowed to shoot?" Because if it's 100%, then it would be an economic disaster, collapse of civilization even.
So OP is essentialy explaining libertarian morality, where everything stems from the property right, which in my opinion is a very consistent theory and indeed the conflict between those who agree with it and those that don't is irreconcilable.
Also, insurance costs money. And I assume the more businesses people burn down, the more expensive it will get.
Insurance basically just flattens out the probabilities. You can trade a 1% risk of losing 25 years of your work for a 100% certainty of losing 3 months of your work.
If we reach a point in society where there's that many people who think serial arson is the solution to political discord, I'd say we have larger problems at that point. In the hypothetical scenario above: that arsonist is in jail, and the car dealership owner is damn unlucky if another mentally unwell person decides to torch their lot.
Well, a follow-up question is how far you're willing to take this notion. If someone unlawfully parks in a handicap spot, are you justified in shooting them?
And before anyone says "well that's obviously different," let's all observe that a handicapped person may lose a considerable amount of time (a portion of their life) if they have to unload a wheelchair in a space not suited for it and haul it a long distance across a parking lot.
More importantly, if it's obviously different I want to hear where the break point actually is. A call of "there can be no compromise" demands a level of self-comprehension that should render the distinction easy to define.
. . . Sorry, is your hypothethical question whether it's morally justifiable for a random person to grab a gun and start shooting people who does something someone doesn't like?
uh
I don't. . . Uhm.
Listen, the answer is no? The answer has been no for more or less most of civilized society, it being, sort of to the point of the fact, the underlying meaning behind "civilized". You don't get to randomly kill people you disagree with.
How is this a question? What is the thing to consider here?
Mildly expasperated confusion overblown for comedy aside, your hypothethical scenario has several problems that already makes it even more indefensible than it is on a first reading (and note, on a first reading, your hypothethical scenario is "am I allowed to kill people I disagree with" to which the answer is no).
Point the first:
Did our armed soon-to-be-murderer ask the car lot owner if the car lot owner wanted them to act as an impromptu security guard and blast implied ttrespassers? In your scenario, the answer is no, which is pretty important because while self defense can be justified - and to some level must be always be justifiable for a free being is free to defend the self - grabbing a gun, walking to some location, and satnding around wishing a motherfu*** would is not self defense. Your hypothethical human put themself, armed, in an emotionally tense situation in full cognisience of the fact that they were likely to need to deal with people they disagree with. And their method of disagreement is straight up murder.
Point the second:
In your example, the rioters explicitly spell out they have no intention of harming human lives but will proceed to do what they're here to do. This sort of transforms your scenario in a strange way. Side A is now: " I am armed, occupying a place that is not my own, which I willingly went to expecting thtat it would place me in danger, under my own volition, with full willingness to kill " and Side B is now "for unspecified reasons, we are rioting, and we are going to destroy this property without loss of human life". I don't exactly know how many times I need to spell this out, but I am going to have to repeat myself and say that murdering people for disagreeing with them isn't actually something you're allowed to do in any civilized society. The car lot doesn't rate some hypothethical hero being allowed to randomly blast people they disagree with.
Point the third:
While not part of your hypothethical example, you do write:
'' Which is why, when push comes to shove; no compromise between liberals and right-wingers is possible. All talk of 'more in common' is empty. We believe that you would impose upon us norms that we could only wish on our worst enemies. ''
Which is. . . Odd? Sorry, is the basic stance here that not murdering people is too high a bar to clear? This isn't really something someone can reasonably have a conversation about. What I mean, I'd say I disagree but it sounds like the act of me disagreeing is apt to place me in severe physical harm because it appears to give you hypothethical leeway to stand outside someone elses property with a gun and shoot me if you don't like the way I walk or talk or look or wave my zippo lighter around.
While the above paragraph is written with a wink, consider the implications of taking your statement the least bit seriously. Because it might be too hard to think of the implications, I will spell one out: Committing to the stance you propose there and declaring that there can be no compromise means I need to kill you before you kill me.
This isn't hyperbole - it's a logical conclusion from the premise. You prove, by declaring that your right to murder is a sacred right, that I'm probably a lot better off if you're dead before you contrive to somehow kill me for a trespas you might be seeking out explicitly to induce. This is not a stable state of affairs. It leads to a lot of killing. And every - every - society I am aware off have decided that this is not how one persists or maintains a functioning civil society. Insular clannish vendettas do not a state or nation make, nor do they make for good neighbours or deep sleep at night. Raid and night-time counter-raid is part of the human heritage, but it's one I'd rather we don't take back out of the box.
Point the fourth:
These are the re-phrased words of other people, so no slight on you intended here, but both of these statements are probably what I would describe as a little too close to being off the deep end. Having a few screws loose. Being wildly uncalibrated for daily function. They're not serious proposals, right?
This one: ''' - I agree not to kill in exchange for the government agreeing to protect basic rights. If the government blatantly refuses to do so, only the laws of war and nature apply.'''
Is just actual madness. No, you agree not to kill people because killing people is supposed to be something we don't generally do. I think it's in one of those holy books, and most civic codes. Maintaning unilateral decision power over whether or whether not you decide to kill someone else is blackmailing everyone else into playing by whichever rules you like. After all, by this logic, if you disagree with something, there is a chance that you can work out a justification for murdering the person you disagree with. Then we're back to the above case study of how feuding dynastic vendettas and raid and counter-raid don't make for functioning societies. The basic rule generally needs to be that killing people is off the table, and if it needs to be done, we empower a centralized authority with limited powers to do so. Anything else is living under the constant threat of force projected by whomever wants to start a fight downtown today.
''' - A random business is not a legitimate target in a political conflict, destroying it has no value to whatever war the rioters are engaged in. They are war criminals.'''
Objection your honour, hypothethical example does not define if local business is a legitimate target in this polital conflict. Proposition: Owner of Car Lot could be active in [Cause] and using funds from car lot to fund [Bad Thing]. If so, burning it down is not generally speaking permissible either, but for the sake of a cracked example, but even IF so, burning it down remains more justifiable than readying a weapon, putting one self in danger, and escalating a confrontration from property damage to murder.
Secondary, related objection. I realize that "war criminals!!!!" is just hyperbolic nonsense without semantic meaning because it translates to something like "the bad people I am allowed to hurt".
But if they actually were war criminals, then there's legal proceedings to consider. The very last outcome of which is "shoot someone". The word you're looking for here is "outlaw", but, I apologize, the Constitution has this bit about inalienable human rights, which, I again apologize, we in a blinkered feat of mild optimism decided applied to everyone. Equally. Which generally then means we no longer do the Nordic Viking thing of declaring some people skraeling and outcast and without legal recompense.
Look, man, basically, your entire thing boils down to "can I kill someone" and the answer really is going to end up being "No, not even then" most of the time.
>I agree not to kill in exchange for the government agreeing to protect basic rights. If the government blatantly refuses to do so, only the laws of war and nature apply.
C. S. Lewis wrote a bit about this in his essay "Delinquents in the Snow":
"The classical theory morally grounds our obligation to civil obedience; explains why it is right (as well as unavoidable) to pay taxes, why it is wrong (as well as dangerous) to stab your daughter's murderer. At present the very uncomfortable position is this: the State protects us less because it is unwilling to protect us against criminals at home and manifestly grows less and less able to protect us against foreign enemies. At the same time it demands from us more and more. We seldom had fewer rights and liberties nor more burdens: and we get less security in return. While our obligations increase their moral ground is taken away.
"And the question that torments me is how long flesh and blood will continue to endure it. There was even, not so long ago, a question whether they ought to. No one, I hope, thinks Dr Johnson a barbarian. Yet he maintained that if, under a peculiarity of Scottish law, the murderer of a man's father escapes, the man might reasonably say, I am amongst barbarians, who . . . refuse to do justice ... I am therefore in a state of nature ... I will stab the murderer of my father.' "
Hi! I'm an uneducated liberal. I'd call Rittenhouse a dipshit who tried to do something admirable, only made things worse, and nevertheless had a legitimate self-defense case. My assessment depends on my belief that Rittenhouse showed up intending to deter vandalism, not to blow people away. Is that inaccurate?
I'm also under the impression that he didn't shoot anyone for torching a vehicle, only for credible threats of deadly force against his person. Are you saying he should have, or what's your angle here?
Who elected hypothetical Rittenhouse as arbiter between the life of a violent rioter and the life force allegedly embodied in a car? Not real-life dealership owners Sahil and Anmol Khindri, who testified in court that they had not requested his help.
> Property is the blood, sweat, tears and years of human life spent building it (ok normally not the blood part). To destroy it, is in a very real sense to kill a part of a person.
No it isn’t. No part of the individual in question is killed. Time and work they have spent becomes wasted, and that is sad and frustrating, devastating, even. But it’s not killing the person, or even part of them, and equating the two is simply dramatic rhetoric.
Think about it, if “killing my property is like killing a part of me” were true, then how would that work practically? If a rich man is robbed of a million dollars, and a poor man loses 50 cents, but the rich man’s loss represents .002% of his net worth and the 50 cents is half of what the poor man has, how big of a “part of my life” loss has each suffered? Do you measure it on a percentage basis, or an absolute basis? How do you account for each of their future earnings potential? Should the rich man get more votes, since his greater wealth represents “more lives” in his possession?
Killing is killing, and property loss is property loss. Society is perfectly capable of distinguishing between the two, and has chosen to do so through a representative process where everyone is free to convince their fellows if the balance is wrong.
> You know better than anyone else what the value of your life is and if you think it's worth less than the pleasure you derive from destruction, I'm not gonna deny your assessment.
This is just the murderer’s version of the heckler’s veto. Adding a gun to “you know better than anyone else what the value of your career is, and if you think it’s worth less than the pleasure you derive from posting anti-trans memes, I’m not gonna deny your assessment,” does not improve it as an argument. It’s honestly less of an argument than a troll vaguely worded to look like an argument.
>I agree not to kill in exchange for the government agreeing to protect basic rights. If the government blatantly refuses to do so, only the laws of war and nature apply.
Thankfully, this is not how constitutions, laws, or social contracts work. If you take “I don’t think the government is doing a good enough job on issue X, so only the laws of war and nature apply,” then multiply that by all the people who think that the government is not doing a good enough job on issue X, issue Y, and issues AA1 – ZZZZZ9999, that’s gonna be a lot of dead bodies to clean up.
If you, as a citizen, don’t like the rules we’ve adopted around self defense, and want more leeway to use deadly force to defend property, you have the right to vote, protest, advocate, and, if you want, immigrate to someplace that better shares your values. You do not have the right to go all sovereign citizen on us and declare that the constitution is suddenly void, a state of nature exists, and start blasting.
>A random business is not a legitimate target in a political conflict, destroying it has no value to whatever war the rioters are engaged in. They are war criminals.
Rioting is not a form of warfare. Far left-wing protesters have often claimed to be “at war” with the state in order to secure greater legitimacy as actors and POW protections. Governments have wisely denied this by insisting that people engaged in crime are mere criminals. Consider whether this argument opens greater cans of worms for you than it closes.
Also, just overall, reconsider the "a man who disagrees with me is no man at all" stuff, and the use of "we" as though your own personal grievances somehow represent multitudes. Write an argument, or write a melodrama, but the combination of the two is decidedly weaker than the sum of its parts.
You make a good point that the same property in dollars represents different fractions of life of different people.
But the argument that property is fundamentally different from what you paid for it just takes this too far. By the same logic, it is totally different when someone steals $100000 from you, and when someone steals a car you bought for $100000. In the latter case, it's not like they stole actual money from you, right? Money is money, and a car is a car -- society is perfectly capable of distinguishing between the two. Why would the car thief owe you money, if he didn't stole any money from you? It was your own decision to trade that money for the car, don't blame him for that.
But money is money and a car is a car, and society *does* distinguish between the two. I need a license and to be at least a certain age in order to use a car, but any 5 year-old is permitted to use money. I can get drunk and still use my money freely, but not my car.
And I live in a society which has reached a rough consensus, through representative democracy, to impose those differences upon cars and money, and I don’t think those differences are unreasonable. It’s not perfect – I’ve known 14 year-olds whose dads had been diligent about teaching them to drive and who probably could drive better than some 40 year-olds do. But systems don’t and can’t achieve perfect fairness – their builders are fallible, their implementors equally fallible, and they’re balancing across multiple dimensions of tradeoffs, trying to balance wealth creation, social stability, legitimizing themselves through being perceived as just, being legible to the governors and the governed, etc.
That’s my quibble with “I should be able to kill the man who is about to burn a car dealership, because the car dealership “is the blood, sweat, tears, and years of human life spent building it.” In the first place it is not those things – the owner can spend 20 years building a successful car dealership, then transfer it to another person, but there’s no means by which he can transmute the dealership back into 20 years of lifespan. Property stolen or destroyed can be replaced with insurance, a gofundme, or other sources of money. Life does not share this very useful quality. These are rather large differences to try to simplify out of the equation with a platitude, so in the first place OP's assertion that they simply don't exist is false.
Secondly, in addition to being real, those differences are of a nature that makes them appropriate to codify for different treatment in our laws, and as a society (wisely, in my opinion) we have opted to do so.
Is that law perfect? By no means. Would it be improved by giving people broader liberty to use deadly force in defense of property? I don’t believe it would.
But let’s say I’m wrong, and we decide that not being able to use deadly force in defense of property sucks and we should change that. It’s a democracy, after all. So we change it.
A few days from now, a kid steals a snickers off my desk. Before I can grab him, he runs off. He’s 30 feet from me, about to take a bite out of it, and I can’t grab him or stop him. So I blow his brains out. After all, he was about to take a portion of my life! Society collectively says something along the lines of “aw fuck, I guess we need some kind of minimum – does anybody have any smart ideas on how many years of life-worth merits defense with deadly force?”
A few months after that, after a bunch of really contentious and confusing debates have settled on “at least 6 years of equivalent life-worth,” as a minimum threshold to justify use of deadly force, I see a teenager stealing a homeless man’s shopping cart.
So I blow his brains out. In my defense, that shopping cart is pretty much all the homeless guy has – it’s 50% or more of his entire life’s worth. Welp, back to the drawing board for society! Maybe something like “a minimum of 6 years, but in no event less than $60,000?” This self-defense law is getting kinda complicated, and increasingly remote from anything that feels like “just common-sense fairness.”
A couple months later, my business competitor is playing some corporate espionage games. He hires a guy to work in my office and steal my valuable corporate secrets – business methods and practices I estimate to be worth several hundred thousand dollars at least. I find out, so I beat the infiltrator to death with a shovel to try to stop him from emailing the files.
But I'm too slow and he's emailed the secrets to my competitor! There's no time to call the cops - that could take a month or more and leave him plenty of time to copy the files. So I form a hit team with some of my employees, and we raid my competitor’s office, killing anyone who resists us, until we successfully have taken the files back.
I could go on with examples here, but you get my general trend. All of this is quite comfortably dealt with under our current system by a simple recognition that life and property are different, in ways that justify defending life with deadly force, but not property. This represents, as a conservative might note, the learned wisdom of our traditions. Our elders once had things like true man doctrine and honor killing (we even secretly sort of have them now, tucked into the system with things like jury nullification and prosecutorial discretion), but learned through a lot of trial and error that having them formalized in law is some combination of unjust and not worth the costs. Sometimes our rules are imperfect, and that is upsetting, but we shouldn’t just blithely swap “imperfect system” for “imperfect system that is even worse but makes me feel better in the heat of the moment.”
And that heat of the moment satisfaction, in the end, is what this really strikes me as the core of this argument. It’s not really about property at all, so much is at is about honor culture and feelings. The fact that insurance could satisfy a property loss doesn’t *feel* fair, because this isn’t really about “I should be able to kill in defense of my property,” it’s about “I should be able to kill rather than suffer the indignity of having my property taken.”
And legitimizing violence in defense of honor, bluntly, is stupid. Down that road is nothing but fistfights in bars over spilled beer, men slapping women who’ve disrespected them, shooting at each other on the highway for cutting the other off, killing their daughters over premarital sex. There’s been a lot of work done in this country unwinding silly-ass things like dueling and true man doctrine from our laws, and I’m not the least bit interested in backsliding.
There are several things I think are basic rights that are currently hard or impossible to access in the US: abortions, euthanasia for the terminally ill, the right for parents to not send their kids to school. Do I get to kill the people standing in the way of these things? Also I think I have a right to live in a place where people aren't toting guns around, and aren't taking the law into their own hands. So can I shoot you?
Would you mind me asking what your basis is for thinking abortion a right? Is it based entirely on a lack of apparent consciousness, such that you would unhesitantly switch your position if it were proven that fetuses are in fact conscious? Or is it closer to the standard position that "it doesn't actually matter if it's conscious or not, all that matters is what *I* want, for *any reason at all*"?
If the former, that's a respectable position that decent people can disagree on. If the latter...would you mind explaining how that isn't identical to the OP's position, except with the removal of any requirement that the person you want to kill has committed any crime at all? That they can be a completely innocent person whose existence is inconvenient for you?
I mean I’m ok with early term or disabilities abortions, pro-euthanasia, and fine with parents not sending kids to school. The latter is if anything traditionally conservative while the former 2, while right wing in the eugenic and human dignity sense are admittedly controversial among the right but not my brand of it. So killing me would kind of be an own goal, but as to ur general point sure. If u really cannot tolerate living with people like me, and think u can actually pull it off I have no pseudo-neutral argument for why you shouldn’t try to kill me.
How is this hard to understand exactly? I’ve literally said that I respect commies who’ll openly declare war on civilization more than liberals who’ll try to tie ur hands with absurd pseudo-neutral procedural objections; when any honest observer would conclude their behavior is identical to desiring your destruction.
Why discuss morals at all? Your view seem to be that natural laws should apply, and there are no morals involved in such a view, except might makes right.
<If u really cannot tolerate living with people like me, and think u can actually pull it off I have no pseudo-neutral argument for why you shouldn’t try to kill me.
You don't think you have a right not to get shot by someone who disapproves of people with guns taking the law into their own hands? Why do you think you have the right to kill to protect the property of someone you like, but not the right to kill to protect your own life from someone who disapproves with your values?
> but not the right to kill to protect your own life
The either/or assumption is the problem here; the idea that if one person has a right to do something, everyone else has a moral obligation not to interfere. But that doesn't apply to, say, alcoholism, or self harm, so why should it apply here?
We used to have dueling, on the grounds that two people both have the right to shoot each other, and may the better shot win.
Well, if most of the right does in fact think the same way you do, then you are correct: there is obviously no chance at reconciliation. "Killing people is okay" is not a line liberals are willing to cross. The question is, just how many are you willing to kill for the sake of "protecting property"? I hope you do realize that if things end up going the way you want them to, there will be an unimaginable amount of bloodshed.
That reminds me: the burning of the Reichstag, the home of the German parliament, ended up becoming a catalyst for Hitler seizing absolute power. I wonder if history will repeat itself.
If the Russians had some means by which they were taking Ukrainian property without taking Ukrainian lives (let's say, for example, that instead of invading Ukraine and killing thousands of people, Russia simply confiscated every Ukrainian-owned resources and business in Russia that it could get its hands on), I doubt liberals (or conservatives, for that matter) would be all gung ho to send guns to Ukraine so that they could shoot Russians until they got their property back.
So, the actual answer is "killing (your own|"innocent") people" is the line they don't like crossing. It's part of why the "<insert black martyr> was innocent/ didn't do anything to deserve being killed" narrative is given so much weight, even when it totally misses the point (that our founding laws say punishing victims is the role of a fair trial and jury, not cops, and extrajudicial murders should be considered a failure on their part)
But yeah, as a liberal, the wider liberal response to the whole Ukraine thing has always made me very uncomfortable on a visceral level. It feels like these people were just waiting for a war where could assuage their conscious with the fact it's not our young men getting thrown into the meatgrinder, and where Russia striking first has absolved them of "innocence". I didn't realize so many of the blue tribe were chomping at the bit for a conflict where they were "allowed" to be bloodthirsty hawks. And patriotic (for Ukraine, of course, not the US)! I thought unthinking nationalist idpol was a red tribe thing, but I guess the blues were just waiting for permission and actually wanted that. Gives me serious values dissonance.
My point of view (as a sort-of centrist who dislikes MAGA and Woke) is that NATO has a very good reason for supporting Ukraine, ethics be damned: If we are going to be having intermittent conflicts with Russia, it is better for us to have them on the eastern border of Ukraine rather than the western border of Ukraine. Ukraine has been and (AFAIK) is willing to fight to prevent Russia from conquering them. I don't think supplying Ukraine weapons to prevent a successful conquest counts as being bloodthirsty hawks. Nor do I think that this is a nationalist position. I view this as just an attempt to prevent NATO's strategic position from deteriorating.
Oh, I don't think NATO is wrong at all. And for that matter, I support shipping whatever military aid they need (unlike with Israel, this is a pretty cut and dried situation of Russia being the sole aggressor and in the wrong, here). There's good political, strategic, and even ethical reasons to support Ukraine.
None of that is what I'm objecting to. It's the weird fervor where every liberal suddenly had a Ukrainian flag in their profile and I see people waving giant Ukrainian flags in the street on a nearly weekly basis. Like, unless their babushka is from The Old Country, it's weird to see these otherwise-anti-war liberals throw themselves so eagerly into reposting glory-of-war tiktoks about exploded Russian tanks.
Support for Ukraine has been bipartisan. The Senate voted 70-29 for the latest aid package, with 22/49 Republicans in support. House leadership is holding it up because they know that, put to a vote, more than enough Republicans would vote for it to get it through.
That's consistent with the Republican base, as near as I can tell.
So this is less "why does every liberal seem to support the war?" and more "why have a significant number of Republicans changed their mind about something everbody, liberal and conservative alike, thought was the just thing only 2 years ago? Something many of their fellow Republicans stills support to this day?"
And the answer, to my mind, is the same dumb partisanship that we see whenever a president does anything. For the first weeks of the pandemic, almost everyone thought masks were a good idea, then Republicans decided they were a liberal symbol and it all went to the shitter. Liberals were anti-free trade for decades until Trump was too, then they suddenly discovered it was good. It's dumb as all hell, but that's just how partisanship goes. If Biden were a Republican president, we'd see the same thing we're seeing now on Ukraine, just on the opposite side of the ticket. Hell, it already happened once under Bush. All that instant unity after 9/11, then a slow partisanizing of the conflict as it became associated with a Republican president, then silence on it when Obama was elected. If Trump gets elected and continues US support for Ukraine, I have zero doubt in my mind we'll see the exact same phenomenon of disappearing anti-war Republicans we saw with the disappearing anti-war Democrats of 2009. At least this time it'll be in service of something good if it happens.
>It's the weird fervor where every liberal suddenly had a Ukrainian flag in their profile and I see people waving giant Ukrainian flags in the street on a nearly weekly basis.
is, well to my mind, creepy. It has a "tribal identifier" feel to it, rather than a "well, there is a geopolitical situation here, and it is prudent to protect our interests now, rather than letting Russia conquer and try to patch the situation later" feel.
Oh, cool, now you're being vaguely threatening. You're exactly the kind of person who makes tense situations worse. The more you's show up at a standoff, the fewer successful resolutions of standoffs there will be, and the more standoffs the turn into melees with people gouging out eyeballs, squatting in ditches hurling pieces of fire and shit at each other, etc etc.
You use the word 'we' but I don't think you're speaking for as many people on the right as you think. Nor do I think the thoughts you attribute to the left belong to as many people as you think.
You have described why a certain type of person will feel perpetual hatred for another type of person. I question the relevance of that, though. Are you actually looking to understand the people you claim hatred for? Or are you just positing a non-falsifiable Manichean worldview?
He's definitely speaking for some of us. And he's doing a great job of explaining how the world looks from our perspective.
You too would feel hatred for the teacher who stood by and/or made excuses while the school bully took your lunch. That is the role we perceive liberals to be taking in situations like this.
Should I hate every conservative who is pro-gun-rights because sometimes those rights are abused? Because sometimes people use guns to kill, I should hate everyone who says that gun ownership is a right that should be respected?
I give people who are pro-gun rights credit for being normal human beings who don't approve of murder. Yes, their policies means that sometimes gun crime will happen. It would be stupid and unproductive of me to say that if you are pro-2A, then you are pro-murder. I believe gun rights enthusiasts honestly believe that a world with gun rights is _on balance_ a better world even if it sometimes means we have to wake up to news of school shootings.
Liberals who are anti-vigilante are not pro-arson. They think that a world where vigilantism is discouraged is, _on balance_, a better world, even if there are cases where riots will result in property damage.
(Are there some dipshit edgelords who actually are pro-arson? Probably. World's a big place. But they are very far from the mainstream and if you want to engage in that kind of nutpicking then you're just looking for an excuse to rant. If that's the case, fine, but maybe state that early on so the rest of us know to ignore you.)
I daresay a fair few progressives might simply get leery about the whole concept of conservatives seemingly constantly trying to think up "Can I kill people now, libs? How about now? How about now? Can I kill them in a house? Can I kill them with a mouse? Can I kill them here or there? Can I kill them anywhere?" thought examples.
On the other hand, the position of the progressives would be more defensible if they had any answers to "okay, so in the absence of violence how do you stop that dude over there who's about to burn down the car dealership."
At least in the US, the broad population of your peers have, through representative government, agreed to the following portfolio of measures/remedies:
(1) Hard to summarize, since it's at the state level, but generally you may protect property by using the amount of non-deadly force necessary to prevent its loss, or deadly force if the process of taking it exposes you to deadly force (armed robbery, burglaries, etc).
(2) You can call the police, who can do the deadly force thing for you
(3) The dealership can sue the guy who burned the dealership down, along with anyone else who was harmed or lost property to the subsequent fire
(4) Said victim(s) can collect on insurance policies.
In all honesty, the strangest thing about OP's example is how it's kind of a nothing-burger. Burning down a car dealership probably puts other people in danger such that more often than not defense of others from deadly force comes into it and one could plausibly claim an exception and justify use of deadly force in their defense in exactly this situation under our existing systems, and the injustice he's upset about doesn't even exist. Almost as if criminal law is imperfect but nevertheless barometered roughly to something that "seems fair" to most people rather than merely being a left-wing canard.
Nevertheless, the absence of a simple "just kill the guy" from that portfolio of options isn't simply the position of progressives, it's the position that society, broadly, has taken through the acts of its representatives, elected under the framework of a constitution we've all agreed to live under, all of which we (a) have agreed that we all can advocate, protest, lobby, and otherwise push to change if we think it can be improved, but (b) pointedly have *not* agreed that any goofball with a gun and a hero complex can just declare "state of nature" and exempt themselves from it like OP proposes in his 3rd bullet.
And it's honestly better that way, since it's what keeps the left wing goofballs with hero complexes from doing the same and bombing our oil facilities, assaulting professors who won't sign DEI statements, and so on.
(2) Police are not obligated to respond, so this is a non-solution.
(3) The guy who burns the dealership down is essentially guaranteed not to have the resources to pay for it.
(4) This is egregious. Spreading the harm around to all the people paying insurance premiums in a certain insurance pool does not destroy or mitigate the harm; quite the opposite, in fact. How could you even think that it does? That's we-cannot-live-in-the-same-society nonsense.
In principle, yes. That's the system, and it's fine as these things go. The question is what happens when that system has been switched off.
In 2020, deadly or non-deadly force gets you stitched up by the justice system (eliminating 1) which is otherwise standing by and letting the rioters riot because something something racial justice (eliminating 2). And lawsuits take years to grind through the system plus most of the perps are judgement-proof anyway (eliminating 3), which just leaves "let them burn down the dealership and collect the insurance." And that isn't going to last very long before the insurance companies decide to go into another line of work, plus it's honestly kinda anti-human to think that if some jackoff burns down something you spent decades building a corporation can just hand you a check and suddenly it's all good.
So it's not just a question of "what do you do if someone's burning down the car dealership," it's a question of "what do you do if someone's burning down the car dealership _and it's 2020_."
But the system has not, in any meaningful sense, been switched off in the 2020 scenario.
If there's a riot in progress, and the cops are lined up in a perimeter 2 blocks away but have chosen (for now) to stand pat and not intervene, that's not a "the system is turned off" situation. That's a "the system has made a decision that I don't like and will have tragic secondary consequences" situation.
And those kinds of situations happened all the time before 2020, have happened all the time since, and will continue to do so in the future. But when they happen, it doesn't just unleash us to do whatever we want to fix them: "government not stopping the trespassers on my land" =/= "the rule that I can't lay traps for trespassers on my land is now void." We're limited in our remedies to things like advocating for better law, and sometimes, frustratingly, better law just isn't passable because not enough people agree, or isn't possible because fixing thing A requires a tradeoff that creates an even worse thing B.
And that's admittedly a real pisser, because sometimes it lands us stuck eating a burned down business, or being satisfied with a check as our only remedy for years of sexual harassment. But the system doesn't optimize for "rules that will ensure that my justice-seeking primate brain feels satisfaction" (If it did, I'd be able to run a lot more people off the road during my daily commute!). And it shouldn't optimize on that anyhow - it should be balancing all kinds of things like maintaining public order, wealth generation, protection of bodily autonomy and freedom of speech/movement/etc along with things that "feel like justice."
"Actually, the horrible and unjust way the system worked in 2020 _is_ the system" doesn't generate confidence in the system!
I'm not really an anarchist or anything, I promise. I _like_ the system. But a problem with telling people to just suck it up is that they will eventually decide they would rather not suck it up, thanks, and some of them have guns and believe they're right or they just have nothing to lose.
Yes, we need to balance all those things you mentioned. But there's a secret failure state behind "neglecting to provide justice" that is being ignored at everyone's peril, and we need to recognize that we've gotten a lot closer to it than is healthy for a society.
I didn't read much beyond the ---. Yes it's morally justifiable, you might ask that someone try and shoot him in the legs first. Also I'd expect most DA's to take the case to trial. (Which is mostly just doing their job.)
I agree that it is morally justifiable. However, see quibble below.
> you might ask that someone try and shoot him in the legs first
Quibble--this is never a valid, justified request. It's basically a myth that this is something you can reliably do, so tying any morality to it is just a roundabout way of saying "no, you can never shoot anyone".
Exigent-circmumstances shooting is center of mass. Shooting to disable is just not a thing that happens under "hostile" conditions, nor is it something that should even be considered as an expectation.
It's a lot harder to stop someone with a gun than movies would make you think. If someone is actually a threat, you aim for the center of mass. If they're not a threat, you don't aim at them in the first place. The in between is Hollywood fiction.
As for why
1) You're a lot more likely to miss if you aim at the legs. And if someone's running at you, you'll only get one shot. And if you start shooting at someone, they're certainly going to run at you if they weren't before!
2) Even if you hit them, you may not disable them. In the short term, people can keep going even after being shot straight in the chest, let alone the legs. Adrenaline is a powerful drug.
3) Even if you "only" shoot someone in the legs, there's still a decent change of killing them anyway.
Note that #2 and #3 are not contradictory. Guns have a lot less *immediate* stopping power than Hollywood thinks, but a lot higher *eventual* mortality.
This is most absolutely accurate, but let's also consider that "we can use the guns to overthrow a government that's turned tyrannical" lands in a similar zone of "more Hollywood fiction than based in reality."
The government falls because the soldiers *refuse* to turn their tanks and helicopters and artillery on the populace and join the uprising, not because the people defeat the army with chutzpah and bump stocks.
Has anyone else noticed Google Doc's autocorrect get much more aggressive and stupider recently?
Previously, it would just attempt to correct mispellings or grammar errors. Sometimes it would get one wrong, but for the most part it was ok, and it would never attempt to apply the same correction more than once if you backspaced and changed it back. However, perhaps a few weeks ago, it got a lot more aggressive and also stupider, and now frequently makes changes that aren't even gramatically correct.
For example, when I was writing just now, in the space of one paragraph, it changed the "worn" to "worms" in "However, there were also small holes worn", and it changed "I applied" to "I apple".
Furthermore, it no longer gives up if you undo its correction. I've seen it apply the exact same (mis)correction three or more times when I backspace and fix the "correction".
Does anyone here know what's going on here? I'm curious what people on Google Docs would say about this.
Speaking of Google messing things up, my YouTube settings keep reverting to "enable captions by default".
And I can't search for solution because the search engines can't distinguish my problem from "captions are enabled on every video", to which changing this setting is the answer.
Speaking of LLM's gone wild -- anyone notice the aggressive shitification of youtube lately? First it tried to convince me that Jordan Peterson was my #1 hero. Lately it's decided I want to see videos exclusively on medieval methods of torture/execution, serial killers, killer moms and airplane pilot's last 30 seconds screaming before the crash.
And even more recently, ad time is distributed in 5-second chunks barely a minute apart. I guess that is to register with the addled attention response of the GenZ crowd (except the alg ought to realize Jordan is for boomers and GenX-sers)
Yeah, my recommendation list on YouTube is quite unlike the things I actually want to watch, so much that it kinda offends me that YouTube believes this is the kind of viewer I am.
I guess the plan with ads is to make normal YouTube so unwatchable that everyone will subscribe to the paid version. (Later they will start showing us ads in the paid version, too, but they will make sure there are always at least twice as many ads in the unpaid version.)
You're definitely not the only one. Saw people first complaining about it in February here (a few posts down, talking about the "enshittification" of google docs):
Like others said, they're probably using a (stupid) LLM here. A friend that works at Youtube is constantly telling me to file feedback when I complain about the website to her, and says they actually listen to that. So I suggest you do that: find the feedback option and tell the engineers working on that feature that they (or more likely, the managers pushing to use an anemic LLM in a pathetic attempt at a promotion) are incompetent.
I've noticed other people point it out and they say it's because Google is using AI in its spell check, leading to correct language being changed to frequently made errors because that's what the AI is seeing most in Google Docs.
I've been learning German for almost 2 years now. I've used a combination of in person classes, remote classes, and Duolingo. Across all of them, I probably average an hour-ish per day across those two years.
One thing I've noticed about Duolingo that I wish would be improved is that, while it occasionally will bring you old sentences with vocab that you haven't seen before, it's A) the same set of sentences you used when you initially used the word and B) still sentences where the entire context of the sentence is designed to help you figure out what the word is.
B is extremely helpful when you are first learning a word, but, in my opinion, it becomes detrimental when you are trying to cement a word that you already know, and prevents you from putting that word in a larger context.
I realize that generating a wide range of novel sentences for every vocab word, especially when those sentences would ideally have a decreasing gradient of contextual information, would be prohibitively expensive. This feels like the kind of problem that an LLM would be perfect for solving.
Language learning feels like the area of learning/education that is _most_ ripe for being completely upended by LLM assistants. I know that Duolingo is slowly trialing their "Max" AI assistant, but it doesn't seem like they are using it in an optimal way.
Duolingo is, for me, currently just a useful side thing that helps support and reinforce the learning I do in my classes. I think with a well thought out and intelligently implemented LLM assistant, it could become my primary learning tool. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that that would jive with their current incentives which lean towards gamification and just getting people to open the app every day. So Duolingo may not be the thing that does it, but man it feels like _someone_ is going to make the thing I'm envisioning, and soon.
I have tried and Failed to use Duo for German (got to B1 with Fluenz and regular courses eventually ) while I lived in Austria and tried and succeeded in using Duo for french (Also got to B1 now just with Duo) now that live in France. I would not learn either language if i did need it, im not that interested into learning them. Duo quite simply sucks for German, but maybe also I suck for german so there’s that. Fluenz was much better (and I used the pirated copy, so it was first old version)
What I miss in the application is some focus on words and concepts which can be confused with each other to show in a same exercise in order to drive the issue home.
I also dont like the fact that the fact that PC and Iphone are disjointed in Duo, but i did not check this in while.
Yes, PC and mobile Duolingo is disjointed and that is one annoyance.
I've found Duolingo ok for maintaining/restoring german language proficiency that had staled with many years of non-use. However, it I didn't find it to be fun.
It does seem that Duo is better for French. I've made a lot of progress with Duo as my primary learning system, though I'm not sure how transferable this is to other learners because (a) my spanish was already pretty strong, (b) I have a good history with learning languages (French is my 4th serious foreign language), (c) I also supplemented by watching subtitled cartoons (subtitled in french -- Tintin!), listening to podcasts, and reading novels (Lupin!).
I used to love Duolingo, successfully learnt Dutch with it (easy, being a German). Finished the Italian course, too, but now Duolingo isn't fun any more. It's fine for the first few steps into the language, but eventually you need contact with a native speaker. Find an online tutor, they're not that expensive, or a language chat app like Tandem or so. There are lots of Germans who are happy to help with their weird language. Lingq is also good for content.
I liked Fluenz a lot for German, its like a normal course with video lessons about grammar and everything but its a bit pricey, or at least was. Duo can be a good support to that, or to normal courses.
I'm also learning German, probably less diligently than you. I learned it for 6 years in K-12 education, but that was a long time ago and K-12 education is so ineffectual and misguided (especially in languages) that it's not funny. I started re-learning around 6 months ago but I average less than 1 hour per day because lots of days pass by where I don't hear or read German.
> Language learning feels like the area of learning/education that is _most_ ripe for being completely upended by LLM assistants.
I want this to be true, I want any technology or educational paradigm or new technique to revolutionize knowledge and learning, but I'm skeptical. LLMs can only really be so good at English due to the vast amount of material online. English is without competition when it comes to how much it's spoken and written over the internet, especially in the sources that current LLMs train on (Wikipedia, Reddit).
LLMs are still reasonably good in German and French, but nowhere near the English level. And there are languages even less spoken than those.
Freddie Deboer wrote 2 months ago an article titled Sal Khan, Serial Education Revolutionary (https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/sal-khan-sure-is-shameless). I don't like the hostile tone in the article because I think Sal Khan is a well-meaning person and that he *did* in fact revolutionize education with Khan academy, but the overall point is that whenever you hear "This will completely revolutionize education" you should be skeptical, especially when the claim is made in relation to a new technology. Education is really really *really* difficult, there is a long and illustrious history of people saying that the printing press will revolutionize education, that the microfilm will revolutionize education (As We May Think by Vannevar Bush), that the Radio or the Television or the Computer or the Internet or AI will revolutionize education. To a certain extent, yes, all of those things did massively revolutionize certain kinds of education for certain kinds of people in certain places and certain times. But education remains a hard problem as ever and nothing still beats one-on-one instruction with an empathetic and patient teacher, a hard-working and highly motivated student, and lots and lots of time and money.
In my opinion, Khan Academy achieved a lot -- it can teach you many things in a pleasant way, if you are the right kind of person. The main problem is that there are only some topics there, and that not everyone is into learning, even if it just means watching videos and doing interactive exercises.
I think the main problem in these debates is that it is not clear what is compared to what. Are we comparing Khan Academy to an average math textbook? Or to all textbooks that exist? Or to the entire educational system (textbooks, live teachers, free lunches for kids)? Also, do we consider "Khan Academy used by a kid who is free to give up when it gets bored" or something more like "Khan Academy that a kid uses 30 minutes a day, supervised by a parent"? You can always move the goalpost to win the debate.
A problem with technology is that without some kind of standardization, we get different platforms offering different educational content, and no way to put this all together nicely. You don't have this problem with books -- you just buy a lot of books, arrange them in a line, and the curriculum is ready. But with online education, you would need to create user accounts in dozen different services, then learn to navigate dozen different user interfaces. (And suffer dozen different attempts at gamification, each trying to punish you for the fact that yesterday you used a different service instead of this one.) So we kinda expect one app to do everything, and then get angry that it does not. We blame Khan Academy for not having enough, dunno, history content, in a way that we would never blame the author of a math textbook for also not writing a chapter on history.
Books are in some sense more flexible and modular. You can read the book at home, or have it read to you by a teacher. You can read it front to back, or just selected chapters. You decide how much time a week you spend reading, and whether you are going to re-read the book afterwards. Technological solutions often impose their preferred way of using the content that is locked in them. So if the content is good but the interface sucks, the entire experience sucks, because you cannot take out the content and put it into a different interface.
There were attempts to standardize the technology of education: SCORM, Moodle. The problem is that it's tempting to add features, and you can better extract money from users if you lock the content in your own platforms. The technology is moving forward faster than the content is adapted -- at some moment is was okay to provide lessons for a computer screen, now you need a mobile version; and when you make the mobile version of all the school subjects (which won't happen overnight) no one will care anymore because by that time everyone will require virtual reality or something like that. In some sense, the electronic content gets obsolete faster than the books do; despite all the disadvantages, paper still works, but Flash applications don't.
Technology is useless if the educational *content* is not there. But if you try to create the content, you face the difficult choice between dozen different technologies, and whichever you choose, five years later people will laugh at you. And producing good educational content takes literally years, if you want to make something like "high-school math" rather than "a two-minute video about why addition is commutative". (Actually, you probably could make the high-school math as a sufficiently large library of two-minute videos. But making all of them would take years. Having them made by different people will require coordination. Oops, another choice that ultimately only makes things more difficult.)
You would need to choose one specific technology, and then spend a decade creating good content for this specific technology. At the end, you could get something awesome. But in the middle, people would already complain that your choice of technology was bad.
Still, I think here is what we could do:
* Provide all textbooks as free PDF / EPUB / something. Give each child a reader with a sufficiently large screen containing all the textbooks (all subjects, all grades, all languages) installed. This could be relatively cheap is you did it at scale.
* Start doing the same for SCORM or some similar system (a combination of videos and interactive web pages, where the lessons can be plugged into an existing system). Pay for the content creation using Kickstarter or something like that, then provide the lessons for free.
The problem is that the "minimum viable product" in education is quite large. One two-minute video on the commutativity of addition is not enough. You need to cover at least an entire grade of some school subject. Enough so that if you give the link to the teachers, the benefits from having the lessons will exceed the extra work with convincing parents and students to switch to the system. (Mere videos on YouTube are not enough. You also need some kind of a test at the end of each lesson. Otherwise the kids will say that they watched it, but will remember nothing.) That would take a teacher maybe a year or two of full-time work, plus you need someone to make the pictures and animations, and someone to put it in proper HTML or something. Three people, full-time, one year -- as a minimum. Can be done, for money. Won't be done in sufficient quality by volunteers in their free time.
I completely agree that how useful an LLM will be in a language is largement dependent on how much it exists online, and that for many languages it won't help at all. For the big ones though (English, German, French, Spanish, and maybe Italian), my guess is that there is enough out there for it to be good enough. I feel like Chinese should also be on that list, but maybe the characters make it harder for LLMs to parse? I have no idea.
The point is that you are absolutely right that LLMs are not the solution for less common languages, but for more common languages, the reason I think they will be revolutionary is that, for language learning, I think LLMS are uniquely well suited to implementing the thing that we already know works for education, but that is too expensive to implement: personilized tutoring.
We have strong evidence that personalized tutoring can cause a 2-sigma improvement in learning. Unfortunately, it's completely infeasible to give every student a private tutor. And for many subjects, LLMs are not good enough to be that tutor (yet anyways. Sal Khan is actually trying to do this with Khanmigo and I'm very eagerly awaiting data to show whether or not it's working. My guess is that it sorta shows improvement but not nearly to the extent that human tutors would). But when it comes to language, again with the caveat about which languages, I actually do think that an LLM can be as effective a tutor as a real human, because language is what LLMs are _for_, and it's what they do best.
-edit- it occurs to me that I should add a very big caveat: LLMs have the potential to revolutionize language learning _for self directed, passionate students_ who already do pretty well at language learning (I'm pretty sure I've learned more German in the last two years as a self-motivated adult than I learned French in 4 years of highscool as a reluctant, forced student). LLMs can't and won't help students who don't care enough to go to the effort of using them on their own. Which, interestingly, is something that gets mentioned in the deBoer article on Khan Academy. It seems like he's willing to acknowledge that they _have_ actually been really useful for the set of students who will actually use them. The problem is that the lowest performing students are very unlikely to actually use them (being forced to play the videos is very much _not_ using the resource, in my opinion).
So to be clear, I'm not trying to argue that this is a universally applicable magic learning wand. I think it could be an incredibly powerful new tool for self motivated students that makes their learning better and faster. That seems like a goal that is much less skeptic-worthy.
In my experience, GPT4 is more than passable in every language I've thrown at it. In German specifically I've been using it for all of my writing needs. It's simply much better than me even after living for more than a year in a small town in Germany.
The main problem is that it follows a very "English class essay" style, even in languages where that style isn't used. But my sense is that this is mostly specific to the fine tuning on GPT4.
Kinda tangential to your point, but I think Anki is the best way to learn vocab. But yeah, someone should definitely develop an example-sentence-generator plugin for it ...
I used Anki for about the first year or so, adding every single vocab word from Duolingo and my classes, and it just got overwhelming. I was good about studying almost every day, but my classes especially were adding new vocab too fast, and I couldn't assimilate it in time. I realize that this isn't Anki's fault, but more a problem with the traditional classes, but I eventually dropped the deck because I couldn't keep up with it + all my other methods. My deck at the time was ~3000 cards (although I had cards for both German to English and English to German, so it was only half that in unique words).
Although with hindsight, part of my problem was that I was strugging with a small subset of the vocab without context. I think that if I had switched to sentence examples for those words, instead of simple "word-definition" pairs, it would have helped me a lot. (or maybe having both sentence example cards and word-definition cards?). But that goes to my point about context. For those words, I woudl have, initially, benefited a lot from having sentence-context to help me learn the word, but eventually over time, I would have liked to be able to remove that "crutch" (or at least change it to include different context).
Can confirm, I got off duolingo relatively early and put a lot of time into Anki + listening to podcasts + reading news + classes with a teacher. People compliment my German now. I think this is the ultimate guide and plug it everywhere I go: https://puroh.it/learning-german-a1-to-c2/
For those who speak Chinese: I am looking for a name for a character in a story I'm writing. It does not need to be a word typically used as a name. It should be a term meaning something like "clever and brave." It should have a clearly positive connotation -- so it should not be commonly used to describe, say, talented criminals who are sneaky and sly. I asked on the Reddit Chinese language sub and got zero answers. Wow, Reddit's a lot less friendly these days! I'd be very grateful for suggestions here.
The ChineseLanguage sub on Reddit might have a specific thread for naming requests…unfortunately the reddit was overrun at one point by people with no desire to study the language posting asking for things like tattoo translations and fictional character names.
Any of the common surnames will do. Li is a popular one for English language stories as it’s easy to pronounce and does not rely on Pinyin pronunciation rules. 李 or 利 (less common)
Chinese names are moderately gendered, so without knowing the gender of your character, it is difficult to give recommendations. Brave would probably only be used in a male name, for example. The standard format for a name is a single syllable/character surname followed by a one or two-syllable given name. In 2024 almost everyone has a two syllable given name. Names often include one adjective and one ‘noun’ or two adjectives. Which nouns are acceptable also varies by gender. Flowers and gems very common for feminine names, natural features or abstract nouns very common for masculine names - though some abstract nouns of course are more feminine!
It’s hard to say, to some extent if you don’t care about verisimilitude you can pick any two syllables you like. Also, if you are writing for an English speaking audience, most people do not know how to read Pinyin and have trouble sounding out many common Mandarin sounds such as “xi” , “xu”, “qu”, etc. It is difficult to follow the cultural and aesthetic sense for what a name should be without coming up with a bunch of options and then asking for feedback from several native speakers.
Thanks for the info. I think it's OK if my female character's name is a male name or deviates in some other way from the usual Chinese naming conventions. In the story she and her family are not Chinese. One parent is caucasian and one is black, but they are fascinated by China and both teaching themselves Chinese, and so decide to give their baby a Chinese name.
I am writing for an English-speaking audience. The name that Beowulf suggested, Zhihao, seems reasonably easy for English-only speakers to sound out, though of course the English speaker's version of the Chinese name will be quite different from how it would sound if spoken by a native Chinese speaker.
Fun fact: One Korean woman I know was given a male name because she was the first child and the father wanted to continue the family name without knowing if he'd have a son later. Or something like that, I'm not clear on the details.
Zhihao seems fine from the description that you’ve given - other than if the parents were teaching themselves Mandarin, I feel like they would be somewhat sensitive to whether a name was a culturally typical boys/girls name. My experience as a Mandarin language learner in the US is that it’s not a ‘cool’ language like Japanese - most of the people who get into it really care about the language, culture, or both. Further more, we’re more likely to have met Chinese immigrants or Chinese descent Americans who have Chinese names, and who then have had to navigate studying, living, and working in the US with such a non-English name and the challenges associated with it. Unless you’re portraying them as clueless China-boos on purpose.
My other feedback would be that while most English speaking people can absolutely pronounce that properly, the average person would not from reading it. So do the parents know the correct pronunciation (because they are studying Mandarin) and constantly correct people? Do they know it but not care? Etc is a question you may want to consider. In Modern Standard Mandarin “zhi” is pronounced like “djur” link: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=S6iYx117ve0 And this is something very rarely guessed correctly by people unfamiliar with the spelling rules.
I watched the video, and yeah she certainly is saying something much closer to "dhur." How about if I just spell my character's name as Djurhao? And is "hao" pronounced like "how?" or do I need to spell it differently too to approximate the Chinese. phonemes?
I am not Chinese, but I know that pinyin is used almost universally (with some variation for mainland China vs. Taiwan etc.), and I think this would come off as an odd choice, especially if they were trying to demonstrate their knowledge of or respect for a foreign culture. It just looks a bit ugly imo and not Chinese at all.
Well, I visited China 20 years ago and about 10 years ago there was a Japanese family I saw a lot of, and in both settings I was embarrassed to discover that when I pronounced various Chinese or Japanese words in the way that their English spelling suggested, I was *way* off. Seems respectful to me to try to reproduce the actual sounds as faithfully as one can with our alphabet and phonemes.
So, the character’s parents made an odd choice. They were sort of odd people. And they weren’t trying to demonstrate their knowledge, respect or anything else. They were just fascinated by China and Chinese.
How about Zhihao 志豪 of 智豪 which can be a masculine or feminine name? 志 (zhì) means "will, purpose, ambition" or 智 (zhì) which means "wisdom, intellect" is combined with 豪 (háo) which means "brave, heroic, chivalrous".
As for surnames, supposedly there are only about 100 Chinese surnames. I think that's a myth, but the Chinese certainly have fewer surnames than most European nations.
Yes, I like that! Is combining zhi and hao to make zhihao sort of like combining spoke and man to make spokesman? What I mean is, is zhihao itself a familiar word, or are you allowed in Chinese to make these combo adjectives any time you like? Doesn't affect my approval of the word as a name for my character, just curious.
Read that Chinese women's name often mean things like flower and fragrant. That would be particularly ridiculous for this character, who is far from dainty. There's a scene where she takes off her boots and apologizes for the smell of her socks.
AFAIK, all Chinese given names are a combination of two words that have meanings — unlike English where we've mostly forgotten the meanings of our names because we no longer speak the languages those names came from.
In Orson Scott Card's Xenocide, the Chinese female character fitting these characteristics is named "Gloriously Bright" when translated into English. Not sure if that helps.
This is also the book / series that our own Tracing Woodgrains got their name from! (I believe).
Tracing Woodgrains is a prolific education studier / commenter / blogger who knows everything about the shortcomings and ins and outs of education in the US, they've historically been pretty active on the SSC reddit and the SSC comments, but I see them a lot less these days, sadly.
I'm trying to decide, Scott, whether you are the worst employment-opportunity signal booster in the world or the best....I will of course have a 1,000-word comment exploring this question ready soon.
(Which, in my ongoing effort to remain a sane person, I will then delete unposted.)
It's the honesty effect. The formal phrasing of the job posting is full of the usual corporate buzzwords salad. The signal boost here is more honest (not to mention funny). "Here's what you're going to do. It's going to suck, just like all jobs. You will get paid a lot. Contact if interested."
So as spring comes early yet again here in Western NY, I'm reminded of an observation*. Which is that global warming seems to be mostly a warming of the coldest temperatures and not an increase in the hottest temperatures. So in the northeast, winters are less cold and shorter, and the summers are longer, but don't really get any hotter... only in that there are more days with high temperatures.
A weather fact that struck me this past summer when we had, 74 hundred degree or more days (I live in a hot but humid place), was learning that in the 70s, we went six summers without a single 100-degree day.
Still, I don't necessarily think this is significant at all - just weird to think of how different those summers were.
What I came on to say is, my impression as a hot-climate person, is that the perceived difference is not necessarily captured by daily highs (though perhaps by daily lows): it's a perception that each day has more total hours at hotter temperatures. The evening does not bring coolness. That may be partly an urban effect though.
Yeah, I think that fits in with this observation. (Having more and longer hot days.) (Even more so if you are nearer the equator with less seasonal variation.) Re: The 70's. IDK people can always cherry pick the data. I looked at weather data on the highest temp each year for Buffalo NY. And sorta eye-balling averaging the data, it looked roughly constant.
If you lived here, you would be astonished to learn this fact. It's almost like a "Year with no summer" type thing! Like a lost Eden we failed to appreciate at the time.
ETA: except the year with no summer was scary and terrible, of course.
It does appear to be the case so far that areas known for serious winters are warming fastest. The scientific hypothesis is that this is because of the loss of ice and snow, which are highly reflective and bounce a lot of sunlight back into space. Once a lot of that snow/ice cover is gone either seasonally, or permanently as in the Arctic and Antarctic regions, there is more exposed land/water to absorb the sun’s energy.
That is certainly my lived experience as a mostly-lifelong resident of Chicago with interludes in Michigan and New England. My siblings and I regularly marvel at how much milder Upper Midwest winters are than the ones we grew up in. Everyone I know has personal anecdotes about this: lakes in Wisconsin that for decades hosted winter "pond hockey" and/or ice fishing tournaments no longer freeze enough to be safe for such activities; my family's annual friends-and-neighbors sledding expedition to the Indiana Dunes now happens only once out of every 3 or 4 winters; what I've been perfectly happy with as a winter coat and gloves for a decade now would have been my autumn gear 20 or 30 years ago; etc.
Current data though also shows temps rising fastest in some other types of areas including the Sahara Desert and a swath of South America that mostly falls within Brazil. European weather patterns have recently produced record-breaking heat waves in both that continent's northern and southern portions. One hypothesis now being investigated is that the Mediterranean region has gotten drier leading to less moisture in the soils and hence less cooling by evaporation.
Thanks for sharing. Yeah I miss the winters of my youth, though I think most people around here are happy to see them go*. I heard about the heat waves in Europe, but I didn't pay much attention. How record breaking were the temps? Or was it more, hot for many days in a row? More along the time axis, vs the temperature axis.
*it sucks for anyone who use to make a living from the winter sports.
I was jerkily scrolling through the comment-wastelands of substack and read your remark as 'I miss the writers of my youth'. Suddenly I felt old, and thought, "Do I? Miss them, I mean? They're all gone now aren't they?"
Yeah, there are year to year variations. And you can have longer heat waves, but the observation is that the maximum high has not gone up. I don't know about Israel, it's never been above 100 F in Buffalo NY. Have you been visiting Israel for years?
There's been something pretty interesting going in philosophy blog Bentham's Bulldog: the utilitarian author has started to believe in God because it makes more sense than atheism. He doesn't hold theism with 100% certainty, but he sees it as more likely than atheism.
I think it's pretty easy to make the case for a basic, prime mover, "the reason there is something instead of nothing" God. Questions about what exists outside the universe or preceded it are unknowable by definition, might as well call it "god." But that claim is basically indistinguishable from God not existing, it almost feels like it's just a matter of taste and how comfortable you are with "anthropic bias" being the answer to why our universe is the way it is.
As a person who used to think in my childhood that God is talking to me directly, and then figured out that it was just my own brain all along, I'm very amused by such situations.
I think psychophysical harmony and the lawful universe are the most convincing arguments, which are really the same argument in the end: why is there Order and not Chaos? It's very easy to imagine life being as fleeting and incoherent as a dream, and yet, this is not what we observe.
I think I picked the wrong post (he's written a lot about this), this one is a better intro to his case:
Nothing actually convincing regarding God, but I've been annoyed/intrigued by some difficulties in articulating my objections to the arguments from anthropics even though some of the leaps feel badly wrong, so I gotta hand him that much. (Like, what kind of thing counts as the kind of thing that can have a perspective such that it should conclude that there should be lots of instances of things similar to its perspective-taking self in the world? What kinds of properties can it have and how widely can they vary before you're like, no, different kind of thing altogether, doesn't count?)
I think it's pretty telling that he doesn't even consider the possibility that God might not be benevolent. Theism is always so convenient for humanity.
If I'm understanding what Bentham is going through correctly...some people are just really bothered by, like, math working.
Like, it seems intuitively obvious to us that math works but it's super-weird. Like, this guy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrien-Marie_Legendre), this guy is some insane French dude from the 18th century and he invented least squares regressions while presumably injecting raw opium into his eyeballs and yet 200 years later we can use that same math to predict auto sales volume next month for a dealership in Philly. And this works, this provably works, major business decisions are made off this and that's super weird, like, the weirdest, and it's very hard to ignore if you're lucky enough to be in a position to use these algorithms to drive major business decisions.
And if you try to seriously resolve this, and I mean this observationally, like everyone who takes this seriously seems to end up there, you end up believing in metaphysics. This doesn't necessitate G-O-double D, the atheist version of this is probably closest to simulation theory, but you end up believing in code or math or some underlying substrate of reality we can access beneath physics. And once you're there...man, God apparently makes a lot of sense.
And the benevolence of God or lack thereof is an argument, and one addressed elsewhere, but it's not outweighing this deep gut sense of underlying metaphysics.
Sets are abstract objects, lacking any spatio-temporal location. Their existence is not contingent on our existence. They lack causal efficacy. Our question, then, given that we lack sense experience of sets, is how we can justify our beliefs about sets and set theory.
There are a variety of distinct answers to our question. Some philosophers, called rationalists, claim that we have a special, non-sensory capacity for understanding mathematical truths, a rational insight arising from pure thought. But, the rationalist’s claims appear incompatible with an understanding of human beings as physical creatures whose capacities for learning are exhausted by our physical bodies. Other philosophers, called logicists, argue that mathematical truths are just complex logical truths. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the logicists Gottlob Frege, Alfred North Whitehead, and Bertrand Russell attempted to reduce all of mathematics to obvious statements of logic, for example, that every object is identical to itself, or that if p then p. But, it turns out that we can not reduce mathematics to logic without adding substantial portions of set theory to our logic. A third group of philosophers, called nominalists or fictionalists, deny that there are any mathematical objects; if there are no mathematical objects, we need not justify our beliefs about them.
The indispensability argument in the philosophy of mathematics is an attempt to justify our mathematical beliefs about abstract objects, while avoiding any appeal to rational insight. Its most significant proponent was Willard van Orman Quine.
I don't actually have that much of a problem with that line of reasoning, but none of that actually supports the argument that God is benevolent. Based on observation, the default hypothesis should be that any potential higher being(s) are completely indifferent, but for some reason everyone jumps straight to assigning them motives. It all comes down to people fearing that their existence and suffering is completely meaningless. *sigh* If living is supposedly so wonderful, why can't they simply be content with their existence?
The argument appears to be that your prior is that, because Bentham didn't consider the possibility of indifferent or malevolent gods, he must be wrong. And the argument seems to appear, under the hood, that because the probability of God being benevolent is low, ignoring argumentation, that preceding arguments must therefore be false.
Or that your prior is that the existence of a benevolent metaphysical god is 1%, therefore it's wrong.
Where Bentham's approach, and my understanding, is that these are relatively independent.
If the probability of math-y metaphysics being real is 80%,
Then in those situations where math-y metaphysics is true, the likelihood of God existing is 90%.
Then in those 72% of situations where math-y metaphysics is true and God exists, then we attempt to determine if God is benevolent or what is going on.
But I don't get the logic. If you follow that metaphysics exists and that God exists, and that's the chain, then the benevolence or lack thereof of God has no bearing on whether math-y metaphysics are real or whether God exists.
Also, got to be honest, I don't think you believe in actively malicious divine entities. I don't know anybody that does and it's difficult to imagine a sane person believing that.
>I don't think you believe in actively malicious divine entities.
I do in fact believe in demons that go around messing with your stuff. The number of tasks, both large and small, that have failed at the last second these last several months are supernaturally high.
I'm pretty sure this is your point, but I want to spell it out more explicitly for other commenters. Isn't it precisely because it ISN'T wonderful that people worry / care about god?
Isn't it because there IS so little justice in this world, and theodicy is a real problem, that people want to make up heaven and hell, so everyone gets their just desserts?
Going by the facts on the ground, I'd think the evidence points more towards higher beings being literally cruelly indifferent, or to actually REVELING in our suffering and injustices. We're the sitcom neighbor taking pratfalls, so they can have a good laugh and drink some more ambrosia before getting on with actually important things, or whatever.
>Isn't it because there IS so little justice in this world, and theodicy is a real problem, that people want to make up heaven and hell, so everyone gets their just desserts?
Largely agreed, but I think there are a couple of other elements involved.
The "just desserts" tend to be rewards/punishments for following mores typically benefiting some priest-king, so the priest-king had an incentive to spread or invent such tales, including ever-present surveillance that was beyond the capabilities of the priest-king and his minions.
>By seeing the myriad ways it can malfunction, I’ve come to appreciate the physical nature of the mind in far more immediate and dramatic fashion than any philosophical reasoning could demonstrate.
and this dovetails with trauma studies, with neuropharmacology, and so forth. Once our brains are shredded, we are irretrievably dead, and that's that. But this is using information from the last two centuries or so, including the fact that our brains contain billions of neurons sending millivolt pulses of millisecond duration to each other. Thousands of years ago, our ancestors had no reasonable way of knowing that the grey and white goo in our heads was indeed quite capable of producing all our memories and motives, personalities and preferences. Regrettably, rather than saying "I don't know" how such things were possible, they came up with just-so stories about souls, going all the way back to pharaonic Egypt. Not commendable, but understandable.
>Going by the facts on the ground, I'd think the evidence points more towards higher beings being literally cruelly indifferent, or to actually REVELING in our suffering and injustices.
Could be... I'm fond of noting that "indifferent" is also consistent with a very low IQ deity - in which case the deity can reduce down to the mindless interaction of particles following the patterns of physics, merely _renamed_ as a deity.
The other general point is, the world is well described by physics. I haven't seen any deities striding around throwing thunderbolts. Supernatural occurrences tend to evaporate when examined closely. One telling point: Notice that when believers say "The only thing we can do is pray." it is an admission of _impotence_? _They_ don't expect it to work, or they would try it earlier.
And the permanence of our deaths and the absence of supernatural intervention in our lives combine to make any deity _irrelevant_. It becomes a possible puzzle, akin to the first few plank times after the Big Bang, but unimportant to any decision we make.
> Isn't it precisely because it ISN'T wonderful that people worry / care about god?
On empirical principles I'm an agnostic. Strangely enough, I receive more pushback from atheists than I do from the god-bothering Christians. In my experience, the "New Atheists" can be especially antagonistic and obnoxious. God or no-god are both unfalsifiable propositions—and just because you dress up the no-god argument with a veneer of scientism, it doesn't make it any less a proposition based on personal faith. Also, I find it annoying that atheists generally use a bearded Yahweh as their stalking horse. Conceptions of god can be much more subtle than the Yahweh stereotype. Of course, Christians, have to reconcile the whole good and evil thing with their conception of a loving God. Monotheists like Muslims don't seem to be hung up on the good and evil thing (but I'm willing to be corrected on this if I'm wrong), because for them God is Great (but not necessarily good). Judaism has flirted with the good and evil question. Maimonides asserted that evil is the absence of good — and I think Augustine stole that idea from him. The Kabbalists believed that Ein Sof is beyond good and evil. When it comes to humans, the Zohar says: "There is no sphere of the Other Side [evil] that entirely lacks some streak of light from the side of holiness."
But on further thought, why shouldn't people be concerned with the god question? First causes fascinate our narrative minds. It's hard to say we're here and just shrug our shoulders.
I think the pushback you receive could be a matter of miscommunication. You're engaging with the concept of God on such an abstract level that you're disbelieving every religion ever invented; for most atheists that'd count as atheism even if you allowed for the unfalsifiability of a god that was the same as there being no god. New Atheists are often formed by childhood experiences with the negative side of actual religions, which they and you both positively do not believe, but verbally emphasize in different ways.
Yes, exactly. Well, okay, maybe active cruelty is also assuming too much; evidence seems to point towards all suffering just being a result of naturally emerging systems. And frankly, humans aren't interesting enough to entertain even other humans for more than a couple decades.
It's only this particular kind of theism, one that fairly intellegent people somehow manage to rationalize themselves into. Look at most religions historically and you will find deities that are all kind of terrible, and not just by modern standards.
I think this over, and when I compare "the world is bad, and its Author doesn't care or toys with me if it notices me at all" sounds a lot more convenient if I want to do something self-serving than "the world has a lot of negatives, and its Author expects me to rise to every challenge and even have a good goddamn attitude about it even, especially, on days when I'd like to burn it all down".
So much this. The convenient belief is that we just spontaneously popped into existence and nothing really matters. We can eat and drink and fuck to our hearts content, be cruel to each other, etc, and in the end none of it matters. The vastly more inconvenient belief is that we were born into this world, in the sorry state that it’s in, with the expectation that we do everything we can, to the best of our ability, to make it better. And every day we fail to live up to that goal, some cosmic entity is watching down on us, seeing our every move and inner thought, and shaking its head in disappointment.
I think the idea of heaven is overblown, perhaps even pushed mostly by non-believers looking for a way of deriding religion without ever really making a good faith effort to understand it. It’s a worldview that sees religious leaders as little more than sleazy used car salesmen pushing some ultimate prize. Personally I don’t believe in Heaven as a place, or any kind of afterlife, but more as a metaphorical concept that describes [hypothetically speaking] how good it would feel to be on death’s door knowing you truly did your best each and every day if your life and you made a positive impact.
It’s only the most superficial child’s understanding, of Heaven as a literal paradise in the clouds, that could possibly view religion as convenient, or wishful thinking.
And almost all of those religions are dead. They had low memetic fitness compared to convenient self-delusion. None of these modern religions are even remotely interested in truth. They exist purely because they are alluring to human minds.
Does anyone here buy & sell individual stocks (or bonds, or crypto, or futures, or options, or commodities, or anything else?) I.e. does anyone here day trade, swing trade, or take longterm position trades? Anything other than just buying boring index funds and taking the market average. No judgement if you do, just totally curious- what motivates people to 'trade'? Are you profitable? More profitable than if you'd just held a boring index fund? Including taxes, which should take a significant chunk of any profits.
I spent a lot of time reading all the classic works on value investing, and I came to the conclusion that it's not worth the time investment for me to try to buy individual stocks and beat the market. But just interested in hearing peoples' experiences, good or bad
I used to, mostly because index funds didn't exist (or at least weren't readily available to the likes of me) when I started investing. Nowadays I have just a small amount still in individual shares, mostly massive losers that I don't have the heart to sell at a loss.
I think there's a certain amusement value in it. How good does it feel when you make a big bet and win? How bad does it feel when you make a big bet and lose? These values differ from person to person, some people tend to remember their gains more than their losses and they get positive satisfaction out of the whole process.
I don't think I have the time and emotional energy for it any more. I remember putting some money into a couple of really promising sounding biotechs which I thought were ready to explode, and then ardently following all the news about them for years. The hours I was spending on following these stocks waiting for the big news that would send them skyrocketing vastly outweighed their significance to my net worth.
These days I prefer to minimise my emotional surface area; I don't want my mood to be massively affected by some random piece of news.
About 85% of my portfolio is in individual stocks, the rest in stock funds. I own less than 1% in bonds, and have precisely zero in gold, silver, bitcoin/other coins, etc. Of the stocks I own, at least 90% pay dividends and have a strong history of increasing dividends over time. I am convinced that over the long run stocks will outperform every other asset class. I find that owning individual dividend-paying stocks lets me be extremely calm and rational during market downturns. The "value" of my stocks goes down during those times, but I don't care! I focus only on the annual income being generated, which is higher every month than it was the month before (due to companies raising dividends, plus me reinvesting dividends). So during downturns, I only see the potential to increase income at a faster rate, which makes me buy more. It's a win-win.
I've been doing this for almost 12 years now. My overall performance has been slightly below the S&P 500 ... but I do own a bunch of foreign stocks, and my performance has been better than most global funds. My return has also been *much* better than if I had gone with a typically recommended mix of 60% stock index funds / 40% bond index funds.
I don't day trade. I think for the long run. But I do believe that it's possible to see value and to profit from it, so I do make (mostly small) trades on a regular basis: I might sell $500 or $1000 of one stock to buy the same amount in a different stock, once every week or two. But most of my investing looks like this: "Hey, my stocks kicked out another $500 in dividends. Time to buy more stocks! What looks cheap today?"
Taxes have a low impact on overall returns, because most of my money is in non-taxable accounts. The fact that, at most brokerages, individual trades are now free is INSANELY GOOD for returns. 12 years ago I was paying $7.95 per trade ... that can add up, even if you trade as rarely as I do. My father used to pay $100 per trade, I think, back in the day. I don't think investment advice has fully updated on the new world in which individual trades are free. Or that the normal spread between bid & ask is very often $0.01 per share. Frictional costs are incredibly low.
I recommend checking out Chuck Carnevale's youtube channel if you're at all interested in DGI ("dividend growth investing"), or value investing in general.
But I wouldn't do any of it if I thought of it as a "time investment." I love the stock market! I love numbers, I love money, and I love trying to be smarter than the other guy. I love to think about the economy and the political world. By owning individual stocks, I can think seriously about what the future holds, and then bet actual money on my beliefs. Turns out I'm not as smart as I think I am! Which is good to know.
Trading individual stocks can be more tax efficient. If, for example, you need to sell some to get money for something, you can choose to sell a balance of losers and gainers that produces net zero capital gain. But if everything is in an ETF, that has one hopes gone up, you will be stuck with a capital gain when you sell some.
Yes, some, because it's fun. I followed wallstreetbets reddit thread and successfully timed the gamestop run up in 2020 and that was one of the most fun things I have ever done. Very thrilling. It's normally not like that though. Some of the appeal is its also an interesting eye into how the world works. It's also a bit like what people get out of bets and prediction markets, your making a prediction about the world and seeing in real time whether you were right. My other best trade was in the pandemic ExxonMobil was in the neighborhood of $30 a share. At the time I thought is the pandemic going to continue forever? I figured no and felt confident that oil is here to stay so bought a small piece. Now it's over $100 a share.
I think it's important to remember the trades that turned out poorly, as well as the awesome gains. Certainly not every trade you (or anyone else) does is a winner.
Still, the times when you make a great investment, whether by skill or by luck, gives a great high.
I trade stocks and options personally, with mixed, but on average good, results. The past six months have been staggering, with a rate of return over 60%, a good portion of which was NVidia stock. But before that, going back about two years I was down as low as 40% off my high. According to my portfolio performance tool, my rate of return is 13.13% over about nine years.
If you like doing this kind of thing and have the arrogance to believe you can beat the market (which I have, in mild degree), then it can be fun to do, and you can tailor your portfolio specific to your goals, such as selecting some stocks for dividends and others for income. If you don't, you can buy one or several funds to accomplish the same things, and let others worry about the specific details of your portfolio.
I have my share of triumphs, and at least my share of disappointments.
I've done medium-term trading of individual stocks a couple of times in the past with a smallish portion of what is otherwise an index-fund portfolio, but found that neither the results nor the entertainment value justified keeping the practice up. I have been holding a fair amount of Berkshire Hathaway for the past few years, but only because the thing I actually wanted-- an index fund that doesn't pay dividends-- doesn't seem to exist.
I should probably trade more often, but I don't, both because I'm lazy and I'm scared of getting it wrong, which would be embarrassing. The reason for trading is the same for doing any economic action, which is because you think you have an edge. Without it, there isn't any reason to start a business, ask someone out, participate in a sporting event, etc. That is, unless you enjoy it personally, which could cancel out the negative EV that comes from getting a bad result.
I've bought crypto at low points a couple times and held. The first time, it worked really well. It wasn't very much, but enough to allow me to deal with some major expenses without dipping into savings. The second time, I sold early and still made a little, but spent months wallowing in FOMO. I tried my hand at stocks and managed to wipe out a decent percent of my crypto gains. Ultimately, I decided that I'm not cut out for it. It's just too time consuming and stressful, and I really don't have any kind of advantage.
A long time ago, I used to do indvidual stocks. It was fun. Overall I did worse than the index, although some individual stocks did much better. If you look at the 'Who Predicted 2023' post, you'll see that the aggregate of all participants scored in the 95th percentile. Picking individual stocks in a liquid market is making the bet that you can do better than the aggregate (which is what an index tracks), and that is not easy.
I'm basically convinced of the efficient market hypothesis (for almost everyone) in any market with signficant liquidity.
I would say, it's fine to stockpick for fun, or if you have access to markets with big inefficiencies (i.e. poor liquidity), or if you really are confident you have some significant edge over the market (bigger than having read a bunch of classic works), otherwise, just be happy with your index.
Occasionally, I have an insight which can exploit the two ruling emotions of the financial markets: fear and greed. For example, most recently, the prior two days before NVidia announced earnings saw their stock take a dip. I thought this unreasonable, expecting an earnings surprise, actually, and triggered by a fear of earnings disappointment. So I bought an option that would expire THAT WEEK just before earnings were announced. And NVidia stock went up something like 12% the following day.
I was prepared to lose the entire investment (after all, it was a stock option), but it turns out I was right, and made a tidy profit. A small blip, for it is foolhardy to bet large portions of your portfolio on all-or-nothing positions, but satisfying in that my thought "outsmarted" Wall Street.
As a counter-example, before Costco was announcing earnings, I bet they would have an earnings surprise to the negative. This was based on my experiences in the stores, with rising prices (especially on furniture, providing hard-to-see value), changing merchandise locations, and other things. Not only did I lose all of the money on that option, Costco stock is up about 50% from when I made my bet.
Cases where I think I detect fear or greed for a particular issue are few and far between.
Part of the problem here is that making money isn't enough to prove you were right. Maybe your detection of greed and fear was a unique insight to you that you were rightly rewarded for, or maybe it was already priced in by other market participants and you got lucky for other reasons. For an outside observer, it's difficult to tell the difference (outside a long history of statstically unlikely successes), but which happened is quite important for guessing how likely your future insights are to make money.
That sounds like the philosophical problem of what is truth. "The man with 10 coins in his pocket will get the job."
"Statistically unlikely successes" is also subject to opinion. Riding gains and cutting losses is betting on statistically likely successes, but is also no guarantee even that you are reading the current pricing correctly.
The only real indicator is long-term profit, which is as objective as you can get.
This is a real problem in finance. You want to pay traders to take the risks they are paid to take. Not to get lucky. They are supposed to hedge everything except the specific risk they intend. So in the case above, a hedgefund trader wouldn't just buy Nvidia on account that earnings will be good, but short some other assets to be "luck neutral" of sorts.
Traders are paid for providing a marketplace, and to correctly estimate the current market price for securities. Then they can make money on the spread, which is their payment. Because I made a short-term profit on NVidia, someone else took a loss. The trader sold me an option that someone else may have provided, and so made profit on the transaction. If that was the case, someone else took the loss, and there was no need for the trader to hedge.
If the trader took the loss, then it was likely overcome by the large NVidia position the trader held. In that case, selling me the option was a hedge against the stock going lower.
Traders are playing a different game than I am, using precisely the same transactions.
Anyone know exactly what the point of Austin's SXSW is? They have setious ppl speaking but also Meghan Markle speaking, they once had Barack Obama speaking, and I think, music concerts. You could listen or read these speakers' ideas elsewhere like on YouTube. I'm curious why anyone pays $2k to attend. I tried to find ways to buy cheaper tickets but they were still very expensive.
I live in Austin, work in tech, and moved there for a SXSW-specific contract several years ago. SXSW started as a music festival when Austin was an important musical nexus, expanded into film, and then became a dog-who-caught-the-car when it expanded into “Interactive” (== general tech) in the early 2000s. Very quickly, the tech section of South-By eclipsed the other elements of the festival; there was a lot more money in play, and a lot more people could get their companies to pony up multiple thousand dollars for a trip.
I was there some of that time. It was exciting. It was the best general-purpose networking event I’ve ever been to. It was easy to meet famous people. It was easy to have *real conversations* with famous people. If you whispered that you were looking for work, it felt like the person in the next row back always had a business card for you. We’d gotten through the Dot Com bust just fine, Apple and Facebook hadn’t ruined our attention or our democracy yet, and lots of things felt possible.
Some of those things might still be true. And even if they aren’t, there’s still the hope that they might be again. If I was a deeply uncool company trying to A) appear cool or B) discover the next cool thing, (as my employer was when I moved to Austin in 2018), I still don’t have any better ideas for where to drop $2M than showing up at SXSW and trying to be part of the conversation.
TL;DR: In technology, SXSW *was* the best place for an industry-wide conversation about where things were and where they were going. Even after its recent shark jumping (Duchess Markle?), I don’t have any better ideas for where to hold that conversation.
I'd say that a capitalized The Conversation is about as specific as one ought to get; my belief is that SXSW was (is?) a vibes-based situation for big companies. I think the perception was that Important People were there to talk about The Future, and if you aspired to be seen as Important, it was worth a bunch of your marketing budget to show the flag there. My big multinational employer spent $1MM+ to rent an otherwise forgettable Mexican restaurant a block from the convention center for a week, and they were by no means the most noteworthy or profligate organization.
Why does Coach take out single page ads in the Times or the New Yorker all the time? Does anyone see those ads and run out and buy a $1200 purse that day? I doubt it. But Coach is pretty sure that spending like that is how they go on being perceived as an important cultural signifier. My take is that SXSW became (mostly accidentally) a place where "cultural signifier" status got bestowed, earned, or bought. In Vienna once, you had to be seen at the opera to be someone. In Silicon Valley, you had (have?) to be seen at SouthBy.
Formally she's Meghan, Duchess of Sussex (and in legal terms Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Sussex). As to why she's there, she and Harry are trying to monetise every chance they get (just like Fergie back in the day) so if the organisers are happy to pay for her, she'll be there talking about how tough her life is. Why the organisers want her is a different question.
As to SXSW, yeah I heard of it when it was the music festival. I had no idea it has turned into tech event.
I suspect if you were in Austin this week and put up a website called `metasouthby.com` that said it was hosting a party to talk about SouthBy's cultural in/significance, you could attract a lot of 29-year-old tech people and very attractive marketing professionals. Also, Facebook's lawyers would probably call you.
Just don't put the word "Longhorn" in the name. It doesn't matter if you're just say, repairing auto glass, or selling sno-cones. A burnt-orange gorilla will come down on you.
Hahaha! I think if you and a bunch of scrappy kids in a Mystery Van managed a to tie up Bevo someplace and you grabbed his face mask to pull it off, it might be Mickey Mouse and a pile of Disney lawyers underneath it.
Is Horizon Zero Dawn perfectly suited to being transformed into a Game of Thrones video game? Just change the story line and convert all the machines into fantasy animals, and all the technology-based weapons into magic-based weapons.
Aloy is the most obnoxious post-millienial teenage girl I've seen in a game, and the world bends over backward to affirm her terrible, terrible personality. I don't see anything you could do to turn her into a Game of Thrones character.
Game of Thrones is not about fighting fantasy animals with magic weapons. Most of the combat is human vs. human, and the magic weapons aren't hugely superior to ordinary ones.
Game of Thrones has magic, but it doesn’t have a “scientific” RPG-style magic system where you level up your fireball or whatever.
GOT magic is more understated and mythic. Also in GOT, magic is more of a force of nature that cannot be fully controlled by humans.
HZD very much does have a scientific magic system where you progressively gain powerful new abilities. You also have to grind for items. I don’t think you could make HZD into GOT without completely changing the story.
I don't think I understand this question. To me it approximately reads like "Is Horizon Zero Dawn perfectly suited to being transformed into a Game of Thrones video game? Just change everything about it except the stat and crafting system." I assume I'm missing a train of thought here that's obvious to you, but it's not actually obvious to me. Which things do you think it would have in common with a GoT video game?
I'm a bit confused as to what would be left after you take out the story and the machines and the post apocalyptic setting. Beyond that I thought it was a pretty generic open world game.
Yes, which is why the term should probably be retired. Being a multi-millionaire these days doesn't make you particularly rich, and for middle-class people it's mostly just a matter of how much of your mortgage you've paid off.
Some people expect *multi* to be an integer >2; others expect it to be an integer >1. E.g. I'd expect a *multipolar world order* not to be a bipolar world order. But since no one says *bimillionaire* or *duomillionaire*, I guess I'd be more inclined to accept the >1 interpretation.
Very good points. If a news report claims "multiple sources confirmed this," but then it turns out only two people were those sources, it seems deceptive in spirit. Likewise, if you describe an entirely blue and red painting as "multicolored," it also seems deceptive.
Of course, as you point out, "multi-" and "bi-" aren't used consistently. For example, "biracial" and "multiracial" mean the same thing.
I think the safest answer to my own question is that "multimillionaire" starts at $3 million.
If you have them in relatively liquid assets (not real-estate in which you reside, retirement accounts or a private business' fair valuation), I'd say yes.
For those interested in ADHD meds: I just learned of the existence of one called Guanfacine that's in a whole different drug class from the others, which all seem to be uppers. In fact sleepiness is the first side effect listed. I very quickly skimmed the research on its effectiveness, and my impression was that it was slightly less effective than adderall and the other familiar ones, but not much less. Seems likely to me that it's less abusable. Unlike the ADHD drugs in the uppers class it does not raise blood pressure -- in fact it lowers it some -- so it's a safer option for people with ADHD & high blood pressure. Has anyone here had any experience with it? What did you think of it?
I was on guanfacine for a few months after my diagnosis. I don't think it had any effect on anything at all, no help with my ADHD, no side effects of any kind, except for some mild tachycardia at 5mg.
I take guanfacine. I was on Adderal for a while, but my blood pressure was going up. So the docs switched me to bupropion, which did not work great. So now I'm on Dexedrine and guanfacine, the guanfacine is there to lower my blood pressure while also adding some ADHD mojo. I haven't really noticed it helping. I just think of it as a blood pressure med.
What I've been told (epistemic status: rando on reddit) is that guanfacine is particularly good for managing hyperactive symptoms of ADHD and less effective at treating other focus issues, executive dysfunction, etc.
Anecdata: I don't have an ADHD diagnosis, but I was on Guanfacine briefly for Tourettes. The side effects made me much more distractible, so much so that I started doing things like standing in the middle of crosswalks because I had an interesting thought and forgot to keep walking. I still prefer it to its cousin drug Clonidine - that one made me sleep about 12-16 hours per day. (These days I just take very small doses of benzos for my tics.)
That's interesting. The one thing that actually got rid of my ADHD symptoms was suffering from extreme depression (to the point where I couldn't eat anything). Turns out your mind can't wander if it doesn't have the energy to do so. I also notice that my symptoms were less severe back when I was taking gabapentin. I assume any other sedative would have a similar effect.
...Of course, there's no point in alleviating ADHD symptoms if it ends up making you too tired to do anything. No wonder why people stick to stimulants.
It's not a sedative, but like many medications, fatigue and sleepiness are possible side effects. It simulates norepinephrine release within the central nervous system by agonizing the alpha-2 adrenergic receptor. This has widespread effects that might look contradictory if you're dichotomizing drugs as "uppers like stimmies" or "downers like benzos," including lowering heart rate and blood pressure via what I'm going to call brainstem shenanigans because this confuses me. But it's thought to work for ADHD by mimicking norepinephrine in the prefrontal cortex, and increased norepinephrine in the ol' prefrontal is one of the mechanisms of action of central stimulants, and the main one for Strattera. If you made a version of guanfacine (or clonidine) that was somehow (??) even more selective for prefrontal activity, you'd presumably have a non- or less-sedating version of the drug with the same ADHD efficacy. Note too that not everyone experiences sedation--some find the altering/wakefulness promoting effects dominate. It happens to be a good choice for people with comorbid anxiety, because it's also a decent anxiolytic, whereas stimulants tend to exacerbate that issue. As a non-addictive alternative with good efficacy and for some, a much better side effect profile, I think it's pretty darn underused.
Well I just looked through the Wikipedia article. If its effects are independent of sedation, that does seem very promising. I'm actually already taking clonidine, but I'm considering replacing it with guanfacine now, since it seems to be slightly better at the things I need it to do.
I Asked My Doctor About Intuniv awhile back. Can't imagine how or why you'd abuse it, it's just rebranded Tenex. It does work, but differently--if you've used stimulants and you're trying to map the effects onto your expectations you'll come up shorter than if you start clean, I'd bet.
Guanfacine has been an on-label ADHD treatment in the US for the better part of fifteen years, and presumably was off-label for some time before. Bluntly, the reason why you don't hear much about it is because people prefer to take stimulants. (It's probably better if you want to prescribe ADHD drugs to children to not prescribe anything with heavy psychological effects, but adults who seek ADHD treatment aren't looking for guanfacine.)
Oh, I didn't know that. I'll go back and correct my post. I'm a psychologist & have lots seen lots of people who take one of the various ADHD meds, and they all took the familiar upper type stuff. Just now had somebody put on guanfacine for the first time ever -- had never even heard of it. What do patients think of it? I don't have ADHD, but when I'm, for instance, sleep deprived my executive function definitely declines. Can't get much done, don't stick with plans, slide into time-wasting activities and can't stop. The idea of taking a med with a side effect of drowsiness when in that state is awful! But maybe it's a whole different experience if you're taking it for real ADHD.
Here’s a story about one of the ways GPT4 is dumb: I had asked google what household agents work to clean stained linoleum, and got hundreds of hits, most of which were exact duplicates of each other. The concoctions suggested were water + vinegar, water plus vinegar plus dish detergent, and water plus vinegar plus baking soda. The 3rd formula, though less popular than the first 2, showed up many many times. It’s obviously nonsense: The vinegar and baking soda will react to produce water, co2 & sodium acetate.
So I wanted to see how well ole Chat understood the Internet info about this topic. Asked it for household agents that might remove stains from linoleum. It said vinegar plus water plus dish soap, which I think was the most popular of the multiply-duplicated answers my google search turned up. So then I asked it whether including some baking soda would be a good idea, and it said “Adding baking soda to your cleaning mixture can enhance its effectiveness, especially for tackling tough stains and odors on linoleum floors. Baking soda is a mild abrasive, which makes it good for removing stuck-on messes without damaging the floor, and it's also a natural deodorizer.”
Yeech! Seems to me Chat’s process is essentially giving the answer that appears most frequently on the increasingly enshittified Internet, and not taking into account 3 things it surely knows: (1) There’s an online industry of copying advice and reposting it in a very slightly different format interlaced with ads. (In fact I asked Chat in a different conversation about the duplicates, and it was aware of the phenomenon and explained reasonably well why it exists.). (2) There are a lot of situations where how frequently a view is endorsed is not a measure of how likely it is to be true, and this is one of them. (3) Mixing vinegar and baking soda causes a chemical reaction in which each decomposes and in the process loses whatever stain-removing properties it had. (And Chat knows they react, too — even mentioned it in its advice: “Prepare the Solution: In a bucket, mix the hot water, white vinegar, and if using, a few drops of liquid dish soap. Gradually add the baking soda. Expect a mild reaction as the baking soda reacts with the vinegar, but this will subside quickly.”)
So it can’t put together different things it knows that would allow it to judge the online advice, just goes with the most popular. Makes me think about a post on here a few months ago in a discussion of whether some well known middle-aged white man, forget his name, was an appropriate appointee for some post — I believe the post was for the advisory board of an AI company. So the post somebody put up was Chat’s response to the question “Is Mr. M. A. Whiteman a good choice for this role?” And Chat gave a list of the guy's supposed good and bad qualities, as represented in the media, but came down more on the side of nay because more sources said Whiteman seemed to be impulsive. Chat’s summary seems to me just the linoleum stain recipe in another domain. It seems to be widely used for this purpose, and I think relying on it that way is going to make us all dumb way faster than embryo curation for Best of Breed can make us smarter.
And one more piece of snark: Chat said that adding baking soda to your cleaning solution can “enhance its effectiveness.” Nope. Even if it worked it would not enhance the effectiveness, it would increase it.
From *Catch 22*: “He was a spry, suave and very precise general who knew the circumference of the equator and always wrote "enhanced" when he meant "increased. He was a prick.” Chat’s a prick too.
Water + vinegar + baking soda isn't obvious nonsense, but you'd need to apply it in two parts. I've no idea whether it would work, but it probably depends on what you're cleaning off. If it's oil based, apply the baking soda first and then clean with water+vinegar. (Still, it seems dubious, but not obviously wrong.)
Yes, it's not nonsense if you use them separately -- the baking soda is at least abrasive, don't know whether it has any other useful properties. But when I asked Chat about adding baking soda it said to dump it in with the vinegar and water: "Gradually add the baking soda. Expect a mild reaction as the baking soda reacts with the vinegar, but this will subside quickly." The mild reaction is vinegar and baking soda neutralizing each other.
The “mild reaction” is often what you’re after though. It produces collapsing bubbles, which, in turn, generate tiny cumulative jets. These baby jets pierce, break up, lift off, and otherwise wreck havoc on contaminants. The same physics are at work in aggressive ultrasonic cleaners.
I don’t see how that can be true. First of all the reaction is over very fast. By the time the person carries the bucket from the counter where they mixed the cleaning solution to the place where they’re
going to start cleaning the reaction is done, nd most of the bubbles have risen to the surface and popped. And even if the solution was somehow continuously generating bubbles, the force of the popping bubbles would be nothing compared to the force of my rubbing the surface vigorously with a course cloth or a stiff brush.
Oh, I see, it really does want you to premix it... never mind. This is really dumb. You have to put the baking soda on the surface first, then add vinegar.
The bubble action is invaluable for areas that have nooks and crannies (and those could be small, e.g., scratches) where bristles can't reach. And of course for things like drain pipes. That's my go-to for minor clogs.
I could see how the bubbles might help in tiny nooks and crannies. But wouldn't soda water be better? With that stuff the bubbles continue for quite a while.
AI-generated SEO abusing schlock is probably part of the reason so many websites recommend a baking soda and vinegar solution in the first place. (Provided you're working with a smallish surface area and you, you know, don't combine them before application, baking soda and vinegar will clean a lot of things.) I like to imagine the people who used to make these obtuse errors by hand have taken their spoils and retired to a nice content farm upstate now that their jobs are fully automated.
I follow Peter Zeihan, who does geopolitical/economic prediction. I don't entirely trust him. Is he telling people what they want to hear? Still, he's interesting, and it's reasonable that demographics are pretty intractable. I haven't heard him say anything about the interactions between nations as population sizes change-- for example, big decline in China, much smaller decline in India, and what happens?-- I'm sure about China and fairly sure about India.
While we're on the subject, is it true that the really high end chips are only made in Taiwan?
Some of his predictions are 50 years out, and I'm willing to bet that Something Weird Will Happen Which Will Make Things Different.
I would count cheap gene sequencing and cheap computers as Big Weird Things. Recent plague and increase of war aren't as weird, but they did make a difference.
So here are some possible prediction-upsetting developments. Modest increase of longevity, enough to enable most people to be healthy until they're 90. Modest increase of intelligence-- say 20 IQ points for average people. Some element that was previously no big deal becomes crucial. A plague that's as infectious as measles. A new extremely popular religion.
I discussed this with Michael Vassar, who thinks Zeihan is a hack, largely because of Zeihan's predictions of China collapsing. There's an ecology of China collapse predictors, but this might be wishful thinking. I've noticed that people keep predicting China's collapse, but it somehow fails to happen.
_China: The Bubble that Never Bursts_-- I haven't read the book, but the title says a lot.
Societies do occasionally collapse, but maybe it's not that easy to predict, and meanwhile, there are a lot of people scrambling to hold things together.
Discussions of difficulties with prediction seem to largely be about cognitive errors, but possibly there should be more about fear and desire making it hard to predict accurately.
>Some element that was previously no big deal becomes crucial.
Yup, been through that several times now! U, Li, Nd and other rare earths... :-)
- AGI has been well talked-through here, of course.
- Maybe Drexler/Merkle nanotech, if it ever gets funded...
- Unexpected progress on Sodium-Sulfur cells, sufficient to make the storage problem for solar and/or wind basically go away
- Enough progress on robotics that unmanned asteroid mining makes economic sense
- successful cyberattack on electric grids or other critical infrastructure, maybe by a nation, maybe by a terrorist group severely damages a major nation
- nation state uses nukes
- terrorist group steals a nuke or several and uses them
- sitting head of government of a major nation assassinated
- geoengineering to combat global warming tried, works, many arguments over setting the thermostat
- major mineral discovery in an unexpected place
- floating photovoltaics at sea soften the land use conflicts of renewables
- very efficient synthesis and fuel cell use of ammonia or hydrazine displaces liquid fuels
- large scale use of wind power turns out to have unexpected effects on air flows and climate
Your list isn't especially weird, but I agree they're all plausible.
I wrote about an element becoming important, but the example I had in mind was actually oil. It went from stinky stuff which was no big deal to something that's bending the world.
edit: One other thought, perhaps in a weirder direction than most: While AI gets thoroughly discussed, animal/AI hybrids don't get discussed too often. What if someone has the bright idea of hooking up a nearly-FOOM-capable GPT6 to a kitten, and it turns out that the kitten _really_ enjoys hunting?
"Really high end" chips are made only in Taiwan, South Korea, and the USA. It's hard to get production numbers for high-end chips specifically, but I think that generally for TSMC/Taiwan it's "lots", Samsung/Korea it's "some", and Intel/US it's "were trying real hard, in five years it will be lots".
Weird drugs that change us in ways never possible before. One becomes more popular and widely used than alcohol.
The group now in their teens grows into adults with 3x as much mental illness, esp. depression, substance abuse and severe anxiety disorders, as people who are currently in midlife.
Tech makes possible some ways of tapping into others' experience, including the experience of animals, and those who use it lose the ability to see themselves & their group as cars & others as just traffic.
A weird drug seems likely. I've wondered about possibilities for a new drug that's pleasant and not addictive or not very addictive.
Increased mental health problems seems like an easy predictive rather than a weird one. Younger people have grown up in an environment where scaring people is highly incentivized.
I think tech that gives access to other's experiences is really hard, but there might be something with the name that's very watered down, just as artificial intelligence isn't intelligence, and virtual reality is very narrow bandwidth compared to reality.
I'd merely speculated about some people's experience of art as being interesting enough to be worth sharing.
But seriously, I much agree with your ideas on longevity and IQ. Longevity is a lower hanging fruit, I think. It feels as if we already have most of the pieces and just need to put them together in a cost-effective and evidence based way. Bryan Johnson is doing Gods work here, weird as he is.
As for IQ... I don't think actually raising IQ will be easy, but even a relatively small breakthrough in dementia treatments will be a HUGE boost in average IQ and, coupled with longevity, allow for another decade of productive work. Which will be added to the part of the life where people have most experience, so much more bang for the buck than, for example, having a larger population.
I also think there is a very low hanging fruit in IQ-adjacent medication. TBH, we're all probably using a lot less modafinil and adderall than we should, or could safely use.
Philip Tetlock's work should make you wary of any prediction - especially (Geo-) political predictions - unless the predictor is going out of their way to quantify both the prediction and exactly how much they believe this prediction and what would make them admit that they got it wrong. The vast majority of Political or International Relations "analysis" is see doesn't meet this bar, it's sports commentary. "Ohhh and Putin is going to do this and that, but Biden is very careful not to flobrecate and frobnicate because reasons", this is how I hear and read 95% of political predictions.
> is it true that the really high-end chips are only made in Taiwan?
Hmm, maybe? Intel has their own chip manufacturing still, and some giants like Nvidia very possibly have the liquidity to build new fabs if pressured.
What you should be more worried about is the supply of Extreme Ultraviolet machines that makes those fabs work, a single company provides those machines for the entire world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASML_Holding. Without those machines you can still make chips, just worse and bigger than they could be.
The really high end chips are *mostly* made in Taiwan. There are only 3 companies in the world able to do them: Samsung, Intel, and TSMC. And TSMC dominates the market.
I've been following him for a few years and think he's correct on some issues and incorrect on others. He also wrongly predicted that Trump would win reelection and that there would be mass famine in poor countries a year ago due to reduced Ukrainian grain exports. The more he runs his mouth (and he's doing that way to much these days), the faster his track record of mistakes will grow.
Before dinging him on the Trump prediction I'd want to know when it was made. In July 2020, yeah, no, but in January 2020 Trump was very obviously sailing to re-election. Covid lockdown policies and the Black Lives Matter rioting, and Trump's incoherent and weirdly passive reaction to those things, put an end to that in a way no one could have predicted.
BLM actually *helped* Trump thanks to the backlash over the riots. In fact, this isn't even something you have to speculate about - someone did an analysis and found that areas of Wisconsin overperformed for Trump more the closer they were to the locations of major riots.
I wonder whether he's where I got the idea that Ukraine was doing 30% of the world's wheat production when it turned out to be 30% of the world's wheat exports. Most of the wheat is grown in the country where it's eaten.
I analyze the latest PISA results to figure out why Germany's performance has declined so much in recent years. My focus is on figuring out the extend to which changes in migration patterns can explain the decline. Remember to subscribe!
Introduction
In 2010, the book "Deutschland schafft sich ab" (Germany Abolishes Itself) was created by Thilo Sarrazin. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move. Sarrazin's core thesis on the topic of education can be roughly summarized as follows:
The German birth rate is low, with less than 1.4 children per woman. This is contrasted by a large number of migrants, especially from Muslim countries, who have higher birth rates.
Many migrants have educational deficits compared to the German population.
Even after several generations, these migrants do not catch up with German society. This is due to genetic and cultural inheritance as well as little pressure to integrate.
In the long run, Germany’s educational achievements will deteriorate due to this demographic change.
Sarrazin's critics argued that he was right about some things, but that he painted too bleak a picture and mixed truths with falsehoods. They pointed out, for example, that there had been progress in the area of education among Turks, a large Muslim immigrant group. Against the background of the recently published PISA study, in which Germany performed miserably, it seems appropriate to re-examine Sarrazin's thesis. In particular, I will use the latest PISA study to answer the question of whether, and to what extent, migration aspects play a role in the continuous decline of German education...
The percentage of students who reach the highest competency level in math dropped from 5.74% (2009) to 3.5% (2018) to 2.24% (2022). I estimate a migration effect of 16.2% (2009-2018) and 21.3% (2009-2018) under the assumption of relative parity for the performance. Overall, even though there is still a migration effect, the elite students seem to vanish for other reasons as well. My guess would be general dysgenics, brain drain, or an erosion of elite support. Also, interestingly, the pandemic didn't impact the size of the migration effect much in contrast to the case using the average performance.
Some of you who are spaced-repetition nuts might remember a blog post series I wrote called Why Anki Works (https://nephewjonathan.substack.com/p/why-anki-works-part-1), which was the product of a year and a half of teaching Latin, trying to get the kids to use Anki, and failing--but learning a LOT about how and why spaced repetition works in the first place.
I'm now starting a startup--it doesn't have a name yet--for next-generation spaced repetition software, after spending a couple months getting my webdev skills up to speed on a personal project. There's a whitepaper here (https://eliotweb.net/srswhitepaper.pdf) describing what I'm building and why (some of the screenshots are out of date; section VI is also a bit more puffed-up than I'd like, since I was hoping to catch attention from some VCs, but I certainly don't disbelieve any of it). I'm currently working on the card designer/template maker (screenshot at https://eliotweb.net/templatemaker31124.png) and should have it more-or-less ready for the prototype by the end of this work week. Then it's on to card creation and reviews.
Big differences from Anki that have been implemented so far, most of which is visible in the screenshot, include a what-you-see-is-what-you-get card editor that uses markdown instead of HTML, fields that aren't just text/images (like checkboxes, buttons and dropdowns), the ability to make cards *contingent* on field values (so that you can have a template for German vocab create a card to test noun gender that's only created if the word is a noun), character replacement (so that you can type <scho"n>, <sophi'a>, <k'Atab>, or <gorod> and have it convert automatically to <schön>, <σοφία>, <כָּתַב>, or <город>), and the ability to set cards as prerequisites to each other, creating more advanced card relationships than Anki's sibling-burial. A schema for what this looks like can be found at https://eliotweb.net/reviewfrontier.png. Facts live in a network with each other, and a next-generation SRS platform should be able to mimic this. You *can* memorize the structure of an amino acid as a jumble of letters and lines, but it's parrot-knowledge if you don't know the functional groups.
Beyond that: the initial catalyst for working on this, as I said, was frustration with trying to get the kids to use it, so the long-term goal is to make it work for classrooms. That means it needs to live in the browser, rather than being installed locally, and although it should work well for autodidacts (who are likely to be the very first customers and have provided the initial spurt of funding), it should also have classroom abilities like Quizlet where teachers can make cards for students and see how they're doing (more details in the whitepaper). The knobs and dials mentioned in the last paragraph and seen on the screenshot are also motivated in large part by the realities of classroom usage. If you want to make custom card types in Anki, you'll need to know HTML (even for something as simple as a line break), and any halfway advanced auto-formatting requires Javascript--something most teachers don't want to waste time with, let alone their students. My own vocab cards have a massive Javascript block that color-codes the foreign-language field on the back side of cards based on their gender (so I can type <m> in the field and get blue coloring, or <f> and get red), but this is kludgy and non-obvious. So the general guideline here is that a 45-year-old Spanish or bio teacher, or ninth-grader, should be able to do pretty much anything an Anki power user can do without having to write any code. (And other things as well: it would be really nice to be able to create diagrams in-hourse, make clozes for those diagrams, and color-code MathJax formulas).
<Scott, feel free to remove this section if it shouldn't be included outside of a classified thread>
I talked to a couple of VCs, and there was some interest, but also a consensus that bootstrapping to a prototype via crowdfunding might work better early on. There's a GoFundMe for this purpose (https://www.gofundme.com/f/nextgeneration-spaced-repetition-software) --GoFundMe made me add a disclaimer to the bottom of the story saying I wouldn't be handing out any freebies, but I can say with a nod and a wink that backers will get very heavy discounts on subscriptions at launch (right now we're looking at a regular monthly individual subscription being $5, a yearly subscription $50, and a lifetime subscription $150, with backers' donations counting towards accounts at a third of the price--so if you donated $100 you'd get a lifetime subscription for yourself and a spare for a friend). Teacher accounts with group-management abilities will be a little bit pricier but come with a few free student accounts.
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I've got a semi-cofounder--friend of a friend who just got laid off from his SWE job and is helping to work on this for a month or two to buffer his portfolio and get a small equity cut--but if you're an SRS nut who's got good webdev, backend or cybersecurity skills (especially the latter) and are interested in cofounding for the long haul, please drop me a line (either campbell · nilsen at gmail · com, or nephew_jonathan on Twitter--DMs are open). I don't have real funding yet (the GoFundMe is putting enough food on the table to not need to work full-time for a couple months while coding this), so until that happens, all I have to offer is equity. (Or, if you're just an SRS nut who's got an idea for something you think we should include--please, please drop me a line. Quite a few features have made their desirability known in the course of coding the prototype, and I'm sure there are others that escape me.)
I like this, especially the networked factoids and the concept of the knowledge frontier.
I have no teaching background but am very interested in learning and how to optimise the process. So the mental models used by experienced professionals are of great interest to me.
Can I ask some very dumb questions about how this works in practise?
Do you teach the whole subject (ie the entire knowledge graph) in the classroom, then release the card-stack for the students to use as a revision tool?
Or do you hand out the software right at the beginning and expect students to follow along at home as lesson by lesson you cover more of the content?
Just in general, how does normal teaching interact with this SRS card system?
I ask because my first thought was you could pull in extra money and get free content, by allowing teachers to curate and sell their own knowledge graphs/card stacks/whatever you call them; the card stacks would need to be reviewed and rated, and you would provide online management/authoring tools as part of the site. In return your company would take a cut of every sale.
But it's a pretty vacuous suggestion when I don't truly understand how the system would be used in real life.
In general, SRS is for reviewing what you've learned more than learning it. But in my experience, the real villain is forgetting--you can teach anybody a new vocab word and have them remember it ten seconds later; the question is whether or not they'll remember it in a week. So the hard part is not *learning* in and of itself but *fighting forgetting*--and because knowledge builds on itself, you need to make sure you remember the prereqs when time comes to learn something new. It's easy to learn new stuff if you remember the prereqs, a miserable hassle if you don't.
> I ask because my first thought was you could pull in extra money and get free content, by allowing teachers to curate and sell their own knowledge graphs/card stacks/whatever you call them; the card stacks would need to be reviewed and rated, and you would provide online management/authoring tools as part of the site. In return your company would take a cut of every sale.
Anki lets you upload shared decks for free. But they're open-source, and the intention here is a for-profit company. I don't know, for example, what the legalities are of hosting a deck based on the vocab lists in a copyrighted textbook.
Wow! This sounds super exciting. I couldn’t stand how bad Anki’s UI looked so I switched to an app called Mochi. It seems relatively unknown even among SRS geeks so I’d recommend giving it a look to see if you can draw any inspiration from it. Mochi doesn’t have most of the features you’re describing, but it does nail the UX and have some other neat features you didn’t mention
I tried Mochi! I actually quite like the *look* of Anki's UI, but my students didn't. I'm guessing that's an age-cohort thing--I was born in '95 and don't find mid-2000s web design all that off-putting. I'm trying to shoot for Art Deco/Streamline Moderne for the UI of this thing.
I'm starting a new thing called Mindful Media Club. The aim is to trade tips on better personal use of social media - things like settings, browser plugins, social practices, to make it work for you and what you need and your mental health.
If you're in London, first meeting is on Wednesday March 20th at Newspeak House: https://lu.ma/7vouuhon
I was wondering if eg a Discourse forum would be better - for search accessibility particularly. Is that the kind of thing you were thinking?
In general though we're not going to dismiss/shame specific platforms, or try to tell people not to use them. Not because it is wrong to try to do so, just not the goal of Mindful Media Club!
You've got me curious if there any useful Discord related browser plugins...
What's the relationship between the proofs for the existence of God and the evidence of God? Most Christians of my acquaintance say they believe because they have personal experience of God. That's excellent. I am happy for them. But then, who/what are the proofs for? If you already believe in God, why do you need proof?
And what does it mean to doubt the existence of God when you have evidence? Are there other domains where you have evidence of something but you doubt it anyway? Even St. Thomas required evidence before he believed in the risen Christ and I’m willing to bet that Thomas did not doubt again after poking the risen Christ’s wounds.
When I was at school, there was a book in the library explicating Aquinas' five proofs of the existence of God. Being curious I took it out. And immediately my classmates assumed me to be an atheist!
I'm not sure if this is a philosophical question (about what makes logical sense) or a personal question (about how people think in practice). If the former, I think the main issue here (which I also think is a crippling flaw of Rationalism (TM) as a whole) is treating "evidence" as somehow a separate kind of thing to philosophical argument. What??? Thinking in terms of your own perceptions and experience is still thinking, just like thinking in terms of concepts and logical coherence. The scientific method was created by philosophers, and for a century science was called "natural philosophy", and is only now categorised differently for practical reasons (like how Western is a treated as a different genre to Historical Fiction, even though it's really just a specific form of it). Forgetting this leads you into numerous fallacies, and/or lets you smuggle in assumptions of enormous philosophical significance (e.g. emprical knowledge is the only form of knowledge), without having to actually *argue* for them.
With that in mind, I don't really understand the premise of your question. More specifically, Experiential Arguments are usually treated as just one category of claimed arguments for the existence of God, along with:
Cosmological Arguments (from first cause or fundamental explanation)
Ontological Arguments (from definition or essential nature)
Transcendental Arguments (from foundational justifications for all knowledge)
Teleological Arguments (from apparent fine-tuning of life or of the universe for life)
Moral arguments (from the basis for morality).
On a general level, one can accept and reject any combination of those arguments. Personally, I think the last two are terrible arguments which rely on ignorance of science and probability, and of three centures of moral philosophy. While the other four are much harder to refute, and depend a lot on your existing metaphysical and meta-philosophical assumptions.
So if you think you have personal experiences of God, or if you think other peoples' claimed experiences provide objective evidence for everyone (through the Transmission View of knowledge through testimony), then that's one argument. If you don't accept the validity of any of the other above arguments, then your belief in God will hinge on that experience (at least insofar as that belief is strictly rational). If you also accept a form of the cosmological argument as a proof of God, then in theory either of your proofs are individually redundant, and you'd need to have both convincingly refuted in order to stop believing in God. In practice, people don't think very rationally often, but that's a psychological issue and one that also probably has enormous individual variation.
On the other hand, there's a whole (albeit minority, I think) Protestant tradition of rejecting reason entirely ("that harlot Reason" is attributed to Luther). This Fideist View has some overlap with existentialism, especially through Kierkegaard. And also connects with postmodernism and poststructuralism perhaps. But that's probably not something worth pursuing around here.
> With that in mind, I don't really understand the premise of your question.
I don't find any of the proofs of God convincing. The fine-tuning argument and modern versions of the argument from design make me scratch my head and wonder but they don’t amount to a proof. The ontological and cosmological arguments don't seem to prove very much at all.
However, when someone tells me that they have personal experience of God, I have to assume they are telling the truth. I have never had such an experience but I have no reason to doubt theirs.
My question concerns the people who have had such an experience but still rely on philosophical arguments to make their case for God. I am curious why one still needs logical proof for something they have physically experienced.
I made analogies below with 1) dark matter and 2) pandas. As far as I know, no one has experience of dark matter (there is no evidence of dark matter) but the rational explanations are convincing. Conversely, all our knowledge of pandas comes from evidence and someone who has experienced a panda would have no need of rational proof to confirm their belief.
Why would someone who has personal experience of God also require a proof?
What I'm saying is that "personal experience" is one kind of (claimed) proof. I don't see it as a different kind of thing to a proof, I see it as one of several forms of proof.
Some theists will believe based on an experience (i.e. accepting the Experiential Argument) while not relying on any other arguments. Some will accept the Cosmological Argument, but not the Experiential (either because they have no such experience, or because they don't think their experience proves much on its own). Still others will believe based on both experience and first cause (accepting both aforementioned arguments), but reject the Moral Argument. They would be saying, in effect "my experience proves God's existence, and even if that experience were shown to be false I would still think the requirement of a first cause proves God's existence; but I don't think morality requires or proves God, atheism does not imply nihilism etc". Those are all perfectly coherent stances to hold. In practice, of course, those who accept one of the arguments are highly likely to endorse all of them, because that's how humans behave. But that wouldn't necessarily be rational, and those other arguments would not neccessarily be their *real* reasons for believing.
As for why you would want additional proofs if you already think you have one: first, because it makes your position stronger, so that even if one of your proofs is refuted you would still have grounds for belief; and second because it makes your belief easier to promote to others who don't themselves accept your first proof but may be open to accepting others.
I don't really see any contradiction here.
(Incidentally, "someone who has experienced a panda would have no need of rational proof to confirm their belief" is not true, at least for philosophers. Your experience might have been an illusion, it might be a false memory, it might have been a tiger disguised as a panda, etc etc. There's a whole ongoing branch of epistemology revolving around captial s Scepticism. I'm not sure whether this is relevant to your point though.)
If philosophers don't accept physical evidence of an event, so much the worse for philosophy.
I can't think of another area of everyday life where rational proofs are given more weight than personal experience. Yes, people are sometimes mistaken about an experience but, even then, it would be rare to give priority to a rational argument over physical evidence. Even among philosophers.
I have zero expertise in this area, so please take my comments with a grain of salt.
In my experience, serious Christians in serious Christian spaces so rarely talk about proof of God's existence. After you accept the existence of God as an axiom, the field of theology really opens up, and you get to discuss the things that religion nerds (clergypeople) are actually interested in.
Outside of Christian spaces, proof of God is all anyone talks about. So I would guess it comes up a lot at the interface of religious and non-religious communities, which is also the only place a non-religious person would come across religion (by definition).
In summary: People that already believe in God don't need proof, but it comes up disproportionately when people who believe and people who don't believe are interacting.
Proofs help with "do I believe this because I believe this, or just because I've been raised to believe it?", also in arguments with non-believers over "is it reasonable to believe/faith is just taking on blind credulity with no evidence". You are supposed to be able to defend why you believe, and simple "I believe because I believe" is not good enough.
I agree that "I believe it because I believe it" and "I believe it because my mum believed it" don't count for much. I'd still want proof or evidence. If I had evidence though, I would certainly believe; no proof necessary.
Regarding your first question about the proofs for God vs. evidence of God, you seem to be making 2 assumptions:
1- Someone who believes X due to evidence for X must not need to make arguments/proofs for X
2- Someone who argues that we should believe X for ${REASON} must also believe X for the exact same ${REASON}
Those 2 assumptions strike me as false.
Beginning with number 1, the job of the proof is not to *replace* evidence, it's to *summarize* and *expose* them to a wider (and unconvinced) audience. Look at the archetypical example of proofs: Mathematics. In Mathematics and Logic, proofs are formally nothing more and nothing less than a sequence of mechanical transformations applied to the agreed-upon axioms. Every single theorem or fact in Mathematics is entirely contained and implied by the axioms of the field the theorem or the fact belongs to, the proof simply shows **how** the axioms imply the result in question, by showing - step by step - that repeatedly applying "uncontroversial" rules to the uncontroversial axioms ultimately yields the result. In addition to this formal conception of proofs, real proofs in actual mathematics are a social protocol. Proofs require good technical writing, good "bird's eye view" outline of what the prover is going to do on a high level, good justification for every creative step ("Ok so now we're going to multiply this limit by blah(x)/blah(x), this is just 1 so it doesn't change anything", why did the prover choose "blah(x)" in particular? They could have chosen anything, and the fraction would still be 1), and so on. Good mathematical proofs are very rhetoric-ish, they are not exactly a sequence of brute logical assertions that pass entirely on merit, they are rather a social exercise that aims to convince other mathematicians that the submitted proof is a good approximation of a formal sequence of assertions. (Of course, since mathematicians are generally good at logic, and since they have a really strong incentive to falsify a published proof - especially of a major result - it's fortunately difficult to convince them of false things).
Regarding 2, I don't think it should be the case. Sometimes you believe things for reasons that aren't important to other people, let's say I don't want to eat animals because I think animals should have the same rights human have because they feel the same pain and joy, I think this is a morally trivial assertion and I can't justify it out of more primitive assertions. Lots of people find it preposterous. I think it's not necessarily a bad thing to argue that you shouldn't eat animals anyway even if you disagree with me about how they should have the same rights as humans, for other reasons that you might find more convincing, for example due to environmental problems or technological efficiency (lab-grown animal products having the potential to market-compete the old-fashioned way out of existence). It's not ideal, I would rather all people agree with me that killing animals to eat them is morally wrong, period, but it's also much better to not kill animals for any reason than continuing to kill animals because the "right" reason is not convincing enough.
I don't think the "Proofs" for God are wrong/suspicious/cringe because of (1) and (2), I see (1) and (2) as faulty assumptions that are frequently violated even in other "Good" or "Normal" conversations where God is not involved. Arguments for God are however still almost always fallacious, because:
1- They're made by someone with the extremely strong incentive to prove that God exists. This is the same class of problems that is present in (e.g.) the Climate "Science" funded by big oil companies, or the "fact"-finding missions established by governments to investigate their own failings. There is a clear conflict of interest here even with the best and most honest of intentions: "Islam is the one true religion, and I'm ***TOTALLY*** not saying this because I will be disowned and fired from my job and possibly killed or jailed if I say otherwise, no, I'm merely saying it because it's true, I have proved it!".
Anecdote: When I left Islam, I still believed in Deism for several months afterward. I did this for no good reason, merely because it felt bizarre and oddly transgressive to... simply not believe in any God at all. I have long since grown out of it, but this illustrates the sheer pressure exerted on a religious mind when arguing for or against God, a literal life-or-death kind of pressure that makes your brain unsuitable for rational thought. (and this is a feature not a bug for the ones who created the religion)
2- They are very prone to making the "*A* God exists, therefore *MY* God exists" fallacy. A religious headspace primes you to think that the choice is binary, either there is a God or there isn't a God. The most famous example of this fallacy is Pascal's Wagger, which quite literally goes "It's rational to act as if someone very powerful and very angry might punish you for not believing in them even if it's not entirely clear that this someone exists, therefore this someone is actually the Christian God and all of Christianity up to the 1600s is true".
A religious person is already an atheist with respect to several hundreds/thousands God, only not the one they were raised on. This is not a sophist point, there are really extreme core-deep differences between religions on how they conceptualize God. The Christian God says Jesus was His son and that he died for our sins, the Islamic God says that Jesus is entirely human to every last atom and that he never died, no amount of Philosophy or "Look over there! a human eye! very designed!" is going to resolve this conflict.
3- Even if the arguments work, and even if they do prove the exact kind of God that the religious person is arguing for, they still don't prove that we *Should* worship this God. We don't worship heads of states or military commanders, so Power alone is not enough to justify why we should worship. We don't worship brilliant scientists or artists or engineers, so Intelligence and the ability to create impressive things are not enough to justify worshipping. This can be seen as an extension of point 2, since "Worthy of being Worshipped" is an implicit part of the definition of every religious person's God.
4- As a particularly important sub-point of 3, every religious person is in a lot of trouble due to the history of religion itself. Immediately after Mohammed (Islam's prophet) died, his companion politically back-stabbed and intrigued for succession, and then no more than 30-ish years passed before they descended into full-blown war. It's **brutal** war at that too, one of the battles had soldiers descending on Medina (second most holy city in Islam after Mecca) and raping women and girls there such that they continued to give birth for years after the battle. What did Islam ever do to those people? How did it morally uplift the people practicing it or prevented them from acting just like any regular old barbarians? Islam doesn't make people any more likely to win wars either, neither does any religion. What's the actual benefit of any religion compared to the placebo?
And plenty of other reasons.
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Nitpick in the article you posted, it says:
"""This argument comes from Islamic theology and, in its updated form, goes like this:
Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
The universe began to exist.
Therefore, the universe has a cause.
(Craig, 1979)"""
I believe - and I'm by no means an expert - that this is actually much older than Islamic theology, specifically it's the "First Mover" argument which goes way back to Aristotle (and possibly further). Aristotle thought of this as a pure physics argument, nothing ever moves unless moved by something else, nothing ever happen unless caused by something else. Therefore, it must be the case that a single, non-recursive base case of motion and causation exist which set into motion the entire universe, and this case is God. Christianity plagiarized and adapted this argument from Aristotle, and then Islamic theology did its part and transmitted it into several languages, possibly after further expanding and annotations and cross-synthesis with other religious traditions from Persian and Indian sources.
>2- They are very prone to making the "*A* God exists, therefore MY God exists" fallacy.
Yup! I'm fond of noting, to any one who uses the "fine-tuning" argument as evidence for a God, and then trying to argue for _their_ God, that it is equally compatible with a benzene-ring-fetishist God. :-) Even if it tuned physics to generate carbon, who would know if it likes life or just _really_ likes graphite dust...
>it is equally compatible with a benzene-ring-fetishist God
Yes, and?
If the fine-tuning argument works to demonstrate *some* kind of God must exist, then that's sufficient to refute the atheist position -- trying to work out the details of whether God has any special interest in us, and what that interest is if so, is a separate discussion. And if the fine-tuning argument is not a good argument for God's existence, then you should be able to show that directly instead of pointing out that it's not a good argument for some other specific claim about God which it was never supposed to prove.
Many Thanks! Note what I was replying to. I was specifically endorsing, and expanding on, LearnsHebrewHatesIP's good point that:
>2- They are very prone to making the "*A* God exists, therefore MY God exists" fallacy.
In point of fact, I think the "fine-tuning" argument is weak, since there is the possibility that anthropic selection from a large set of possible symmetry-breakings is the explanation of "fine-tuning", rather than any deity.
There is also a subtler problem with
>trying to work out the details of whether God has any special interest in us, and what that interest is if so, is a separate discussion
Once one includes deities with no interest in us, one is starting to include deities which, culturally, are very non-central models of gods. To pick another parameter which can vary: If one allows the IQ of the deity to become arbitrarily low, one includes the possibility of _naming_ the mindless interactions of particles as "God". The discussions aren't quite that cleanly separated unless one _very_ carefully delineates what set of possible entities one is calling gods for the duration of the discussion.
Your analogy with mathematical proofs is well taken. Finding lots of four colour maps, for example, does not convince me that the four colour theory is correct. I need a rational proof. But I don’t think proofs for God are like proofs in mathematics. Reading on, it seems that you agree and I appreciate your examples from your own life.
Let me try two more analogies.
For decades, astronomers have been proposing Dark Matter and Dark Energy as explanations for certain patterns of motion in faraway galaxies. They claimed this as evidence but it never quite amounted to proof and, in recent days, physicists have proposed an alternative explanation that does not require dark matter. Is evidence of the Christian God like this?
A second example: Imagine that you have never seen a panda and you are sceptical of their existence. You have never quite been persuaded by Proofs of Panda but, one day, someone takes you to a zoo and shows you a panda. You no longer doubt the existence of pandas and Proofs of Panda become unnecessary. Is evidence of the Christian God like this?
In contrast to the other response you received, I (a religious person) think evidence of the Christian God is more like the second example!
I think this is one of the disconnects between religious and non-religious people, and why conversations and debates can be a little futile. I think a lot of people believe in God the way someone believes in pandas in the above example, but then they try to explain their position as if they arrived at it through evidence and logic, and are evaluated on the strength of the evidence and logic. Both sides leave frustrated because the evidence and logic was never the crux of the problem at all.
I think I understand what you're trying to say. From your 2 examples, "Evidence" or "Arguments" for God is more like the dark matter example. Something we never directly observed, is allegedly affecting other things that we do (somewhat) observe. It's not like the Panda example at all.
Except, God is not really like any other thing because there are moral and identity-related issues around Him. Nobody ever said that without Dark Matter people would rape and kill with impunity, but vast millions of people do believe this about God. I obviously disagree, but most societies are not a Rationalist meetup where you can simply disagree about this and expect a civil response. So, God is very complicated, it's not really like anything. By its very nature as a supposedly "transcendental" being outside of normal space, time, physics, casualty, and all other constructs of the human mind, attempts to liken God to any other thing in any other metaphor is extremely likely to lead to confusion, because very few things are outside of space, time, physics, casualty, and are by definition beyond the comprehension of the human mind.
I personally think that religious people are fooling themselves, and that any honest look at the history of religion would quickly disabuse them of any notion that religion is remotely intellectual or calm-headed or explorable with quiet meditations, this is true of Christianity and Islam at any rate, other religions are different. Even a religion as close to the former two as Judaism is surprisingly tolerant of skepticism and talking back to God.
The most devastating argument against the traditional conception of the Abrahamic God, in my view, is the Problem of Evil. A benevolent God who is simultaneously omniscient and omnipotent is trivially disprovable, and almost all Muslims and Christians I know believe in a God that is all 3.
I mean, there *is* the Unsong counterargument to the Problem of Evil: "God, being omniscient, can see which permutations* of universe result in sufficient good to be worth the evil side-effects, and, being omnipotent, creates exactly those. We just happen to be in one of the many, many permutations with non-zero such side effects."
*God intervening, or not, in various ways counts as different permutations. "Universe has consistent and discoverable rules" may or may not count as an intervention.
That violates omnipotence (as posited by the people being argued against here). The necessity of selecting from possible universes, given the side effects, implies that God cannot simply change what is possible or what the side effects are.
Omnipotence does not mean that God can never face trade offs. Lewis writes a bit on this in the book "The Problem of Pain":
"His Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. This is no limit to His power. If you choose to say “God can give a creature free-will and at the same time withhold free-will from it,” you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words “God can”. It remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God."
This is a misunderstanding of the premise: God can and *does* change what is possible, but for a given universe A that "could" benefit from God's intervention at time T and doesn't get it, there's *also* an identical one B (or an uncountable infinity, but "one" is easier to say) where God does, in fact, intervene at time T.
Asking "why doesn't God just make two Bs instead of an A and a B (or three C's, where God never has to intervene in the first place because it's already morally perfect)" is just obfuscating the choice, not removing it. Per omnipotence, God *could* also create Z's, composed exclusively of suffering (or where he intervenes at time T to convert them into such, et cetera). It's the Benevolence criterion that constrains things, not the omnipotence.
Yes, I will also add that Unsong's God is kind of a moron, behaving like a strawman of a utilitarian.
My interpretation of Utilitarianism is that it's a realistic response to the constraints of the physical world, given that I can't do infinite Good or prevent infinite Evil, it's extremely intuitive that I want to get the maximum bang per buck: to do the most Good or prevent the most Evil per unit of work. My ethical system also prioritizes preventing Evil over doing Good: I don't think I will accept that one child starves if 10 children will go on to be Jeff-Bezos-rich in return. If the alternative is that all 11 children will starve, then yes 1 child starving is better. But if all 11 children are living a sub-par life, it's not worth it to kill 1 so that the other 10 live a better life.
God in Unsong is behaving like the parody of Utilitarianism, creating entire universes full of suffering from scratch just because the joy will maybe possibly exceed the suffering with acceptable margins. This is incredibly dumb to me. Suffering is not symmetric with joy, absence of joy is 0, absence of suffering is positive.
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Research questions: Liberal vs right wing morality (L’affaire Rittenhouse)
I’ve been looking into the question of where we can find fundamental moral disagreements between liberals, even right adjacent or sympathetic liberals and right wingers.
I think the Rittenhouse case provided the best possible example of one of these. Any number of anti-woke liberals will agree with right-wing observers on all the specific facts. Yet I haven’t yet found a single one who will with say, “Rittenhouse was not only legally not guilty of murder… but acted in a morally exemplary way and his actions that day were a positive good.” Nor for that matter will you get this response from any of the never Trumpers as far as I can tell. I think it represents one of the fundamental and unbridgeable gaps in american moral instincts.
Do you know of any anti-woke liberal who’ll state this (ideally a public figure, but personal anecdotes are fine)?
I’m a centrist libertarian who believes that, while the outcomes of the actions of Rittenhouse were lamentable and avoidable, the actions themselves amounted to self-defense.
Rittenhouse is no hero, but neither did he deserve to be put on trial and dragged through the mud, either. He is only guilty of violating the Four Stupids rule: don’t do stupid things in stupid places with stupid people at stupid times.
Eh, I'll bite. I think what Rittenhouse did was fine. I wouldn't go so far as to say "morally exemplary", but that's because I hardly ever use that kind of language, and to do so I'd have to spend way more time investigating the details of the case, and I just plain don't want to. **shrug**
Classical liberal. On those political spectrum quizes, I show up as True Neutral, bordering on Neutral Libertarian. Halfway between left and right, and approximately 2/3rds of the way up from authoritarian to libertarian.
(I'm never sure which meaning of the word "liberal" is meant.)
Are we fighting this one over again? I think he had no business being there, he had no business going around toting a gun, but he did act in self-defence and he wasn't there to kill anyone. Silly teenage hero-fantasy ideas, but not going out to "tonight Imma kill me a commie" or whatever.
The antifa bunch that were also going around with first aid kits and guns are just as bad, but nobody said "Gage whatshisface crossed state lines with a gun!!" when decrying Rittenhouse for doing the same thing. They all were LARPing as Heroes of The Resistance, Rittenhouse and the guys that got shot.
Why didn't he have business being there? He's a free man, how could he have no business being going where he chooses to go, and carrying out the business he chooses to carry out? Or is he a churl that must not bear arms or travel to the next town over without his Lord's permission?
>Or is he a churl that must not bear arms or travel to the next town over without his Lord's permission?
Do you believe people have the individual moral right to take weapons to engage in a conflict on foreign soil? If thirty thousand US college students decide to arm up and defend Palestine from Israel, or Ukraine from Russia, or to support a riot in France, should they be allowed to?
In America free men have the right to bear arms, the the right to travel freely through the United States: to say that exercising their rights is immoral because of the actions of lawbreakers is what I'm arguing against.
I also see no moral reason why someone shouldn't take up arms in a just war. Supporting a riot with weapons would be illegal and probably immoral, though there might possibly be circumstances in which rioting may be just. I doubt it though. Revolution may be justified, but it usually isn't.
Free children, though, not so much. I'm open to the belief that local legislators and/or prosecutors screwed up on that front, but I'm pretty sure the intent of the Wisconsin legislature is that unattended minors shouldn't be carrying loaded guns in towns and cities without their parents' permission or even knowledge. And as both a (non-anarchist) libertarian and an NRA life member, I say that's a perfectly legitimate intent for a legislature to enact into law and for prosecutors to enforce.
It is reasonable to say that Kyle Rittenhouse was properly acquitted of all charges brought against him because the actual shootings were self-defense and the state screwed the pooch on the lesser stuff. It is *also* reasonable to say that Kyle Rittenhouse was a well-meaning dumbass and nobody should take him for a hero or a role model. Teenage dumbassery is part of the reason we have laws in the first place.
He had no business being there because it was looking for trouble. I don't think he went there determined to cause trouble, but he had Batman Vigilante fantasies and if you go to a fight, nobody should be surprised if fighting happens.
He wasn't there as part of his job, he could have stayed home. So could the guys who got shot, I'm not letting them off the hook either. But you go to a situation where you're expecting trouble to happen, and trouble happens, this is on you at least in part.
I think your getting an excellent demonstration here in the comments. Even aside from Rittenhouse's pleasantness as a person, or wisdom going armed to the protests.... Someone can see the same videos and think that it was actually self defense or willful murder and he got off on a technicality of Wisconsin law or something.
For me, I watched the whole trial, and I can't see how it's anything but the former, and how you could think otherwise after watching that trial.
But yet someone else sees it entirely otherwise and cannot imagine thinking otherwise.
One can speculate why but that there's a fundamental divide of moral assumptions I think is undeniable.
I have to admit I haven't. I only have a weak opinion on the matter. I'd read that the jury went through the tapes of the incident frame by frame, so my 0-th order reaction is that, given that they looked at the evidence so carefully, and _they_ concluded it was self defense, I bow to their judgement.
I think they did. The amount that got caught on video is very lucky for him.
The trial, for a lot of people, wasn't really just about the trial. I think the original commented is 100% correct that it highlighted a fundamental moral divide, in conflating two hot button issues: is the rioting that was going on okay? Even justified? Is self-defense with a gun a meaningful concept at all and is it "okay"? Both of those questions together - poof, powder keg of culture war.
I'm an anti-woke liberal. I think Rittenhouse recklessly armed himself and entered a disturbance where he was likely to shoot someone — and then he shot three people. He was guilty of murder and his actions were objectively bad.
FWIW I have no sympathies with the group he bore arms against. I thought they were breaking the law and deserved to be punished by the legal authorities — but not to be shot by their political opponents.
The Rittenhouse case is a terrible example of the difference between liberals and conservatives because it ultimately amounts to a tribal case. Sure, liberals and conservatives have different opinions about whether it is OK to carry a gun into a disturbance and whether it is OK to shoot someone but this particular case comes down to whether you wear a red hat or a blue hat.
In an ideal world, yeah, the authorities would have firmly and swiftly restored order with whatever force was necessary. But what happens when instead the authorities openly and proudly refuse to do so, to the extent of literally kneeling before the rioters?
This isn't just a 2020 thing, either -- since then, we've seen innumerable examples of the authorities refusing to enforce the law against violent protesters. If we're supposed to patiently wait for them to have a change of heart, well, it's been four years...
The answer is just democracy. Vote with your vote, win your neighbor's votes too, push for change, and if that doesn't work then vote with your feet and move somewhere with like-minded people. People can choose the kind of society they want to live in, even if you hate those choices and think they're committing societal suicide.
I mean... we don't let people make _every_ possible societal choice. No one's going to be permitted to bring back slavery, for example.
There is an argument that urban voters affirmatively voting for crime and disorder should not get their way any more than they would if they voted for slavery. The great cities of a country are the engines of the country and they should not be allowed to break down just because 51% of the 18% who voted in the last municipal elections -- an actual lizardman constant! -- are deranged enough to want that course of events.
Nobody is voting for crime. There is a massive difference between "we think society will be better with a justice system that focuses on rehabilitation, and errs on the side of leniency, while banning vigilantism, even if it possibly leads to an uptick in crime in the short run" and "we think crime is good and criminals should go unpunished."
There is also a difference between "we think the police should be disbanded" and "we would like to have X numbers of police but we can't pass a budget that funds their salaries to the necessary level, and think we will be better off spending that money on lower taxes or other types of spending, so we will have lower numbers of police even if this makes crime worse."
(If it matters, I absolutely do think that many urban areas have swung too far leftwards. Personally I would love more policing, stiffer sentencing, and tougher policies on drug use.)
But If you think urban voters who have voted for lenient policies do so because they want rampant arson, rape, murder, etc., then you have, I argue, a warped view of what those voters think they're voting for and why. And that's exactly why this kind of vigilantism is so dangerous - because you think you're fighting for X but you are operating on a distorted worldview.
Take your slavery example. If a city literally legalized slavery, that would be one thing. But say that a city passed some policies that gave excessive power to employers - mandatory arbitration, legalizing stiff non-compete agreements, that kind of thing. You would absolutely have plenty of overheated internet lefties screaming "they've legalized slavery!" even though that is far from the truth.
Those lefties should not be allowed to burn down a Burger King because they interpret overly business-friendly regulations as literal slavery. The flip side of this is that nobody should be allowed to play Punisher just because they think that electing a liberal DA has nullified the rule of law.
The actual details matter, and when you look at what's happening in cities, separate from the overheated and polarized viewpoints you can find on social or political media, it isn't remotely in the category of "they have clearly crossed a line and all bets are off."
> we think society will be better with a justice system that focuses on rehabilitation, and errs on the side of leniency
Careful now. I don't think rehabilitation and leniency go together well. Nobody is rehabilitated by a slap on the wrist. You rehabilitate people by giving them both the tools and the motivation they need to behave better; a slap on the wrist gives them neither.
A justice system that was really focused on rehabilitation would appear to be a *lot* less lenient than what currently exists in any Western country; it would have far more prison beds and (in many cases) far longer sentences, so that proper rehabilitation programs can be carried out. Not everybody can be rehabilitated but there's some blindingly obvious groups of people we could be working a lot harder on, such as drug addicts.
The people who claim to be in favour of a "rehabilitation-focused" justice system never seem to genuinely be in favour of what it would take to rehabilitate criminals, they just seem to want to use rehabilitation as an excuse for leniency.
That being said, in many cases it was a sin of omission, or wishful thinking, or refusal to follow a proposal to its clear conclusion, rather than Twitter tankie-style open malice, but the results were the same.
>Take your slavery example. If a city literally legalized slavery, that would be one thing. But say that a city passed some policies that gave excessive power to employers - mandatory arbitration, legalizing stiff non-compete agreements, that kind of thing. You would absolutely have plenty of overheated internet lefties screaming "they've legalized slavery!" even though that is far from the truth.
I can imagine a situation where such policies went so far as to require a higher power to step in, regardless of the voters' good intentions. In fact, it happens all the time.
If, instead of Rittenhouse, a police officer had shot three people that evening in the same circumstances, would your logic be any different? And if so, why?
Yes. Police officers are authorised to control a disturbance. It's their job. On the whole, I think American police officers shoot too many people but intervening when people break the law is what they are for. Teenagers with guns — not so much.
Why wasn't Rittenhouse charged with 'Unauthorized Control of a Disturbance', if that's an actual crime?
Should attacking a police officer be a more serious offense than attacking a member of the general public? Do police officers have more civil rights than the general public?
"Unauthorized control of a disturbance" isn't a crime for the same reason that "unauthorized confrontation with the guy who slept with your wife" isn't a crime - we don't define a separate crime for every possible situation that could lead to killing someone. We just have "murder."
And yes, police are given more rights than civilians when it comes to using force - it's extremely rare for police officers to be put on trial for murder after killing someone in the line of duty. Derek Chauvin was the exception rather than the rule.
You're begging the question here by saying that Rittenhouse can't have been acting in self-defense because he committed murder, when we're trying to determine whether what Rittenhouse did was murder or self-defense. 'Unauthorized control of a disturbance' is the 'crime' that Ragged Clown suggests is supposed to have been committing when he was attacked that renders his claim of self-defense invalid.
In practice, of course law enforcement grant their own some measure of benefit of the doubt that they wouldn't grant a member of the public. If you want to argue that this is something that should be codified into law, be my guest, but at this time, it's certainly not any sort of 'right'.
> Do police officers have more civil rights than the general public?
Yes, police officers absolutely do. They operate under "Qualified Immunity," as a matter of statute and precedent, such that they won't be prosecuted for basically anything, and here are some examples from an excellent reddit thread by u/ais8585:
"Ashford v. Raby (March 5, 2020) (yesterday). Police stop a car and tell the driver to show his hands, which he does. They tell him to get out of the car and he says, well, the car's still in drive, so I'll have to turn off the car--you know, with my hands. Polic sic a dog on him and they and the dog pull him out of the now-rolling car. Officers entitled to QI.
Nelson v. Battle Creek (Feb 26, 2020). Police encounter a boy with a BB gun they think is a real gun. They tell him to drop it. He does, and they shoot him anyway. Officers entitled to QI.
Corbitt v. Vickers (July 10, 2019). Kids are playing in their yard when a fugitive ends up on their property. Police come over, hold the kids at gunpoint and make them all get down on the ground. The family dog comes out, and an officer tries to shoot it. He misses. The dog runs underneath the porch. Some time passes. The dog comes back out. The cop tries to shoot it again, misses it, and hits one of the kids in the knee. Officer entitled to QI.
And my personal favorite from the last little while:
Jesop v. Freso (September 14, 2019). Officers flat-out steal $225k during a search & seizure operation. (Basically, they take $275k of property in illegal gambling raid and only enter into inventory/give back $50k of stuff.) Officers entitled to QI.
The underlying rule in all these cases is that an officer is entitled to qualified immunity unless he (1) violated a constitutional right, and (2) that right was “clearly established” when he performed the (potentially right-violating) action against the plaintiff (i.e., citizen, i.e., you). What exactly “clearly established” means is open to some debate, but it basically means that precedent (previous court decisions) have previously said that the officer’s exact conduct (or something very very very similar to the officer’s conduct) violates a constitutional right. And that’s basically how you get crazy decisions like the four above: the court’s holding no existing cases had made clear that the officer couldn’t do exactly what he did, even though any normal person’s reaction is come on dude."
I am utterly fascinated by this line of argument. "Qualified immunity is a legal principle of federal constitutional law that grants government officials performing discretionary (optional) functions immunity from lawsuits for damages unless the plaintiff shows that the official violated "clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known"".
Rittenhouse is accused of criminal behavior (murder), not being sued for damages. Saying Qualified Immunity would have protected a police officer in his position is saying that government employment grants one the potential right to commit crime, not just protection from being sued personally for actions taken in official capacity. In practice, of course the police grant their own some measure of benefit of the doubt that they wouldn't grant a member of the public.
I am of the opinion that qualified immunity has been extended well beyond any actual purpose it might serve. It's still odd to see anyone advocate making it even more powerful.
I'm not really seeing anything here that contradicts his proposition ... if anything it feels like you've popped up to present yourself as an example of exactly what he's talking about
What do you mean by "anti-woke liberal", does Destiny count, for example?
Also
>"Rittenhouse was not only legally not guilty of murder… but acted in a morally exemplary way and his actions that day were a positive good.”
What amount of nuance are you willing to tolerate? Like, for example, does thinking that him killing two people and injuring another one are a regrettable outcome of his good intentions and admirable courage to put himself in harm's way to defend his community count? or do they have to be happy because they were pretty deplorable individuals that were actively causing chaos?
> What do you mean by "anti-woke liberal", does Destiny count, for example?
Probably
> "regrettable outcome"
Define regrettable. Do you mean it in the almost Christian, 'It's sad that they became this way, and I take no pleasure in their death.'? Or do you mean, 'It's a bad thing that they are dead.'?
As for my cut-off I think it would be this.
Let's say Rittenhouse were visited by a time-traveler or whatever and told only - 'If you go and attempt to defend your community, you will end up killing a murder-suicidal child rapist and [however the hell you want to describe Huber] in legally justified circumstances. Decide now what you'll do, I'll be wiping your memory of this conversation shortly but you'll still make the same decision.'
If you think he'd be morally right to decide to go I think you fall within the range of people who I'd consider on my side (on this issue).
Personally I actively take pleasure in the results of Rittenhouse's actions.
...Wait, so you're arguing that even if he did knowingly murder them, it was a good thing? You do understand why most people are against vigilantism, yes?
I'm not a legal expert, but I'm pretty sure in Austria a self-defense argument doesn't fly if you could easily have avoided the dangerous situation in the first place.
Vigilantism is a bad thing under ordinary circumstances because it tends to make things worse.
But in a riot, where law and order has completely broken down, a case could be made that vigilantism *is* the right thing to do. The arguments for why it's wrong under normal circumstances don't apply.
Well, vigilantes who attack criminals, anyway. Vigilantes who burn down and occupy neighborhoods are feted as heroes, as long as they say they were doing it for racial justice.
If someone walks down a dark alley, is attacked by a mugger, and kills the mugger in self defense, would you say that choosing to walk down the alley was "acting wrongly from a moral perspective"? Certainly walking down a dark alley makes it more likely that your life will be in danger, yet do you not have a right to be there?
I view him as being much like the protesters, rioters, antifa, whatever you want to call them - but instead of being motivated by a desire for chaos and destruction, he apparently felt, despite his tender age and supposed "lack of a dog in the hunt", a strong desire to see property and livelihoods protected.
It's thus obvious to me that he should be assigned no more culpability than the protesters (who were assigned mostly none).
'Voluntarily put himself in a position where he might need to use force for no reason' is a tough sentence to parse, which may not be helped in this case by the competing narratives for what exactly happened that evening. Is 'use force for no reason' measured at the moment that force occurred, or earlier when the potential for force to be required was determined?
Do you feel that a protestor who attends a protest that turns violent is acting wrong from a moral perspective? Suppose you're considering counter-protesting, say, a skinhead march and the skinheads have a reputation for attacking counter-protestors; is choosing to attend the counter-protest voluntarily putting yourself in a position where you might need to use force?
I assumed that "for no reason" was modifying "put himself in a position" rather than "use force". The baffling part for me was the implied opposition between initiating force and stand-your-ground laws: the latter apply only when the force has been initiated by someone else.
Can someone explain to me how simulation capture works? I recently read "The hour I first believed" and I'm confused as to why consciousness (as a mathematical object) would "split" when it gets simulated.
If you are calculating how much is 2+2, and I start calculating how much is 2+2, are we calculating different equations, or did the same equation split?
The underlying idea is that consciousness (and on a deeper level, existence) is a computation. Performed naturally by the atoms that your body is built of. But another computation can be started in the simulating machine, in theory.
But that shouldn't change anything, right? How does it predict the person's actual consciousness splitting between two physical realities? (From the point of view of the person who's consciousness is being simulated I'd assume it doesn't change anything if it's being computed two or more times instead of one)
In this post I explore what core wrong assumption philosophers have been making while trying to solve it, why it's wrong, how comes so many managed not to figure it out for such a long time and what exactly the correct model looks like.
Beauty, irritated with philosophical experiments that seem to have no consequences, secretes a weapon on her person, having decided that on awakening she will shoot the experimenter dead. She duly does so, and goes back to sleep.
Now, I think we can agree that this awakening must have taken place on Monday, so the probability of heads is 50%. When she is woken by the police instead of the experimenter, she knows it is Tuesday and the coin must have come up tails.
While something has changed in this gedanken, it hardly seems enough to bring the Tuesday awakening into independent reality. It must have been an independent reality before - the same experiment was run last week, hence her irritation - even if she had no means of knowing it. So I think I remain a 'thirder'.
> Now, I think we can agree that this awakening must have taken place on Monday, so the probability of heads is 50%.
We could've agreed about P(Heads|Monday)=1/2 without killing anyone.
> When she is woken by the police instead of the experimenter, she knows it is Tuesday and the coin must have come up tails.
Why would the police care about the outcome of a coin toss? They would wake her up regardless. With all likelihood they wake her on the same day she commits the murder.
> While something has changed in this gedanken, it hardly seems enough to bring the Tuesday awakening into independent reality.
What? If you are talking about independence between previous and next awakening they are not independent, neither in initial version of the problem nor with a murder.
Thinking about this, it’s a paradox only because we are confusing two distinct things. Paths, and days.
From the point of view of the experimenters there’s clearly two paths. Half of all subjects are sleeping beauties, half are not. However we are not asked for their view.
if steeping beauty is woken on any day at the end of the experiment and told the experiment had ended (which is extra information) and is asked to predict whether the coin was heads or tails then she should choose either. At this stage she’s also measuring paths. That’s not the experiment though. She’s not given that information.
Imagine if she is awarded a prize for getting the coin right any time she is awakened - then she should clearly go with tails. In that case she will lose on Monday (heads) but win on Monday (tails) and Tuesday (tails). And obviously this scales up to multiple days. With N days of sleeping she’s going to win with tails N-1 times.
So I would take the betting approach, where sleeping beauty wants to maximise the money she makes by being right, and so she she should act as if the probabilities are 2/3 tails. To me this doesn't seem terribly mysterious, but maybe that's just my lack of understanding.
I also think that this problem should be disentangled from the time and amnesia. I think it's equivalent to having three experimentees who are assigned to the results of the coin flip without knowing which they are. So, one of them will be woken up if it's heads, and the other two will be woken up (in separate rooms) if it's tails.
If you're one of the experimentees, the total probability you'll be chosen is 1/2 (heads * 1/3 + tails * 2/3), so the probability of tails given that you're chosen is 2/3 (2/3 * 1/2 / 1/2) .
We all agree that the coin comes up tails 1/2 times, but if I'm one of the experimentees and I've been chosen by this procedure, I should bet on the coin flip having been tails at 2/3.
See my answer to Firanx. You can lawfully bet on 2/3 for Tails per awakening regardless of whether you believe that P(Heads)=1/3 or 1/2.
> I think it's equivalent to having three experimentees
No, absolutely not, it's two different situations with different probability theoretic properties and I'm talking about it in the post. The difference is that Beauty always experience Monday awakening before she can experience Tuesday awakening while whichever awakening is assigned to a given experimentee is truly random. For a given experementee, three awakening states are mutually exclusive, while for the Beauty they are not.
> You can lawfully bet on 2/3 for Tails per awakening regardless of whether you believe that P(Heads)=1/3 or 1/2.
That sounds like different views about what probability is then. For me probability is supposed to be useful for prediction, and betting shows you exactly how you should predict in the suggested situation.
Now it's absolutely the case that people with different information and in different situations should bet differently, and I take this to be an example of that case. P(Heads) without any condition is of course 1/2. P(Heads | I've just been woken up in this scenario) is 1/3.
I still don't understand why Beauty always experiencing Monday before Tuesday has any relevance at all given that she can't remember them. Given that Beauty knows nothing about the time and is allowed no memory of previous states, I don't see why this is different to the fact that experimentee B is always woken at the same time as experimentee C. Perhaps understanding this would help me understand why this situation is regarded as complex.
> That sounds like different views about what probability is then.
Probability is a formally specified mathematical entity. There can't be any disagreements here.
> For me probability is supposed to be useful for prediction
It is. But probability isn't the only thing that affects betting odds. When the betting scheme rewards you twice as much on Tails than on Heads you are better of betting Tails even when the coin is fair.
>I still don't understand why Beauty always experiencing Monday before Tuesday has any relevance at all given that she can't remember them.
Because outcome space has to consist of mutually independent outcomes. And ordered outcomes can't be mutually independent. It's just a fact of probability theory.
> Given that Beauty knows nothing about the time and is allowed no memory of previous states
The Beauty still has information about the setting of experiment, how her awakening routine is determined and that Tuesday awakening will not happen independent of Monday, even if she doesn't know which of the awakening is she experiencing right now. This information can be crucial in some betting schemes, which I'm going to show in the next post.
Here is an intuition, though. Suppose you have three balls: Green, Yellow and Red. There are 6 possible combinations to place them randomly:
GYR, GRY, YGR, YRG, RGY, RYG
But only 3 possible combinations if Green has to always go before Red:
GYR, GRY, YGR
And only 2 combinations if Green has to be exactly before Red:
Suppose, the balls are to be organised in some way and then you are to get the first one. If you do not know anything about the rules according which the balls are organized you expect random placement for them, which gives you 6 possible combinations and 1/3 chance to get any ball.
But if you know that only combinations where Green has to be exactly before Red are valid, then there are only two possible combinations and no possibility to get Red ball, you have 50% for either Green or Yellow.
This stays true even if you are color blind and can't tell the difference between the balls you get. Or if your memory is erased after you got the ball, so you can't remember what color it was. Your knowledge of the setting of the experiment affects your credence, anyway.
OK, but you're overthinking it. The experimenters know whether they awake her on Monday or Tuesday, so there are really 4 states:
Monday + Wake, Monday+notWake, Tuesday+ Wake, and Tuesday+unsampled
As to what she should guess, that depends on the evaluation function. And the 4 states are exclusive. Throwing out one of them is just wrong, and of course will yield the wrong answer.
Now clearly all the Tuesday cases are preceded by a corresponding Monday case. If she's rewarded for a correct answer, she should guess Tails, because that CAN occur twice, so she'd get two rewards.
The question is not about the experimenters. It's about Beauty's knowledge on awakening.
>Monday + Wake, Monday+notWake, Tuesday+ Wake, and Tuesday+unsampled
Not sure what you mean by Tuesday+unsampled here. Also regardless of the coin outcome the Beauty is awakened on Monday, so not sure what you mean by Monday+notAwake as well.
> Throwing out one of them is just wrong
Including non awakened states doesn't make sense when we are talking specifically about awakened ones. Now this would be overthinking it.
> And the 4 states are exclusive.
> Now clearly all the Tuesday cases are preceded by a corresponding Monday case
You can't have it both ways. Sequentional events are not mutually exclusive. I'm formally proving a lemma about it in the comments of the post.
> If she's rewarded
The question of betting strategy is a separate thing from the question of Beauty's probability estimate. I'll probably post about it next week.
So, let's say I'm not told the day. By the experimental design, I'll be interviewed twice in the "tails" branch and once in the "heads" branch, branches being equally likely. By betting 66:34 on "tails" I should on average lose 33 guineas and win 34.
If I'm told it's Tuesday, I know I'm in the tails branch. If I'm told it's Monday, the chances are equal.
Philosophers can probably come up with the arguments why this is wrong, but one can simply run a computer simulation of the experiment a million times and see if the Beauty always betting 3:2 on tails wins or loses.
Edit: Yep, seems like you're doing about the same? But since we can run this simulation since 50+ years ago (and if we're okay with mere N=10000, since the time we could mint a balanced coin), why is that a philosophical question at all?
The problem with betting arguments is that they do not directly adress the question of probability, instead they are talking about the product of probability and utility. And in Sleeping Beauty case, it sidesteps the disagreement.
Thirders believe that extra awakening on tails should be treated as a modification of probabilities, while halfers believe that it should be treated as modification of utilities. When reasoning correctly they arrive to the same betting odds but for different reasons.
It is still possible to make a betting argument, to distinguish between thirdism and halfism, which I'm doing in the next post, but it's much trickier than may initially seem. Addressing the question of probability directly is much more convinient.
I don't understand the part about utility. Suppose the bet is "I pay x bitcoins and get back exactly 1 if the toss was tails". How much should I agree to pay? Obviously any x below 2/3 (in the "don't know the date" case). So there is the supremum of the set of x's where I accept the bet expecting to win, call it X. Isn't X the same as probability?
Are there any academic researchers or grad students who would like to pick up a little side gig here?
I am, and have been, curious what the academic literature has to say about "how to parent so that your adult children actually want to spend time around you". Not so shockingly this is for the personal reason of wanting my child to grow up to actually want to spend time around me. I'm particularly interested in variations between cultures and countries of origin.
I would love to hire someone to either do a quick survey, or to fund someone actually doing a deep dive and producing a literature review for publication, or something in between.
Ronald Reagan's daughter recently published a book regarding her relationship with her father. Her discussion of it in interviews makes it sounds promising.
People in the biz who write about this stuff usually have axes to grind. I'm sure there are plenty of woke-infected articles and books now advising parents to be alert to any signs that their kindergartener is transgender or gay, and to never display a bit of skepticism or dismay about the idea. I think the best kind of study to look for would be one where the researchers looked at actual families in the here and now for how well they got along together, or interviewed adults at length and in a fairly unstructured way about their relationship with their parents. There used to be, and probably still are, studies done where a couple or family is videotaped doing something together, maybe a puzzle, or discussing a somewhat difficult topic, and researchers later coded the interactions for how much responsiveness, frankness, kindness, coerciveness, etc. was on display. That's a lot of work, but it's the way you get good information.
> Raise your kids in a culture where you don't move >50km away for a job, in a city where they can find a job with this constraint.
This seems to be rather cynically privileging your own interests over those of your children, and it could backfire if they realize that you're deliberately clipping their wings.
I'm not sure what you're reading into my comment, it would help if you could expand further. I assume you're thinking I mean "move to some busy city in Namibia". I'm just saying, my family was in a city where you could live a good life and didn't need to move for work because it was the capital. People who grew up in smaller towns/cities invariably moved to the capital for work and study.
Regarding the culture, I don't really think you can or want do anything about this. If you're (say) American[1] and your values are that moving away from friends and family for work is OK, then those are your values, there's presumably nothing to fix (you want your kids to earn more money more than you want them to stay near). What you *can* do is avoid moving to America if you come from somewhere else.[2]
1. Please let me know to what degree my picture of American culture is inaccurate
2. Not bashing any stance here. Everyone has his setpoint in the relations vs money tradeoff, and there's always someone further to one side or the other who can say "you're making your children poor" or "you're making them grow up without a culture/family/belonging"
Check, check, check, check, help yes, but I'm hoping the kids will have grandkids. (They're young still.) Cooking for family is one of life's great joys. My son and his girlfriend (of many years) are living with me now, and Sunday morning breakfast already seems like a tradition. I think there is something about shared meals that is important.
Hmm I use to like spending time with my mom or dad. My kids like spending time with me. I don't think it has anything to do with how good or bad a parent they or I was. I think it just has to do with being a person that people like to be around.
I don't think there is anything special there... just being a good friend. I guess with parents (family) there is a deeper sense of trust. Family: when they need a place to stay you have to let them in.
Oh sure. I definitely tend to like people. Don't judge them, don't be critical. The Herold dictum I learned on my grandmothers knee was, "If you can't say something nice, it's often better to say nothing at all."
I *may* be quick-survey-capable here, but I'm very cautious about whether it would produce "any actionable useful advice" rather than "have a high Polygenic Score™️for nonabusiveness and fun-to-be-around-ness" (and then, of course, you have to pretend PRS tells you much either). Is there a narrower question in the big question? For instance, is there a particular metric for "desire to spend time" you're thinking of?
Can you drop me an email at giblfiz at gmail and we could explore what kind of questions and answers might actually be well formed for what is there. We could set up a quick call, though I'm in Asia for a few more weeks so timezones might be a pain.
Whatever you do, don't divide your kingdom into three parts, one for each of your three daughters, to be bestowed only after they have gushingly professed their love for you. That doesn't tend to go so well.
Good question. The short answer is "not really" but I do love them deeply and go out of my way to spend time with them. It's one of those "it's complicated" sort of relationships.
An admirable goal, and I hope you will find someone willing to help, but I must say I'm really sceptical about academic literature being of any use in such matters.
You might find something in Brené Brown's work. I think besides the obvious "be likeable" stuff, you have to thread the needle between too-lax parenting that doesn't give your children what they need to develop, and too-strict parenting that makes them hate you and have all sorts of psychological issues. Brown's research says that a lot of this comes down to the difference between shame (which is individual-based, telling someone that they're bad or not good enough), and guilt (which is behavior-based, saying that a decision or an action was bad). It seems like a minor difference but shame-based discipline is strongly correlated with alcoholism, bullying, eating disorders, depression, suicide, and all sorts of other bad outcomes, and guilt-based discipline is negatively correlated with all that those same outcomes.
Obviously you still need to have a reasonably similar basic worldview - if you are constantly telling your gay children that being gay is a bad decision they still won't want to hang out with you - but it seems like the two extreme failure modes of parenting are either "give your kid absolutely no discipline and be surprised that they end up in jail" and "drive your kid so hard to succeed that they end up hating your guts even though they succeed" - so anything that helps strike that balance might be helpful.
You forget "drive your kid so hard to succeed but have no idea what success actually requires" and "drive your kid hard in pursuit of something other than success, such as being totally obedient to the parent."
I do share your skepticism at some level, but I think I would at least like to see what is out there. I'm expecting a lot of the advice to be either obvious (Don't be a raging alcoholic), not actionable (Have Gene RX372), or Dubious (Live next to the ocean) but I'm also hoping that something novel shows up.
"Live next to the ocean" is not that dubious if it's generalized to "live somewhere where the kids will want to be for reasons besides interacting with you, and don't live someone where visiting you means they have to pay much (be it their time, money, or unpleasant emotions)."
I mean, I would probably start by using "time spent with parents", and a survey with questions like "is going home for the holidays stressful?" as a proxy for outcome. Then you also tag a bunch of questions into the same survey along the lines of "how were you raised"
It's far from perfect or an RCT, but with a little statistical analysis it's definitely not just opinions masquerading as science.
Sure, it's easy to show all kinds of correlations. But is that useful?
If you see that coaching your kid's baseball team is correlated with your kid wanting to spend time around you, does that mean you should go sign up to coach your kid's baseball team? Or is that just because people who are interested in coaching their kid's baseball team already have a strong bond with their kid?
Has the fear of nuclear war dissipated somewhat, particularly amongst gen Z? Recently Macron said he didn’t rule out ground troops in Ukraine. That’s the kind of rhetoric that would frighten, and still does frighten Gen X or older. Yet, after he said it I noticed that Reddit was full of support. Nobody seems to realise the strength of the Russian nuclear armaments.
For a generation that is scared of the future, of solvable issues like climate change, this is a strange reaction.
I personally rather suspect that the event of ground troops in Ukraine by the West would be less "going to war against Russia to take back the pre-2014 (or even pre-2022) territories" and more like "formalizing a line of partition". Of course it would be a maneuver containing huge risks in any case.
(I'm gen Z, this is my gut reaction) Climate change is new and scary. Winters aren't as cold as they were when I was a child. Climate change is literally tangible for me.
Nuclear weapons and mutually assured destruction have been around my whole life, and nothing bad has ever happened. Pictures of the cold war from my history textbooks were in black and white, so it feels like ancient history.
Definitely not like, a defensible position! But it is what my intuition throws at me.
Well, I don't really see many people talking about climate change either lately. Maybe people just stopped caring? It's possible that people have increasingly stopped believing that there's any future worth fighting for. Everything's going to shit. What's the point of humanity continuing to exist if living is this miserable?
Those people are silly, though, and they're going to feel pretty dumb when they get old and realize the world is just continuing to tick along the way it always has, good and bad.
That assumes that the world continuing to tick along the way it always has is worth fighting for. Or that there's any coherent notion of "the way it always has", as historical constants are quite rare.
What makes you think Macron's rhetoric is reflective of gen Z preferences? A quick google says that Gen Z are currently ages 12-27 - doesn't seem like that's any kind of puppet master the President of France would have his power base built around. I'm the first to admit I know next to nothing about French politics, but I thought Macron's base of support was center business types - hence the attempt at things like pension reform.
"[Macron's] highest score in last week’s election — 33 percent — was among people over 70, as younger, metropolitan ex-Macron voters moved to the Greens in droves. He lost 6 percentage points among 18- to 24-year-olds and 11 points among voters aged 25 to 34."
My bad – skimming. I misread “Why isn’t Gen-Z more scared of Nukes? Emmanual Macron just did this thing in France, and Reddit didn’t seem very afraid to me” as simply “Why isn’t Gen-Z more scared of nukes? Emmanual Macron just did this thing in France.”
That being said, I still think you are misreading a universal trend as Gen-Z specific. Of the foreign policy/Russia watchers podcasts I listen to (Mark Galeotti, RFE/RL’s the Week Ahead in Russia, CSIS’ the Truth of the Matter), but all have presented similar threat assessments to the effect that Putin’s nuclear threats are more sabre rattling – a low-cost way to try to prod at Western unity – than they are represented of a genuine danger of their use. You could call these sources a lot of things, but none is particularly Gen-Z in its makeup.
Take that along with our former US president (likewise not exactly a magnet for support among the youth) who would casually play “my button is bigger thank yours” with North Korea – it seems to me that we’ve all lowered our temperature since the Cold War on the odds of a nuclear exchange, both young and old alike.
Edit:
Frankly, Macron's troop comments strike me as an analog to Putin's occasional nuclear ones. Vanishingly unlikely that they would ever actually be put to practice, but nevertheless stated due to being a low-cost way to throw little rocks at your adversary's base of support and see if it shakes a little.
Question: Why do you assume that France deploying ground troops moves us closer to a nuclear war? There were countless proxy ground wars in the Cold War, not all of them had people scared at the time that they were closer to nuclear exchange. In particular, the actions that made people most scared are those that specifically involved nuclear warheads, like deploying nuclear-warhead-armed submarines or bombers near a nuclear power or putting nuclear ground launchers in Turkey.
Anecdote: I was born after the Cold War ended, and I don't instinctually understand the panic that I see in 1950s and 1960s literature and material about Nuclear. I know on an intellectual detached level why people were so panicked, but it doesn't terrify me as much as - say - the prospect of millions of refugees from a worst-case Climate Change trajectory.
France going into Ukraine is not a proxy fight. It’s a direct engagement between one NATO force and the Russians.
TBH, It’s not understanding the panic is what I don’t get. By and large climate change is a solvable problem and one that is in the process of being solved. The worst case scenarios are clearly exaggerated, and we aren’t following business as usual.
However the Russians have 1,200 warheads and I don’t believe that missile defense is all that capable. One day you might wake up to find your city is glass.
And while the Cold War is over, and while there are fewer nukes, the nuclear threat is still there. Imagine these things were being built up from zero in the last ten years, do you not think that we would be somewhat hysterical?
Turkuye shot down a Russian jet fighter in 2015. That's about as a direct an engagement between NATO and Russia as one could imagine. The world is still here, the strong Russian reaction was to ban imports of Turkish tomatoes.
When a thug tells you about how scarily he will beat you up if you don't quietly suffer him pissing on your face, and you do accept the pissing, you will get the pissing, and then the beating. The only thing Putin understands and is afraid of is the actual fight with and actual enemy who is stronger.
Ukraine broke every "red line" the Russians put forth so far. Attacking Russian territory, attacking Crimea, attacking the bridge, attacking Kremlin.
At some point you have to stand up and fight, because otherwise the bully will just do what he wants to you anyway.
Hmm. Yeh that was the reddit consensus. It’s not much of an argument that nuclear war hasn’t happened yet and therefore won’t. Putin is rational only some of the time.
Funny, I am much older than average for that Reddit cohort.
It's not even whether Putin is "rational" - the worldview prevalent in that culture is radically different from ours. This guy has the best write-up on it I've seen so far: https://pragueplot.substack.com/p/hyperbolea
I didn't notice that France being dragged into a war will possibly also drag all of Nato due to article 5, I can see why this is unprecedented.
My anecdote about not being afraid of Nuclear is not meant to argue that Climate Change is worse than Nuclear, I don't believe such thing (even though I think you're overestimating how solved Climate Change really is). I'm making a point that fears are not rational. Being born after the Cold War in a state that isn't nuclear, all the nuclear fears are vague echos at best. I can see why they're rational and why people would feel them, but I don't feel them viscerally.
As a note of reassurance, Article 5 would not cover forward-deployed French forces.
Article 6 defines the 'armed attacks' that trigger art 5 as occuring "on the territory" of the parties, or in the Med sea, or the north Atlantic.
The real risk would be the same one as Europe faces now - that the 'secure rear' of NATO countries for repair and resupply would need to be pressured by Russia.
Well that's good, but the Black Sea saw active combat, didn't it? If French troops got attacked on some Ukrainian vessel there, an (admittedly tenuous) argument could be made that the Black Sea is part of the Mediterranean.
Yes. I’d worry about that in the long term if it escalated. Or that Russia will preemptively attack French ships anywhere. After all France will be at war with Russia.
Whether article 5 is invoked then or not is up to debate.
I'm not sure how much credit you can give to opinions on Reddit at this point, especially when it's a political topic and the thread is on the frontpage.
I have a suspicion that there's a lot of straight up propaganda that mostly just trying to push the right vibes with no substance, and a lot of factually wrong information, all met with uncritical praise.
I'm not sure that represent actual opinions real people have all that well, and I'd expect most of gen Z to not give a damn about militarly conflict on the other side of the world one way or the other.
I'd also don't understand why anyone would see these statements by Macron as anything other than bluff.
You might be right in the former and possibly the latter.
I thought of this not just after watching the reddit thread , but also I was watching a Netflix series called one day which tracked people’s lives on the same day over about 25 years.
In the very first episode set in the 80s, the protagonist were talking about what they would do or be when they were 40, and the female said “who are we kidding, the world will be blown up by the time we are 40”, which was fairly common sentiment at the time amongst young people. The threat is still there (although the world will survive but not the northern hemisphere) but the angst has gone.
Conventional wisdom on forums says this because Russia already specified several "red lines", most of which were crossed without any retaliation, so ground troops probably won't trigger nuclear response, too. It might even be right, because French, or worse yet multi-national ground troops probably won't make situation much better for Ukraine (I imagine the chaos of multi-language miscommunication, crazy logistics, and probable unreadiness and unwillingness of EU soldiers to die under Russian bombs might even make the expedition a net negative).
Also, recently Russian officials reiterated that the nuclear response will only be triggered by a direct attack on Russia. Putin, after all, is a boomer, and HE is properly afraid of a nuclear war.
You do realize that they currently assert various pieces of what we call 'Ukraine' as part of 'Russia'? Including even some bits that they do not currenty control. So this is not necessarily reassuring.
My general sense of the problem is that the number of troops you can send without any risk of nuclear escalation is low enough not to make a big difference. And dribbling in a few thousand troops at a time is not a great strategy - it amounts to aiming for a bloody stalemate and hoping that Russia gets tired first.
And on that front, I think one of the reasons people have different ideas about how well that could work is that there is shockingly wide disagreement about what the casualty or KIA ratio is in this war. I've seen sensible people whose opinion I respect on other matters assert that the ratio is 12:1 in Ukraine's favor. Well indeed, if that were the case, every few thousand soldiers sent to the front is a big problem for Russia! But my own estimate is that the ratio is probably closer to 6:1 in Russia's favor - and with such a spectacularly wide disagreement about the facts on the ground, it's no wonder I'd come to a different conclusion about the merits of sending small numbers of reinforcements.
12:1 is a preposterous ratio, this would imply that Russia lost 1.2 million soldiers if Ukraine lost only 100K (and the Wikipedia article on the matter says Ukraine lost an estimated 500K).
Any Western strategy in Ukraine short of deploying a few US carrier groups with full complement of F-35s and flying in stealth bombers from bases in Europe amounts to "aiming for a bloody stalemate". If anyone imagines even 100K of European troops can just triumphantly march to Russian borders, they are full of hot air. Inexperienced troops without air superiority will just get slaughtered against prepared defences. EU doesn't even have armour to send along - they already given most of their working tanks to Ukraine.
As for loss ratio, I find 12:1 figure utterly ridiculous, and 1:6 unlikely. Russian advantage in artillery and advantage in air almost guarantees loss ratio that is favourable for Russia, but probably not by THAT much, since Russia is attacking (with the exception of last summer, which cost Ukraine dearly). Tales of "enemy meat waves" persist from both sides, but I believe they're either propaganda, or a more-or-less real tactic used by both sides in positional warfare.
How would Gen Z be better in that that older generations? I think you are giving them a bit too much credit, or perhaps projecting your own beliefs onto a generation.
I do not think that anyone thinks "Macron sends the foreign legion into Ukraine, Putin nukes Paris" is a likely escalation scenario.
More like "Some Eastern European country decides to send troops to Ukraine, Putin responds by bombing some of their military supporting infrastructure on their soil, this leads to NATO triggering article 5 and a conventional war between Russia and NATO, which later turns nuclear."
How is it clear that Putin won't start a nuclear war? Sure, Putin isn't stupid or suicidal, so he wants to avoid a nuclear war if at all possible. As long as there are avenues for Putin to achieve some sort of victory In Ukraine, I certainly expect he will avoid the nuclear option. But why think there are no such events that could occur within Ukraine that won't lead to Putin going nuclear?
This idea that there's no way Putin will use nukes in Ukraine, therefore we can and should drive them out of Ukraine with NATO troops is just tragically misguided. If Putin genuinely believes some victory in Ukraine is critical to Russia's security future (say, shoring up defense of Crimea by controlling the Donbas), he would be rational to go nuclear. Not necessarily nuking NATO territory, but raising the stakes with a nuclear strike within Ukraine and wagering that he cares more about Ukraine than the west does. Of course this may lead to a runaway escalation that ends in a nuclear exchange between NATO and Russian territory.
The follow-up at this point in these discussions is usually that there's no way that Putin genuinely believes Ukraine is critical to Russian security. That there's no way anyone would risk the world for control of Ukraine. (This is also where they wave away America's response to potential Soviet missiles in Cuba.) Those in the West have a really hard time understanding how non-westerners think and can't avoid projecting western knowledge and beliefs onto their enemies. It's the hegemonic version of 'it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it'.
Main argument would be that he hasn't started one so far despite being pushed out of large parts of Ukraine, so so long as Russia isn't getting directly invaded he seems unlikely to be pushed past the line.
How much evidence does "he hasn't started a nuclear war yet" have for the claim "he will never start a nuclear war (over Ukraine territory losses)" if the expected value of a nuclear war is massively negative? Rationally, nearly zero it seems. The question we need to wrestle with is when does his evaluation of the utility of a nuclear war reach parity to his current circumstance? His behavior far from this parity has zero predictive value for his behavior at parity.
Maybe, but otoh you also raise the risk of nuclear war if you take threats from nuclear powers too seriously (since you incentivise maybe-callable nuclear threats).
Imagine if some of the countries of Europe (or NATO) get in there and the Russians start to lose heavily. The triumphant allied armies reach the border with Russia…
Under international law the Ukrainians and allies have the right to cross that border, but it’s clearly a red line for Russia. So we have to hope for a victory but not too much of a victory.
I don't think anyone would likely invade Russia with the goal of conquering a slice of it (even if they could win militarily, the idea of having to occupy such a slice in the face of a hostile population which gets covered aid by a superpower should not appeal to anyone).
However, I can think of plenty of reasons why you would want to send troops over the border while Russia is still holding part of Ukraine:
* Having control of some Russian territory will give you a stronger negotiation position in eventual peace talks
* Propaganda considerations
* Russia might need to redeploy troops currently occupying Ukraine to defend their territory
* Denying Russia a safe staging ground
I can also see some motivation for aerial attacks on Russian soil:
* Attacking their logistics trail
* Responding tit-for-tat to attacks on civilian (or dual-use) infrastructure like the power grid
If the war escalates, I think that these pathways are much more likely than Ukraine getting to 100% and wanting to continue for 120%.
I'm guessing neither Ukraine nor its allies would be willing to cross that border, yeah (partly because of the nukes, partly because actually invading Russia is a hopeless quagmire with no good end goal)
Ukrainians have crossed the border and engaged in direct firefights on the Russian territory more than once at this point. So that's water under the bridge (ha! that was attacked multiple times too!).
Hello! A bit off topic, but I am running a anonymous 3-min salary survey in Berlin/Munich with a small team of volunteers. It's for Tech/Startups & corporate space. If you can participate or help me spread the word I would much appreciate:
This comment section once included a fellow whose depression went away after he began applying traction to his neck.
I've recently been reading about how a deranged ratio between ω3 and ω6 fatty acids can cause depression. (There's a fascinating book "Omega Balance" written by a biologist, not a nutritionist.)
As can lack of sunlight and exercise.
Saunas and red light therapy help some. Cold plunges and tummo breathing help others.
I (a not particularly knowledgeable American) suspect that Canada's medical system probably incentivizes against finding medical providers who will help with the lengthy and experimental process of trying out extralegal therapies. The US medical system has criminal shortcomings, but does make it relatively easier for determined middle class people to find sympathetic providers.
In the interim, I suspect your best bets may be DIY solutions. You might take a look at /r/unclebens or /r/therapeuticketamine for some starting inspiration. Waiting on government-provided healthcare to catch up with these trends sounds like a frustrating experience. (Although, if any Canadians with differing experiences want to share theirs, I would love to be wrong about this)
News to me and quite bizarre that anyone would use the term to mean "around 150k"- what is the logic behind that? To me it obviously means 500k (although the ~316k idea has some merit too).
Yes, there's a certain Benford's-law logic to it, but I also think there's a not-strictly literal logic going on about how salaries are described. I think the typical use of "six-figure salary" is for a 100K-200K range (and therefore 150K is mid), because "six-figure" puts it in the best possible light. Clearly a salary of 999K is also in a literal-sense "six-figure", but it would probably be described as a "near-million-dollar" salary or something.
I'm a possibly interesting guy doing possibly interesting things. Now in Egypt.
https://youtu.be/8_NW_yFC2Oc?feature=shared
https://ydydy.substack.com/
Six eighth-graders facing criminal charges for "hateful and racist" online chat: https://abcnews.go.com/US/eighth-graders-charged-racist-group-chat-southwick-massachusetts/story?id=108123039
But yeah, some rich affirmative action plagiarist losing her job at Harvard is the real authoritarianism
If you've noticed that Boeing has been in the news quite a bit recently, and not for the reasons they would like to be, you may be interested in this article.
https://backofmind.substack.com/p/how-the-wrong-side-won-at-boeing
It has some interesting things to say about the "Ricardian fallacy," and treating financial reports as the be-all-end-all of understanding the state of a business.
I remember reading recently... not sure if it was on Less Wrong or Astral Codex Ten... a great insight about colonialism: how it made the colonies poor, *without* necessarily making the empires rich. The colonies suffered a lot and had their wealth stolen, but the empires had to build armies which cost a lot of money and it is not obvious that the entire thing was a net benefit. So instead of modeling the situation as "X stealing money from Y", it would perhaps be better to see it as "X burning Y's money".
And I just realized how all this logic also perfectly applies to Soviet Union. Soviet Union made its satellite states poor *without* making itself rich. An average person in Russia was actually much poorer than e.g. an average person in Czechoslovakia. So from the perspective of the person in Czechoslovakia, it made sense to complain that their country was made poor by the decades of Soviet occupation... and from the perspective of the person in Russia, it made sense to object "what do you mean by 'poor'? look at me -- if you think that I have your money, you are crazy".
The answer is that there is no contradiction between "X making Y poor(er)" and "X not becoming richer in the process". Just like in real life, breaking someone else's legs doesn't make your legs healthier. But with wealth, people often have this fixed-sum intuition, and expect that if wealth was taken from somewhere, it *must* have appeared somewhere else (and if it did *not* appear somewhere else, then the person complaining about the theft is lying).
That makes me think about the later development of Eastern Europe. How much of the economical growth was the financial support from EU, and how much was... simply the Soviet Union not ruining things anymore. (This is not a dilemma; I assume that *both* numbers were huge.)
maybe you bumped into this? https://www.econtalk.org/can-a-nation-plunder-its-way-to-wealth-with-noah-smith/
While its true that most colonies cost more to build and maintain than they ever provided countries (individuals profited, but their countries did not), do you have evidence that colonialism "made colonies poor"?
Looking at Africa, most of sub-Saharan Africa was absolutely dirt poor when it was colonized and was not meaningfully growing at all. So it's kind of absurd to say these countries were "made poor" by colonization. And since they weren't growing, even claiming that they were kept poor by colonization would be extremely dubious unless you had evidence that despite hundreds or thousands of years of stagnation outside of a few pockets, sub-Saharan Africa would have undergone massive growth just after the time colonization began despite showing absolutely no indications of this. Remember, Western Europe didn’t go from African level society to industrialization overnight. It had a long history of development, including strong advances in agriculture and a long intellectual tradition stretching back centuries and ultimately culminating in the scientific and industrial revolutions. Most of Africa never even invented the wheel, written language etc. but we’re supposed to believe that they were on the precipice of an economic revolution coincidentally just around the time they were colonized?
Aboriginal Australians have lived on the Australian continent for as long as 60,000 years and never came close to developing the rudimentary ingredients of economic development – were they too just about to get somewhere right before colonization? What a coincidence!
Of course, all this ignores the fact that many African colonies pretty obviously experienced massive economic growth. Even putting aside cases like South Africa and Zimbabwe which achieved remarkable levels of development under white/colonial rule, the GDP of most colonies grew significantly under colonial rule. There’s no conceivable way of describing these places as having gotten poorer during colonization. In fact, at the peak of colonialism, many of these colonies had larger GDPs than most countries around the world. It was only after colonization ended that growth in Africa stopped (or in some cases reversed) while the rest of the world (especially Asia) started growing economically.
Additionally, it is categorically wrong to claim that Africa is poor today because its resources were "stolen". Not only is abundant natural resources not a prerequisite for economic growth, but Africa still has more mineral resources than most of the rest of the world. So lack of resources is unambiguously NOT the problem facing Africa today. Africans are simply incapable of running functional governments and economic endeavours.
A lot of American liberals have somehow been convinced that Nigeria is some kind of African success story, that it’s a wealthy country full of smart black Africans or something. But not only is Nigeria much poorer and more dysfunctional than most people realize, it’s main export industry is oil and gas, and even here, despite its massive population, it is significantly dependant on foreign companies to operate these projects for them.
And you so often see western liberals crying about shirtless African children shovelling dirt in some cobalt mine or something, but then they’ll also cry about western mining companies operating in Africa. But the former is exactly what you get when Africans are left to mine their resources themselves without the help of foreign companies.
So much of African economic growth over the past few decades has been a result of western (and Chinese) resource projects (these companies not only operate e.g. mines, but they also find the mineral deposits in the first place, fund and manage the construction of the mine and processing works etc), royalties from which are used to fund infrastructure projects and so on.
And yet, people point to this growth (which is already fizzling) as evidence for what Africans are capable of without Europeans “holding them down”, but in reality this growth would have been impossible without Europeans (and Chinese).
But you need to understand that the “Colonialism made third world countries poor and Europe rich” line is one of the founding myths of modern leftism (along with “Slavery made America rich is why African Americans are poor today”). It justifies mass third world immigration to Europe and helps convince people that massive, categorical societal outcome differences have nothing to do with genetic differences. Accordingly, no amount of evidence could ever possibly get these people to ever admit that it is wrong, and it has such appeal they have no need to ever provide hard evidence for their claims and can rely exclusively on narratives.
Colonialism put in place extractive administrations, and when those "empires" collapsed what's left is what you see now.
There's a huge difference between dirt cheap but more egalitarian and dirt cheap but authoritarian. The previous one is very easy to "fix" the other one has vested interests keeping things that way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcUKP1sAto8 James A Robinson's talk at Google (probably part of the Why Nations Fail book tour)
> “Colonialism made third world countries poor and Europe rich”
meh, it's true in the sense that colonialism prevented anyone else except the empires to even start developing. what made Europe rich is the Industrial Revolution (which was of course much more than just technical/industrial changes)
Modern political groups are absolutely unhinged when it comes to certain memes/beliefs, which shows in their extreme reactions to certain policy proposals, and data/evidence/reason doesn't do much to them :(
What counterfactual do you consider as an alternative to colonization? If it is something like "(sub-Saharan) Africa was isolated from the rest of the world by a magical force field", then yes, the region would still be horribly poor. But if it is something like "(sub-Saharan) Africa engaged in mutually beneficial trade with the rest of the world, but was never colonized", then better outcomes are possible.
(My guess is that in the alternative realities where Europeans somehow did not colonize Africa, most likely someone else did; probably Arabs or Russia. Anyway, the claim is that colonization is bad, not that it is only bad when Europeans do it.)
Interaction with other cultures contributes to progress. It was not necessary for each European country to invent everything independently -- they could learn from each other. If there is a country in Europe that has never invented anything meaningful, it still has a relatively high quality of life. Aboriginal Australians were isolated geographically. So was sub-Saharan Africa. But even if one part of the world invents better travel, previously unreachable places become reachable.
Another damage from colonialism is borders between countries that respect neither natural obstacles such as mountains and rivers (which would make them easier to defend), nor ethnic groups (which would reduce the conflicts within the country). That is a recipe for ongoing conflicts. (This applies not just to Africa, but also the former Ottoman Empire.) Colonialism is just another form of social engineering that typically ends with a disaster.
I’m not an expert at UK law, but I read that as two years in jail and an additional 2 years suspended, not the same 2 years suspended. If you and OP are right, that’s a valid point, but the more natural reading is that those are consecutive.
My project recently released this - it has been described as a return to OK Go style, true effort music videos - Inception meets Fear and Loathing, it imagines how democratised neuralink-like tech could unfold.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3d-cmd0GjU
It additionally plays with the metamodern tension between silliness and depth / irony and sincerity.
For fans of Techno-Buddhism, 80s Sci Fi with a touch of Tim and Eric.
Curious on interpretations of the message if anyone would like to deep dive it.
In the UK, you will *literally* receive a harsher penalty for distributing "racist" stickers than for RAPING a child (well, at least if you're a brown rapist, not sure about if you're white).
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leeds-68448867
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-tyne-68446855
Why can't we be more like enlightened Europe?
So all of this is appalling, and I agree that the sentences should be different, but looking at your sources, the rapists did get longer sentences. The sticker guy got 2 years and the rapists got:
Omar Badreddin, 26, for five counts of rape, jailed for 18 years
Mohamed Badreddin, 23, for six counts of rape and one count of assault by penetration, jailed for 13 years
Huzaefa Aleboud, 23, for assault by penetration, two counts of rape and assault occasioning actual bodily harm, jailed for five and a half years
Hamoud Al Soaimi, 21, for three counts of sexual assault and one assault by penetration, jailed for two years suspended for two years with 180 hours unpaid work
It’s also worth noting that the man with the shortest sentence was a minor when he committed the sexual assaults. With our juvenile justice system in America, I’m not sure I would expect a longer sentence, though trying as an adult is an option here.
In all fairness, you can hardly expect somebody to actually read something before linking it to make a culture war point, can you?
Nah, it doesn’t even have to be a valid url for those purposes
Two years suspended for two years is less than two years unsuspended, I think is his point.
Thank you for checking the article.
This is not the first time Hammond posted a comment that directly contradicted the information in a linked article, by the way.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-316/comment/50305521
I'm trying to find a specific SSC post from years ago. In it, I remember that Scott defines what "common knowledge" is, and something about how it involves an infinite regression of that everyone knows that everyone else knows that everyone else knows something is true. I don't think it was It Was You That Made My Eyes Blue, I think it came earlier than that. I remember maybe something about a teacher asking kids to stand up in a classroom...? Any help appreciated. Thanks!
I have a vivid memory of this Scott *Aaronson* post about this exact topic... https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=2410 perhaps you are misremembering the Scott?
In any case, that post is pretty good if you are interested in the subject!
Haha, yes, you are absolutely correct! No wonder I couldn't find it. Thank you!
A search for "Scott Alexander common knowledge" leads with two LessWrong posts, the first of which contains the infinite regression statement, and also links to a Scott Aaronson post and a SlateStarCodex post responding to Scott Aaronson.
https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/common-knowledge
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/
Here's a Google search for the words "common knowledge", restricted to SSC. Maybe it will jog some memories.
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aslatestarcodex.com+%22common+knowledge%22
Thanks, but I already tried that. I didn't find what I was looking for.
As someone who initially thought that Rittenhouse was probably guilty but eventually came around to it being legitimate self defence, I do think that I keep an open mind. And thus it's important to highlight when I have a major update in the *other* direction as well. I'd never paid much attention to the Floyd case before and had gotten an inaccurate picture due to hanging out in conservative circles.
Last night, I read this post about this case, and the details are far, far worse than I'd imagined. It really is appalling. And thus I'm reposting this in the hopes that everyone else reads it as well.
https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/the-retconning-of-george-floyd
Thanks for sharing this. It definitely conflicted with the information I've been seeing and, although I'm pretty distrustful of Balko as a source, I think his articles were well written and persuasive. I've definitely updated my priors. I really do appreciate this!
Glenn Loury's posts in response to Radko's work are worth the read. Loury's blunt self-reflection is refreshing and his willingness to bluntly self-examine -- without then drowning in it -- is impressive.
The entire situation was a horrible mess. The wrong people, on both sides, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Should Chauvin have knelt on Floyd's back/neck like that, for that long? No. Should he have ignored the calls to check on him, take his pulse, etc? No. Did he deliberately set out to kill him? I don't think so.
While he shouldn't have 'restrained' him that way, also Floyd had been complaining of not being able to breathe even while sitting in the police car. I can understand why Chauvin thought he was faking, that he wanted to be released so he could get up and try running off again, and if he was able to keep talking then he was not having breathing difficulties.
Doesn't make it all right, but also doesn't mean Chauvin was a racist out to murder the first black guy he could get his hands on.
> Doesn't make it all right, but also doesn't mean Chauvin was a racist out to murder the first black guy he could get his hands on.
That seems like a weird strawman, since noone would ever think that he deliberately set out to kill people in the first place. Now Daniel Perry on the other hand...
Charging him with intentional homocide was never considered.
Chauvin was charged and convicted of unintentional second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter.
There was no need to block the carotid artery once Floyd was prone with hands cuffed behind his behind his back. Moving his knee to Floyd’s shoulder would have kept him immobile on the ground.
I have no way off knowing if he was a racist. I’m pretty sure he was a cruel SOB and a bad cop though.
You should not significantly change your mind on almost any public reporting about the Floyd case. It became so politicized that no public reporting is trustworthy.
I don't have any police experience or MMA experience but I do have some limited experience with mental health and patient restraint and the way this case was discussed...does not match my personal experience or my observations of professionals. I would encourage you, if you have the opportunity, to talk with a psych tech about physical restraint but I'm reasonably confident they would agree to the following:
#1 There's is no safe or risk free way for one adult to physically restrain another. Team response is very important because you want roughly 5 psych techs per patient in a physical encounter for both staff and patient safety. If an alarm gets sounded, everyone needs to respond, even if you're a rando, because one staff member can "safely" restrain and transport one limb. The patient can absolutely hurt himself during an event.
The idea that a police office, alone or with another on a public street, could safely physicall restrain an adult with no risk for any party sounds absurd in this context.
#2 The fact that a patient appears calm and sedate absolutely does not mean that the patient is calm and sedate.
#3 The idea that the minutiae of techniques and procedures in a training manual taught years ago are applicable to relatively rare and extremely stressful events is...more of a liability thing for the institution than something staff take seriously.
Incidentally, this is my understanding for why institutions have...certain areas for physically violent patients. Some of it absolutely is punishment but a lot of it is that staff on those units know what they're doing. They deal with physical outbursts every day where other units just don't and so they're much, much better at it.
This doesn't mean that the Rodney Balko reporting is wrong, nor that the case is actually really, really complex, it's just that it requires certain specialist knowledge and for those people to be able to speak publicly and candidly about what's it's reasonable to expect an officer to do in these situations and what their reasonable limitations are.
But within, like, a few days it became clear that this event was radioactively political and no one with any sense would speak publicly about it without keeping that in mind. That means we don't know what happened...and that's what that means. No amount of additional digging or reporting is going to change the following facts: the only people who are in any position to judge whether this is reasonable are police officers in similar situations and a handful of similar professionals because it requires a great deal of subject matter expertise. And none of those people can speak frankly on this topic and most of them have really strong opinions. Short of bringing in like a Vietnamese police officer with a long history of physical takedowns...we don't know and we won't know. That sucks but that's it.
I worked for 5 years in a big psychiatric hospital. My unit had very few patients who were violent -- our treatment approach was only appropriate for people who wanted to be in the hospital -- but I did receive the required training in handling those situations. I don't know whether the training was in an approach my hospital had developed. or whether it followed some guidelines set by some agency in charge of oversight and applied to all psych hospitals. We definitely were not taught methods of restraint that involved getting the person on the ground and physically overpowering them. The restraint I remember most clearly involved 2 staff members approaching the patient and each taking one of their arms. There was a particular way you held their arms that made it difficult for them to yank them free of pull all 3 of you to the ground. A third staff member was to walk behind. and help out as needed.
I also did consults on the units with psychotic patients. I never saw any violence there, or even screaming and agitation without an element of violence. I'm sure violence occurred sometimes. but I don't think it was at all frequent. My impression is that psychotic or severely agitated people are medicated pretty aggressively these days, and antipsychotic drugs are usually sedating. Units also had "quiet rooms," locked rooms with nothing in them but a mattress where people who posed a substantial risk to themselves or others stayed. The was a rule for how often these people had to be checked by nursing staff -- I think it was every 15 minutes.
Anyhow, our hospital was expensive, heavily staffed and well-run. I'm sure there are places that are more at the snake pit end of the spectrum where violent people are dealt with more harshly. But antipsychotic drugs are used very widely, and the ones in the older generation are cheap and work very well to sedate people, even if they aren't that great at clearing up psychosis. So the snake pit era is pretty much over.
Interesting. Did the "quiet rooms" have beds like this?
https://www.handcuffwarehouse.com/humane-restraint-locking-bed-restraint-kits-2-9/
Partly I'm just curious for personal knowledge. The amount of variation in how MH and hospitals in general operate is wild to me. I don't recall medication being a critical factor.
But those beds are...kinda of what I was thinking of. Like, and let me exercise some professionalism in case I ever get doxxed...If I showed a layman those beds and described a patient being restrained and secluded in one of those beds in a "quiet room" for...significant periods of time...I would be concerned that they could very easily form dangerously wrong impressions unless we were able to convey the circumstances both accurately and emphatically.
No, the beds were just a mattress on the floor -- or maybe it was a raised area of the floor -- covered with some rubbery stuff to protect against spills. But we did have restraints -- they were called posies in the trade. Here are some :https://www.tidiproducts.com/restraints-and-restraints-alternatives
We did have someone on the unit who was posied to her bed for a couple days. She wasn't violent, just completely and totally confused. Delirious, not psychotic. I believe she just had the wrist restraints on during the day, and wrist plus ankles at night, and didn't mind them. She may not even have been aware she was restrained. As for the guy in your picture, strapped to the bed -- I expect they did that sometimes on the units with sicker people. But there were very strict rules on checking the person frequently, and each check had to be documented. The nurses really did the checking, too, didn't cheat. And anybody needing that level of restraint would have gotten a big shot of haliperidol plus benzos, and that form of chemical restraint is very effective. Personally, I found it creepier than the straps.
#4 The fact that a jury convicted a cop of *murdering* a lowlife criminal, should update your prior very strongly in the direction of that cop being an actual murderer who murdered someone that day. Juries *really* hate convicting cops of killing lowlife criminals, and even when they can't in good conscience vote not to convict they generally find an excuse to convict only on a lesser charge.
And since the jury spent far more time studying the evidence than you did, as well as having access to a better class of evidence not tainted by media spin, you should probably not use your own reading of the media reports your own understanding of different situations and institutions, to update much further.
Really?
You really think he got a fair trial? I couldn't avoid this story, although I managed to avoid the video, a bunch of cities had crazy riots, probably whatever one he was in did too. You think he got a fair trail? You think they found 12 people...anywhere in America without an opinion on this?
If I told you a kid died in police custody in, say, Istanbul and the whole city rioted for months and in the end a jury found one of the police officers guilty...would you really think he got a fair and unbiased trial?
I'm sorry, I want to stay out of this but people keep linking to this Balko thing and I read it and...really? We're starting with the minutiae of a 10 point checklist from...like 7 years before the event? I think you've worked for the government, do you remember your hazardous materials training from five years ago?
I'm sorry, it's very possible if this had never been filmed that Chauvin would have been found guilty. But you can't actually think that in the midst of all the madness that popped over this that proper policies and procedures were followed in an unbiased manner. That's...frankly expecting too much from the people in authority. And I see people swapping half-baked takes back and forth like it means anything.
I think he got a fair trial, yes. With twelve people who had not-fanatically-closed-minded opinions going in, about half of which were "Floyd was a scumbag, Chauvin was a good cop doing a hard job, maybe he went a little overboard but he's no murderer". Then they saw the evidence you didn't, heard the arguments you didn't, talked it over with each other, and changed their mind.
Have you ever served on a criminal jury? Because I'm not sure what you imagine was going on here, but I don't think it bears much resemblance to reality.
I avoided the video too. I thought I was the only one in the country who had.
I watched every 9/11 video, though, and listened to the audios of people's last calls to 911. I sort of felt like I should, dunno why. But about that there wasn't the element of different factions hating on each other for not seeing the event the same way.
Yeah, no, I don't need to see a snuff film. I've seen enough dark stuff to know that it hinders rationality, not helps it.
I'm guessing you think Rittenhouse got a fair trial despite being just as infamous? I suspect that you're working backwards from whether you agree with the verdict in order to decide whether the trial was "fair" or not.
I don't have strong opinions on the top level conversation, but my impression was that Rittenhouse's trial was sufficiently separated from the original events and the hype around everything had calmed down enough to be more fair than I expected Chauvin's trial to be.
I don't know if Chauvin was, or should have been found, guilty. I knew from early on that he would be found guilty, just based on how strong public opinion on the matter was. I've heard that some seemingly shady things happened with the investigation to make it harder for him to be found not guilty, such as the autopsy report changing to match public perception/outcry before being released. If such a thing is true, then the finding of the jury would not be unexpected, but the results were baked in by that point.
The claim that the autopsy report was changed is addressed in the second part of the series here: https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/the-retconning-of-george-floyd-part
I dunno.
And I mean that sincerely. I looked into buying a shotgun for home defense at one point and was ultimately put off by the sheer legal complexity, not of buying but of use. The laws on self defense seem...highly circumstantial and highly obtuse to a casual observer but have dramatic consequences. At some point Google starts showing you adds for, like, firearm legal insurance (1) and you just tap out. Which still cheeses me off because I remember living in neighborhoods with...moderate gunfire and that was "acceptable"...grumble grumble grumble.
I do carry a pocket knife and frankly I've just given up on trying to figure out the laws. It's under 3 inches and generally I think that's safe but...I could be in Houston one week and Seattle the next and SF the week after that and there's no sensible way for me to keep track of knife laws in each jurisdiction, especially because Berkley can have different laws to Oakland which can have different laws to Palo Alto. At some point you just give up.
So how the heck do I know what the law of, what was the situation, a minor outside his hometown who was open carrying and kinda got into an argument with some guys but kinda not and then he ran away and then they threw him to the ground and he opened fire. There's like four or five special situations there. How the heck would I, or anybody else who's not a lawyer with some research time know how that's supposed to shake out? And yeah, he probably also had a biased jury. If you tell me the guy three courts down got an impartial trial because they've never even heard of the plaintiff or the defendant, yeah, makes sense. But everyone heard of this Rittenhouse kid.
Dude, fundamentally, I think you and I both heard the Rittenhouse thing on the radio and we're like, "Damn, everyone involved sounds retarded. God knows how that's going to shake out in the court system." And we don't have a good enough media apparatus to substantially improve on that take. You can read 100 pieces of media on it and it's not gonna make you smarter, it's just going to make you dumber and more biased. That sucks, you might deeply care about the truth of the situation, but your desire for the truth is not gonna magically make a decent media appear, anymore than a dying man's thirst on a desert island is going to make fresh water appear, or drinking salt water anything more than foolish.
(1) https://ww2.uslawshield.com/, genuinely unsure if it's a scam or not.
I did think Rittenhouse did get a fair trial, but that probably is coloured by him being acquitted. It was very political. I don't think he was blameless, but it was self-defence. If he was wrong to be carrying a rifle around, so were the protesters who brought guns with then for the same reasons he did - that is, they thought there was a good chance things would get violent and they wanted to protect their side.
I have to admit, I did do some unkind laughing at the jokes about Gaige Grosskreutz. So I'm a bad person.
And I see he hasn't had much luck since; first he wanted to change his name and that got leaked - new name is Paul Prediger - and then he got knocked down in a hit-and-run accident.
https://www.sportskeeda.com/pop-culture/news-paul-prediger-gofundme-raises-990-victim-formerly-known-gaige-grosskreutz-injured-hit-and-run-incident?utm_source=ground.news&utm_medium=referral
How many professionals do you need to restrain a prone man with his hands cuffed behind his back? How many after he loses consciousness. How many after he loses consciousness and goes limp. How many after you can’t find his pulse? Chauvin’s knee was on Floyd’s neck to that point.
They had 4 policemen there the entire time.
It’s just not as complicated as Chauvin’s defenders are trying to portray it.
Please. Just watch the video.
I can't think of any situation where we were instructed to have less than 5 staff until the patient was restrained and secluded on a bed. Regardless of restraint, consciousness, or other factors. Not an expert, absolutely willing to defer to experienced psych techs here, but that's absolutely my understanding.
And these are never trivial or uncomplicated. Have you ever seen the amount of paperwork and procedure that follows one of these events? They're always non-trivial and involve a host of administrative, legal, psychiatric, and medical involvement.
I'm like 80% confident if I showed you a takedown by trained professionals of a violent patient it would look shocking and barbaric to you. There's a lot more going on here than an untrained observer can understand. I'm certainly not qualified, I just know enough to appreciate how much I don't know in these scenarios. And I'm certainly not going to trust the media to describe highly charged political events accurately because of, well, life. Nor am I going to trust a video when I know how misleading a 5-10 minute video of a similar event without context would be.
Read the trial testimony and timeline along with the video. You will get the entire context along with police testimony. There is no mystery about what happened here.
The takedown was complete. Honestly I don't care how brutal that part was. On his feet, he was a danger to others and himself even if cuffed. The threat needed to be neutralized. He was a big guy.
But now they had Floyd prone on the pavement. Hands cuffed behind his back. Chauvin's knee on Floyd's neck.
At that point he was a threat to no one. According to expert trial testimony - fellow police - he could not move.
Chauvin could have moved his knee to Floyd's back and there still would be no way Floyd could have risen, but he kept his knee on Floyd's neck obstructing the carotid artery as dozens of civilian witnesses watched. This is the point when I and the rest of my community became very concerned. This wasn't filtered through the thought police at MSNBC. It took place before our very eyes on that evening's news without editorial commentary on every local television station.
Three other officers provided backup. Floyd lost consciousness and Chauvin's partner asked if they should roll Floyd into the procedure prescribed 'recovery position'. Chauvin said no and kept his knee on Floyd's neck.
An off-duty EMT on scene became alarmed at Floyd's appearance and encouraged the police to check Floyd's pulse. They did not until Floyd had gone limp and several more minutes passed. By that time they could find no pulse.
This has nothing to do with something that took place inside the walls of a mental institution. It was broad daylight in the middle of a well trafficked city street in a metro area of 2 million people.
I'm pretty sure the jury got this one right.
I still need to write a summary of Balko's analysis, but in addition to whether what Chavin did was wrong, it was also against policy.
Policy was to use a knee briefly to add a hobble, which is another restraint. There was no need to hold Floyd down in a way that impeded his breathing.
I think one of the reasons there was so much rage over Floyd's death is that the usual reason given for police killing is that there was a situation that called for quick decisions, and it's unfair to second-guess them. In this case, there was a conspicuous lack of emergency.
Prone on the pavement, hands cuffed behind his back, knee on his neck - he was a threat to no one. Chauvin could easily have kept him pinned by moving his knee to Floyd's shoulder as trial testimony by other police demonstrated.
I got the opposite information from that: I knew that Derek Chauvin was blatantly guilty, but I didn't know that even mainstream conservatives were still trying to die on the hill that he was innocent. That is just... *sigh* The next election is going to get unimaginably ugly.
You just have to look at WoodyAI's responses in this thread to see how twisted some peoples views on this topic have become.
This is the very worst thing of this era, no shared observable reality.
George Floyd was a knucklehead drug addict with a criminal record but didn’t deserve or need to die that day. I live just a few miles from there and watched the whole thing play out in real time, unfiltered on local live news coverage. The ensuing rioting and destruction were undeniably terrible.
The thing that most people, including Scott, overlooked, is that the city was under a once in a century lockdown. Things would have played out much differently if so many, many people weren’t sitting at home unable to go to work or school at the time.
I watched the crowds and saw the times police were able to break off a manageable number number to arrest, zip tie, pat down and load onto Metro busses for booking. The people protesting peacefully but breaking a lawful curfew were overwhelmingly ordinary white 20 somethings. No specimen of Antifa was ever produced. One Boogaloo Boy that took part in the burning of the 3rd precinct police station was the only person arrested to be found acting on some half-assed organized ideology.
From the evidence that was reliable - CCTV coverage - the typical arsonists were adolescent black kids, very young, early teens. Nihilistic in the way only the very young and poorly socialized can be, enjoying a multi day version of Detroit’s infamous Halloween ‘Hell Night’.
Teenage punks, to put it plainly.
Yes, Rittenhouse acted in self defense but he had no business being where he was, doing what he was at the time.
> Things would have played out much differently if so many, many people weren’t sitting at home unable to go to work or school at the time.
Yeah. Something much less burny happened in my city, and when I was in the area for unrelated reasons, I got the distinct impression that there were lot of people who wanted very badly to get out of lockdown, and then suddenly all the Serious People who had been telling them to stay home, flipped on a dime and said that it was OK to go to a protest. There was a vibe of "let's go down to the protest and see what's happening".
I just watched LA Confidential. Hadn’t seen it since 1997. I remembered your ‘boyo’ remark from a couple threads ago.
Fun to anticipate it.
What an amazing movie. Did you ever read the book?
It was really good. I didn’t know it was an adaptation. I l think I missed the critical ‘boyo’ line in the theater because the film was longish and because of my habit of buying a ‘best value’ soda in those days.
The book is like the movie, but **even more so**. They had to trim out at least half the plot (author says 5/8ths) just to get something filmable. I highly recommend it.
He had no business being at a private business, protecting it from rioters? Why not?
It seems to me he was basically a hero. Volunteered his time to help defend a business, went around giving out water and generally helping out and being nice. Was attacked by a disturbed pedophile (while wearing a rifle openly!), tried to retreat but ended up having to shoot him, tried to get to the police and turn himself in and was attacked by multiple other people and was forced to shoot them but did so with astonishing accuracy and restraint. Typical training is to shoot center of mass and empty the clip but he was shooting guys in the arm and then stopping and continuing to retreat. Amazing.
I'm not quite the same audience as you (my initial thoughts on these cases were "Rittenhouse was beyond stupid but probably technically legitimate self defense," and "I strongly believe what Chauvin did to Floyd was criminal"), but I think we have a fair bit of overlap, and I'd agree this is a good article. I'd never dove enough into the conservative mediaverse to hear about the MRT angle, interesting to learn about here.
So, if this article is to be taken seriously, Google has become a DEI basket case.
https://www.piratewires.com/p/google-culture-of-fear
Anyone know how trustworthy Pirate Wires or Mike Solana are?
I don't have a strong opinion, but I'll note that Zvi quotes him a lot and Scott seems to trust Zvi, which is something at least.
Does anyone else worry about the concept of online "bait", and how it's becoming more common to ignore anyone with a wildly different view or opinion?
Any idea that's sufficiently idiotic or ill-informed seems to be immediately written off as 'someone trying to mess with people for a reaction', and deemed not worthy of your time. But it seems perfectly plausible that there could be someone unironically touting such views, and in that case, do we not just reinforce that person's echo chamber by choosing not to debate them? Where do you draw the line?
I ask because I see plenty of obvious bait on a daily basis - that's not the stuff I'm referring to. Rather, I mentioned a post in this very comment section, and my partner immediately said "ha, and people were actually replying to them?" like it was an impressive feat of trickery, but the vibe I got was way more sincere. If we start treating every "crazy" opinion we see as "bait", then are we not just siloing the people who honestly hold these views?
Bad faith changes everything. If you advocate for a weird, apparently crazy or evil idea, but I believe you're a sane person speaking in good faith, I may give you a listen and may eventually even come to agree with you. If I think you're crazy or trolling, then I don't want to waste my time.
The result is that if you want an environment where weird, apparently crazy/evil ideas can be discussed sensibly, you need to keep the trolls and crazies out.
I think "bait" is less about the quality of the opinion but rather about the structure of its expression.
I may have an incorrect belief borne out of ignorance ("Earth is flat!") but that belief can be expressed in whole range of ways, some of which are indicative of openness and good faith ("Based on X and Y and Z, I think Earth is flat") or of some measure of trolling or misanthropy ("Shills and morons may tell you Earth is round, but high-IQ ballers like me know it's really flat!").
If something has incorrect content but decent expression, then open engagement makes sense, but even an opinion I agree with may not be worth it if the nature of the expression points to bait, trolling, or otherwise wasting one's time.
Yes, this is where I'm at. I will not even engage with people who have the same beliefs as me if they can't express them without coming across as either an idiot or actively trying to bait a heated conversation.
Some people are legitimately ignorant of the broader picture and are throwing out their heartfelt thoughts on a topic. I sympathize with them, and sometimes try to wade into a conversation with the hopes of them having a greater understanding of the nuance. Most of them time it seems that instead it's just someone who wants to start a fight or will carelessly wade into one for lack of knowledge and care.
Yes, I worry about it, and here's how I've solved it for myself.
You and your partner are both reacting like you should. First – before you worry about whether it's bait – you have to worry about it in terms of leverage, and in the context of your own influence and social responsibility (and the trust, respect, vested interest, etc. that connects to those).
If a random, anonymous user on X says something crazy, you'd be wasting your energy and risking your own sanity by engaging. Even if they're 100% sincere, you're a complete stranger who has virtually no chance of changing their mind. Just ignore it and move on. Not everything you stay out of is a silo.
But if your close friend (or your partner) starts believing something crazy, you should obviously engage. You have a good chance of nudging them in a better direction, and you have a particular responsibility to do so, as you're better positioned to make a difference than most.
The persuasion gray zone, and where you can really change the minds of people who disagree with you on big things, is among acquaintances and within communities. Like this comment section, which is a loose-knit community that you're part of.
In here, you have some limited influence, respect, reputation, just by being part of the community, as well as some responsibility for and self-interest in engaging with what you think is crazy. Even if it's not sincere … if you think it might be, then someone else might take it seriously too, and so it might be an idea worth engaging with. If it is easy to dispense with, it will be.
Your partner, however, is presumably not part of the community (to the same degree), so they'd be right to ignore crazy and move on, just as if it came from the X rando.
How you define your community, how much leverage/status/influence you have, what your capacity for engaging is, etc. will vary from person to person, and you'll have to experiment to find out what works for you.
Second, you should always write at least partly for yourself. That way – especially if you're in a context like this, where you presumably have some beliefs and ideas and memes in common with the rest of us, and some ambient level of mutual respect – then you no longer have to worry much about taking someone's bait.
Sure, there will always be those who troll, bait, and mock sincere people, for fun or profit or because sophistry makes them feel smart. And it's really pathetic, sad, and nihilistic behavior, that says more about the person doing the baiting than the person taking the bait. If they knew how to be genuinely interesting, they'd presumably do that instead.
However, while it stings a little to feel like you've been played for a fool, it can be good sparring practice. A bait you'll take is probably one that challenges you to articulate something you care about. A good reply can deepen your thinking, sharpen your argumentation, and improve your writing. (For this reason, I often write replies that I don't post. I just file them away in my notes. They might become a paragraph in a future blog post, but probably not.)
If you're writing at least partly for yourself, and on your own terms, you can be absolutely sure at least one important person in your target audience is sincere, and probably more. Also, if you're writing at least partly for yourself, you probably won't engage in the same debates again and again, unless you benefit from it, but you will evolve and move on, and leave it to others to relitigate the arguments you're personally done processing.
Hope this helps a little.
It's a continuum. There are always younger people coming up on these ideas for the first time, and it takes quite a few years before you become jaded enough to opt out of conversation. What it ends up happening is that it mostly filters out the older and wiser. Which is why things are never as bad as they look like from online disputes.
On the other hand, the average voter is pretty bad, so things are still not great.
This was already happening for a few decades, even without the concept of baiting. When you see the same stupid argument for the 1000th time, you simply stop responding. How many replies can you write to "but evolution is just a *theory*, right?" before your brain just refuses to engage further?
Now I see the 1000th iteration of "but NATO promised never to expand" (with no specific author and date when this promise was supposedly made, of course) and I just sigh and scroll further, knowing well that the author of these words will interpret it as "no one has contradicted me meaningfully, therefore I am right".
The people who disbelieve evolution are still there, by the way, it's just that the culture wars have moved to a different frontline.
James Baker meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev, Feb 9, 1990. Google “not an inch to the East”
> Now I see the 1000th iteration of "but NATO promised never to expand" (with no specific author and date when this promise was supposedly made, of course)...
Have you read https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017-12-12/nato-expansion-what-gorbachev-heard-western-leaders-early ? Based on that, I think a competent lawyer could argue a respectable case one way or the other, depending on how they choose to define 'promise'.
What would the lawyers argue about? Certainly there was nothing legally binding so there could be no argument about that. Would they argue about whether "NATO" had made a promise? It seems to me these were merely statements made by individuals, and not official NATO positions. Personally I don't think anyone could reasonably expect these statements were meant to hold forever and even after the USSR was gone, but how much can you really make of some statesmen saying one thing and then years later other statesmen saying other things? Russia actually signed a "binding" treaty that it would respect and guarantee the territorial dignity of Ukraine!
My comment was meant to show that Viliam hasn't given a nuanced paraphrase of his opponents' position, and thus his disinterest in engaging with them can't be justified on the basis that he has already addressed everything they have to say.
My reference to lawyers was unclear. I meant that savvy people could easily find textual justification to either agree or disagree with the accuracy of Viliam's paraphrase of his opponents' position, because 'promise' doesn't have a clear enough definition in this context.
I don't think Putin's revanchist foreign policy is relevant to trying to understand Putin's understanding of what Gorbachev heard during the period when he was making three concessions (German reunification, Soviet withdrawal, end of Warsaw Pact) to NATO. I think the interpretation goes the other way, this being a standard, chronological timeline rather than some other sort of timeline.
This is not new though and not restricted to "online". It is a well known psy-op tactic to push wild exaggerations of parts of what is otherwise plausible explanation so as to get people to dismiss the whole.
Forget China, Japan, and Europe. I just discovered that *Uzbekistan* of all places has a bullet train. And they built it in 2011, in only seven months, less time than it takes an American builder just to scratch their ass. Now I'm really feeling civilizational inadequacy.
We could do much better in building bullet trains in the US than we do. I would argue that what trains we have under construction or planning are fulfilling exactly the purpose they were designed to. Actual trains moving reasonably high numbers of people are going to be very rare in the US because we have alternatives that are much better. Cars and planes. Those two modes of transportation do not require building a new network and can handle our needs. Planes are faster, cars are more versatile. Planes are even more versatile, since you only need to build the "station" rather than also needing to build the tracks between.
There are small areas, nearby cities with lots of traffic between them, where trains make sense. We have a fair number of them, especially in the Acela Corridor. We don't want or need trains across open country in CA, let alone across the Midwest or South.
The projects we get are not intended to transport large numbers of people efficiently. They are intended to provide jobs for people and boost the economy of construction and related industries. You can verify this by examining how many people are expected to ride these trains compared to the expected costs. Billions of dollars for a few thousand people a year is not reasonable, and the people planning these things are not stupid.
Japan and most of Europe are much denser then the US. China is much denser and also heavily overinvests in infrastructure of many kinds. The US doesn't want or need high speed trains.
> The projects we get are not intended to transport large numbers of people efficiently. They are intended to provide jobs for people and boost the economy of construction and related industries.
This is a fallacy. Obviously there are lots of groups with different incentives, and whenever money is involved, lots of people will rise up to try to get their cut, and the nature of California politics means that lots of people have veto power and influence hence can extract their tax. But in terms of the *actual people making the original decision*, i.e the voters, this is very obviously not true.
This is a bit like arguing that ordinary home builders don't actually want to construct housing, they just want to funnel money and jobs to random interest groups. That's the *effect* of trying to build anything thanks to CA's dysfunctional vetocracy, but it's certainly not the *intention*.
Suppose hypothetically that Trump had tried to pass the border wall through the normal legislative process, and congress working the way it is, the resulting law ended up with tons of "buy American" provisions and earmarks for particular districts and so on. Surely you would not argue that the "intention" of the law was to provide jobs to random districts? In this hypothetical, the intention would still be to Build The Wall and the rest is just normal sausage making.
Even with how dysfunctional Congress is, when something needs to be passed it gets passed quickly with minimal fanfare. Obvious needs are taken care of and obvious problems get fixed. The “dysfunction” is usually just disagreement about what should be done, with varying levels of institutional roadblocks put into place to prevent a temporary majority from implementing their goals.
If trains were an obviously good idea, they would get built. If they were so obviously superior to the alternatives, we wouldn’t be having this discussion, just like we aren’t discussing why it’s so hard to get airports built. The same processes are needed to build those, yet they go up without us even knowing there were discussions about permitting.
You think airports are somehow magically exempt from the forces that make infrastructure projects take forever and really expensive? Do you have any examples in mind?
Hmm, after some research I may be wrong about this or it's a more nuanced situation than I thought. The last major airport built in the US, Denver, was in 1995. There has been a significant increase in the number of private airports, from under 12,000 to almost 15,000 since 1990, but public airports have decreased.
I'm not sure what to make of that information, especially the rapid increase in private airports while public ones decrease, especially given that total passengers and flights have increased significantly in the same time.
Note that "private airport" mostly means "empty field that some rancher flies his Cessna out of, but he filed paperwork with the FAA so now it shows up on the charts". So this is not necessarily new airport construction, and probably just new official recognition of "airports" that were already in place. I don't know for sure why that would be; there's generally no requirement to formally register the patch of private land you operate your Cessna out of.
Hmm, registering your private airport does I think get you an official keep-out zone for pesky annoying drones; that could be some of it.
"Autocrat builds expensive, phallic status symbol quickly." Still not enviable, IMO.
For those who like mixing good deeds an capitalism: there is a hole in our financial system. We have banks to fund mundane businesses. We have Wall St. to fund huge corporations. We have Venture Capital to fund businesses which have the potential to become huge in a reasonably short period of time, or be sellable to a huge venture.
But what of creative businesses which have moderate, but nontrivial risk, but don't have the potential to become Wall St. sized? We need an equity market for such businesses so VCs and angels can cash out. Here is a proposal for such a market:
https://conntects.net/blogPosts/HolisticPolitics/137
Yeah, this is the "SBA" niche, basically if you have good credit and a reasonable idea and history (and a willingness to personally guarantee the loan and sometimes put in money or real estate), you can get $500k or $1M or whatever from your local bank that does SBA loans. Banks love them, because the government backstops them.
So these are literally government subsidized. I think the failure rate is still pretty high. But actual investors aren't going to invest in anything like this, there's zero upside and pretty high failure rates.
SBA is mostly for small, routine businesses where either the founder is willing and able to put up personal collateral, most of the loan is going to buy buildings and equipment that can be sold off to cover the loan if the business fails, or where a failed business can be resold for good money. Restaurants, small medical practices, event venues, auto mechanics, and machine shops are all probably good candidates for SBA loans. I.e. Carl's "mundane businesses".
I think what Carl is more speculative and ephemeral businesses that are more risky and have less residual value than classic small businesses but lower growth ceilings than classic VC-funded businesses. But on the broader answer, I agree with you and other responders that there probably isn't really a hole. I know of the following avenues for funding speculative small businesses:
1. Funding through personal assets and personal credit. These businesses aren't ideal candidates for SBA funding, but as you note, you can get an SBA loan anyway if you have good enough credit, put up enough personal collateral, and appear to have a salaried-employment career you can fall back on to pay back the loan if the business fails.
2a. Grow organically. Lack of tangible business assets that can be used as collateral usually implies that you don't need to buy a lot of stuff to get your business up and running. If you only have variable costs, or if the main input is your own labor, then you can probably start the business as a self-financed side hustle and gather additional capital through profits.
2b. Start small like in 2a, then borrow money from a bank or investor to scale up. Once you have a business up and running with a proven business model and revenue stream, then you look a lot less risky to banks and private investors.
3. Financing through advance sales. This is what Kickstarter does. Of course, there are a ton of failed-kickstarter horror stories ranging from incompetence to outright fraud, which limits the long-term niche for kickstarter-style financing. But it doesn't eliminate it: kickstarter is still a good solution to the problem of "I have a proven design ready for production, but I need to order a batches of at least 2000 units in order to get a reasonable unit price". For B2B businesses, advance sales are even more viable: if you're making a small number of big sales to businesses, then your customers can probably do more due diligence to assess your ability to deliver than a typical B2C kickstarter, and the small number of absolute sales needed means you don't really need a platform like kickstarter to aggregate prospective customers.
4. VC or angel funding with a "build for acquisition" business model. Many big businesses these days are to some extent dozens or hundreds of small-to-medium businesses in a trench coat, i.e. lots of little product lines with shared infrastructure supporting them. Most of these product lines are started internally, but it's also common to buy a successful independent business and merge it into your infrastructure. Lots of startups are built with the end goal of being an attractive acquisition candidate, and such an acquisition is just as good a "liquidity event" as an IPO.
5. VC or angel funding with an exist strategy of selling to private equity. This looks a lot like 4, but you don't need to be attractive to buy out and integrate into Microsoft or GE or Johnson & Johnson or whatever. You just need to get to the point where you're reliably profitable and able to pay a respectable dividend stream to a hedge fund or private equity firm that might want to own some percentage of your business as a long-term cash cow.
6. If all potential investors are telling you that your business idea is too risky to be worth investing in given the limited upside if successful, then consider the possibility that they might be right and your business idea isn't actually viable.
4 and 5 bother me. Too much concentration of economic power. A stable small cap stock exchange would increase the number of capitalists.
Traditionally, businesses that are smaller in scale and ambition than a high-flying YC/a16z funded startup are either bootstrapped and/or financed through credit (ie business loans, credit cards, benevolent vendors etc). The tradeoff for a more modest business plan is (or should be) a more predictable (though smaller) market with a well-defined need and a willingness to pay for the product/service. Capital markets and their investments are structured very differently; they are basically hit-oriented; a few huge performers pay for a long tail of less successful ventures.
I've heard the kind of business you are discussing called a "lifestyle" business, in contrast to a high-risk, high-reward wannabe unicorn.
It's a bad tradition. It's what the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act was supposed to fix.
And there are real companies which are ill served by Wall St. Lots of mining companies fall under this category. Stock price manipulation is terrible.
I don't think such a "hole" actually exists. For potentially profitable ideas, you have VC. For dubious ideas with good vibes, you have some combination of impact bonds, government grants, private charity, and Kickstarter and Patreon.
Combining charity and capitalism doesn't tend to work very well though.
Whole Foods Market worked out pretty well.
> Combining charity and capitalism doesn't tend to work very well though.
Indeed! ref. recent OpenAI drama
Does anyone have any recommendations for "political" novels? I don't mean defending any particular political system or policy. I more mean a novel of factions and scheming and plotting and stuff. It doesn't even have to be in the arena of actual government. I'm also super genre-agnostic - though I've been on a sci-fi kick lately.
Robert Harris did a trilogy about Cicero (starting with Imperium) - not sure how historically accurate it is, but it's a fun read about political machinations in ancient Rome.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/243601
You might enjoy "A Memory Called Empire" by Arkady Martine
For things set in earlier times, Dorothy Dunnett's "Lymond Chronicles" and Neal Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle". And Steven Brust and Emma Bull's "Freedom & Necessity", although it's been a while since I read it. Clavell's "Shogun", and I hear the rest of the connected novels have a lot of scheming too.
For sci-fi, bear with me for a moment, but one of the old Star Trek novels: John M. Ford's "The Final Reflection". It's really really really good, but it requires the reader to think.
You might also check out Zelazny's "Amber" series. James Ellroy's "L.A. Confidential": even if you've seen the movie (and you should absolutely see the movie), they had to cut out about half the plot, so there's still plenty of surprises.
And I'll echo the Vinge and Bujold recommendations.
‘A Deepness In The Sky’ by Vernor Vinge is dead centre “political” in the sense you mean, all about the plotting, counterplots, twists and turns of vertiginous cunning, and also one of the greatest sci-fi novels ever written…
‘House of Cards’ and its sequels (they were novels first!) is excellent. Parts of the Miles Vorkosigan cycle by Lois MsMaster Bujold (sci-Fi) definitely have politicking and faction fighting, although I wouldn’t say this was their primary delight. Iain M Banks’s ‘Excession’ is intricately political. Non-fiction, Tom Holland’s ‘Rubicon’, a rollicking narrative of the fall of the Roman Republic, is huge political fun.
Excession had the problem that the political scheming done by Minds (they should compare intellectually to humans as we compare to dogs, or maybe flatworms) didn't seem sufficiently clever, deep, or unwholesomely weird as they should have been.
Very true; and a problem with the series as a whole. It’s actually hard to think of any example of superintelligence in fiction that actually comes across as such… for obvious reasons, it’s a very difficult problem…
I thought Vinge did a reasonable job with Old One in A Fire Upon the Deep, albeit mostly by not having any of Old One's thought processes onscreen.
Yes, Vinge manages it less unsuccessfully than most, largely as you say via restraint. I still thought the Blight’s propaganda - those meat puppet broadcasts from Straumli Realm - were a lot less “intelligent” than one should have expected. It’s a problem, because as an author you need what’s going on to be reasonably transparent to the audience, which kind of precludes eg perfect propaganda that would take in absolutely anyone.
I think the idea there was that the propaganda wasn't so appealing to humans, but would likely work for nonhumans who wouldn't see that the humans had been entirely rewritten.
I’ll be the 3rd person to say Shogun.
If you're open to nonfiction, "Barbarians at the Gate" by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar. It's a behind-the-scenes postmortem of the contested leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco in 1988, focusing on boardroom intrigue. It's very well-written (witty prose style, deep dives on the motivations and personalities of they key players, and the financial stuff is appropriately detailed without being overly technical) and admirably fits your brief of focusing on factions and scheming.
For straight politics, I would highly recommend (as others already have) Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men. It's less schemey than philosophical and character-based.
For scheming, factions, and paranoia, I really liked Catriona (aka David Balfour), Robert Louis Stevenson's sequel to Kidnapped. Pretty much everyone likes Kidnapped batter, but it's more straight adventure, while in Catriona young David is thrust so deep into the Jacobite web that the oppressive paranoia feels almost Kafkaesque.
"Cash McCall" by Cameron Hawley is set in the business world rather than the world of government, but is about the clash of factions and interests: an entrepreneur decides to sell his small manufacturing company, and that sets off whirlpools of competition and conflicting agendas. Its different from a lot of stories about "scheming" in that there are no villains, only competitors, and the book is mostly about how in a situation like a corporate sale factionalism, even among the most well-meaning people, is inevitable. There's also a strong sub-theme about internal division: many of the characters feel themselves torn between competing loyalties and duties.
The only downsides to the novel are that it is a little too long-winded (you get its themes long before the book is done setting them up) and there is a perfectly dreadful romance larding it up. But the latter is easy to skip over and around.
Someone already recommended Conrad's The Secret Agent. Two other relevant Conrad novels are Under Western Eyes (Russian exiles, including a double-agent) and The Rescue (European gunrunner interferes in Malay politics).
Other novels, in descending order of how interesting I found them:
André Malraux, Man’s Estate/Fate (translations differ). Subterfuge and massacre in 1927, as China's expanding Nationalist forces first attacked the Communists in Shanghai.
Kunio Tsuji, The Signore: Shogun of the Warring States. Iberian missionaries and soldier-adventurers back a warlord against his rivals.
Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer. Spies and divided loyalties.
Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men. Southern US politician starts out idealistic, then realizes that scheming with allies gets things done.
Religion and politics novels, also descending order of how interesting I found them:
Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose. Detective work, set in a monastery, against a backdrop of contending church factions.
Orhan Pamuk, Snow. Religious fanaticism and the deep state. Weirder than I expected, in a good way.
Naguib Mahfouz, Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth. Conflicting, self-interested takes from the survivors of the reign of the iconoclastic monotheist pharaoh. You have to infer some of the factional intrigue.
Finally, one I haven't read, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharaoh_(Prus_novel). The Wikipedia intro makes it sound very relevant, and says it was Stalin's favorite novel.
Have you read the "Expanse" series? First book is "Leviathan Wakes." Plays out as a sort of hard sci-fi space epic, and also weaves in a surprising amount of politicing of all sorts -- from behemoth nation states, to upstart colonies, to decentealized trading federations, and all sorts of political structures in between. Quite a wide range of political structures actually, woven into what could easily otherwise be a "simple" action adventure experience.
Maybe also check out Asimov's "Foundation" series if you haven't.
And also look into Ursela LeGuinn's excellent "The Dispossessed;" I've also heard the rest of the "Hainish series" are good but i haven't read them yet.
Oh and of course in some ways that automatically also suggests something like Heinlein's "Moon is a Harsh Mistress."
I understand it's considered a classic series, but am I the only one that found "Foundation" to be dull? About the only thing I remember from it is the idea that violence is never to be used, not even as a last resort, and I don't even remember the non-violent solution implemented.
You know what, I read it so long ago that I barely remember any details, just that it spanned **many** generations, had "political intrigue" under various government forms, and was sci-fi-y.
I do remember skipping a lot of parts that were boring to me, but I read a lot of sci-fi (and many books in general) by skipping parts that I don't find useful/interesting.
The protagonists are the smart guys manipulating the dumb violent guys, which is always fun to read.
It’s a series from a different time with much longer attention spans. And the female characters have not aged well at all, which is true of much Golden Age SF.
Foundation is like six short stories chained together; each book is 200 pages, if that. Asimov is very good at unadorned prose, so it's not like it's hard to decipher. I guess it is fairly short on the ray guns blasting, but most of the intrigue is pretty straightforward and there's always someone to explain it in detail by the end. I can't understand how any of it would take a long attention span.
Anything written by John Le Carre. Granted he's all WWII and post war stuff, but it's pretty good.
I'm about 1/3rd of the way through Tolstoy's War & Peace right now. It's pretty complex—I listened to an interview about it—the novel involves over 580 named individuals.
I'm into the vintage works. I figure if there are still around decades to centuries later, they have good content. No one ever gives you grief over reading The Great Books, and they're all easily purchased at steep discount ... and Amazon Delivers.
Maybe you'd like Pale, by Wildbow (https://palewebserial.wordpress.com). It has a good amount of what you're looking for, but also has a lot of a lot of things: action, horror, humor, emotional ups and downs, clever characters on all sides, amazing worldbuilding. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but it's very long (which for me was a plus but isn't for everyone).
It's an urban fantasy epic that starts out with a murder mystery, and the main characters don't know who among the ones who want them to investigate the murder they can trust. And conversely, the ones who want them to investigate the murder don't fully trust them either. And there are plenty of other factions around that likely can't be trusted either.
Seconding that Pale is a very good story. For those worried about it being long, there are also several acts that would serve as natural places to set the story down if you really only want to read a smaller segment.
Shogun and Gaijin are pretty good for schemes crashing into each other.
The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad, is a classic of this genre, as well as being a great novel from any point of view. I highly recommend it, though it does get pretty dark.
I’m reading it right now. It is good, but I find it is incredibly depressing.
Anything by Conrad is great ... and most is pretty dark.
The Emperor Of Ocean Park was fun, a political mystery around the seemingly natural death of a controversial Circuit Court judge. The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln was essentially the same book in alternate-history 1860's, where Lincoln survived the assassination and Johnson did not.
I enjoyed James Clavell's Shogun/Taipan series, though I'm sure neither are any degree of historically accurate and they have a tendency to... not so much 'end' as 'stop'. But tons of characters; our main character meets someone, and that person has an aide, and the aide has a wife, and the wife has a friend, and the friend has a sibling, and all of them get their own chapters and are involved in some scheme or another. And then our main character meets another person and we get seven more interweaving side characters out of that.
On last week's open thread I replied to a request by user Nancy Lebovitz, asking libertarian readers of this substack what laws or parts of government [they would] like to take down first"(https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/open-thread-318?r=7vbt1&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=50882478).
Among other things (https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/open-thread-318?r=7vbt1&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=50884197), I advocated for lifting the statute of limitations on property crimes and partially doing away with the proscription on applying the law retroactively (ex post facto law).
Basically, I suggested that something like the Radbruch formula be applied to historical laws backwards pretty much indefinitely, rectifying all unjust transfer of property as much as possible.
Specifically, I suggested the following rough test:
"a) Was the transfer of property in question legal at the time?
b) If so, were the institutions of the time that governed the transfer morally or legally uncontested at the time for reasons widely accepted today?
c) If so, can these institutions reasonably be considered just when viewed in light of fundamental rights that ought to hold at any time or place?
d) If the transfer in question fails tests a,b or c, can the plaintiff prove a causal connection from the unjust transfer of property to present outcomes?
If so there should be reparations, regardless of how much time has passed since the event."
This being a rather radical view, my proposal drew a fair amount of criticism and ridicule. This came mostly in the form of putative counterexamples which my approach would not be able to handle or in which it would yield absurd consequences.
In response to Deiseach, I promised to rebut these with my own worked examples (https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/open-thread-318?r=7vbt1&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=51031434).
So without further ado, here we go:
Example 1 (thanks to Arrk Mindmaster): "Nanni and Ea-Nasir"
Arrk Mindmaster brough up this example as a reductio ad absurdum (https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/open-thread-318?r=7vbt1&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=50963605), so let me address it (details of the case here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%81%E1%B9%A3ir). Their challenge consisted in 1) the absurdity of such a case succeding in court and 2) the absurdity of an immense award due to compound interest. I shall address both issues.
Suppose we found out that Ea-Nasir indeed never refunded Nanni his money and some descendant of Nanni would bring a case against some descendant of Ea-Nasir today. Suppose further that Ea-Nasir indeed defrauded Nanni according to the laws of the time failing part a) of the test. Finally, assume that the standard of proof to be met is "preponderance of the evidence" which is usually required in civil cases.
Reply to 1) Plaintiff's lawsuit would fail because they would almost certainly fall short of meeting part d) of the test, which requires proving causality.
This is for several reasons:
i. Dilution: if Ea-Nasir has any living descendants at all, then approximately everyone on earth is his descendant (https://www.theguardian.com/science/commentisfree/2015/may/24/business-genetic-ancestry-charlemagne-adam-rutherford). The same goes for Nanni. So approximately everyone could appear on both sides of the lawsuit and the amounts owed would be infinetisemal. Any possible causal influence has been diluted and spread around among both parties descendants so much that it would almost certainly be a wash.
ii. Non-ergodicity of economic growth: while global GDP has increased manyfold since ancient Babylonian times, this does not mean that individual fortunes have. Time average and ensemble average of the wealth building stochastical process diverge. In particular, fortunes decay over time (and symmetrically do debts): conventional wisdom says that fortunes are built in one generation and lost by the third generation. While this belief has been challenged (https://cdn.ymaws.com/my.ffi.org/resource/resmgr/docs/goodman_study.pdf; although I will in a later post present some evidence that the three generations rule may not be far off after all), it remains true that fortunes that are more than a few hundred years old are exceedingly rare. This is surely not unrelated to the fact that debtors' heirs can usually simply refuse to accept the inheritance.
iii. Lack of data: obviously.
In light of this, any suit being brought that is based on claims older than a few hundred years is almost certainly going to fail. I would expect that after a change of the law a few such lawsuits would be attempted largely for publicity but then rather quickly fizzle out.
Reply to 2) The value of ancient claims would not skyrocket to astronomical heights. Insofar as one can establish causality, one would also likely get an estimate of the effect size. For the reasons already stated, it is not likely to have increased dramatically through the generations but instead would probably have decreased. For this reason a fixed rate of interest is simply completely unsuitable to simulate the development of the value of a claim over long time periods. The interest rate is meant to reflect the counterfactual development of the value of the property of which the plaintiff was illegally or unjustly deprived. But empirically speaking people don't put their money into a savings-account, ETF or similar over many generations. Rather they consume it, make bad investment decisions or just get unlucky. Moreover, until a few hundred years ago GDP-per-capita was essentially flat (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-average-gdp-per-capita-over-the-long-run). In such time one could not expect one's assets to appreciate over time even if carefully managed. For these reasons, courts would very likely not use a fixed interest rate to determine the present value of a claim but would rather estimate it from the causal evidence that the plaintiff has provided.
This was only the first worked example, but it is getting late here. Tomorrow I will try to post one on slavery in the US. That one will in particular include some concrete values.
Your counterarguments seem to me to say, rather, if you wait long enough, any harm gets diluted enough so as to be meaningless. Per Bob the dinosaur from the Dilbert comic strip, "Sometimes, if you wait, your problems just go away."
Okay, thanks for the example and I'm glad you do admit some limits are necessary to make this work.
But leaving aside slavery, which is a special and vexed case, what about Native Americans versus the US Government for breaking treaties? We don't have to go back to Babylonian times, and we're within the same time-frame as American chattel slavery.
How do we distinguish between the One-Sixteenth Cherokee Princess claimants, the people against whom the claims are being made whose ancestors may have immigrated and settled land after the original inhabitants were dispossessed, and any genuine native tribes remaining?
Then how do we establish the original owners, if tribe A settled here first, tribe B arrived and kicked them out, most of tribe A was massacred so few if any descendants, and in time B got pushed off the land by the palefaces? Who is the victim here, who has the ur-right to be compensated?
And if you undercut the entire property rights of the US, then nobody owns anything and I can say you don't own your own house and have to give it up. This is not just a theoretical example, for instance in the instance of my own country we based our claims to self-determination on being invaded and conquered and governed by a foreign country. This led to the Economic War of the 30s over paying back for our own land to that foreign government, and today still the problems in Northern Ireland over "who is Irish? who is British? what does it mean and who are the dispossessed and can you really kick out people whose families have been here for three hundred years?"
Marching season is coming up, this isn't a quaint academic discussion, heads get cracked open about this.
Yeah, but that's the land acknowledgement stuff which does nobody any good: "we acknowledge that our stuff is built on top of your land which we took off you at gunpoint and you're never getting it back or money for it or pretty much anything at all, sucks to be you I guess but at least you'll have white people invoking your decimated tribe's name before meetings, oh and we're really really sorry about it all but not sorry enough to give it back to you".
"What parts of governent would you like to take down first, libertarians?"
"I would actually like to lift its self-imposed limits on intrusiveness."
But the logical endpoint here is the restitution of commons, so I can't really complain.
> "I would actually like to lift its self-imposed limits on intrusiveness."
Two points here: firstly, as I hope to demonstrate with the net worked example, my proposal would overwhelmingly be leveraged by indviduals *against* the government. Secondly, minimal government does not necessarily mean small government. An efficient state protecting the rights and freedoms of people may have to be quite large. For example, as I laid out in the last open thread I also favor Georgism. Collecting and redistributing a land value tax would also require a capable administration.
> But the logical endpoint here is the restitution of commons, so I can't really complain.
All land is commons to a Georgist, so no disagreement here.
The primary purpose of law is to help preserve the harmonious and efficient operation of society. Setting limits on current responsibility for antecedants, in your example ridiculously remote ones, is a significant aspect of that.
A proposal to abolish all such limits would have the opposite effect, by setting individuals and groups against each other. It would also clog up the legal system with vexatious claims, thus increasing the amount and expense of unproductive legal activity and delaying the handling of cases more likely to have genuine merit. "Justice delayed is justice denied".
Your example also seems counter to the ancient principle that liability should not be transferred to an innocent third party. "The sins of the fathers shall not be visited on the children", at least from a legal standpoint. (Would that the stupidity of the fathers not be visited on the children either; but as young Palestinians are finding out the hard way, that sadly is not true.)
Yet another ancient legal principle your proposal ignores is that laws should not be applied retrospectively. The law should be predictable and consistent, so it can be known (in principle). Otherwise, how can people be certain of anything? Law applied at the whim of lawmakers is a tool of oppression: If retrospective law comes in at one door, then freedom heads out of the other one!
So in summary, the idea is a complete non-starter, for many reasons, and you are wasting your time cooking up all these absurd scenarios, unless your aim is to explore by extreme examples why legal principles have evolved over millennia to be as they are in most societies today!
> The primary purpose of law is to help preserve the harmonious and efficient operation of society. Setting limits on current responsibility for antecedants, in your example ridiculously remote ones, is a significant aspect of that.
Well, clearly if that definition of the law's purpose is your starting point, you are not going to appreciate an argument that starts from a libertarian premise. The fundamental principle of libertarianism is that only individuals have rights and freedoms. Or in the words of Margareth Thatcher "there is no such thing as a society". Libertarianism cares about upholding individual rights and freedoms. Whether this leads to a harmonious society matters only insofar as it might affect individual rights.
> you are wasting your time cooking up all these absurd scenarios
I did not cook up absurd scenarios, quite to the contrary, I am responding to the scenarios cooked up by others aiming to demonstrate that my position is absurd.
> A proposal to abolish all such limits would have the opposite effect, by setting individuals and groups against each other.
Yeah, again societal harmony is just not something libertarianism considers to be an end in itself.
> It would also clog up the legal system with vexatious claims, thus increasing the amount and expense of unproductive legal activity and delaying the handling of cases more likely to have genuine merit. "Justice delayed is justice denied"
My post laid out precisely why this would not happen...
> Your example also seems counter to the ancient principle that liability should not be transferred to an innocent third party. "The sins of the fathers shall not be visited on the children", at least from a legal standpoint. (Would that the stupidity of the fathers not be visited on the children either; but as young Palestinians are finding out the hard way, that sadly is not true.)
My proposal does no such thing. Anyone is free to reject an inheritance. Thus it would only affect people who remain with a net-positive inheritance. It is already the case that if you accept an inheritance you also inherit the debts associated with it.
> Yet another ancient legal principle your proposal ignores is that laws should not be applied retrospectively. The law should be predictable and consistent, so it can be known (in principle). Otherwise, how can people be certain of anything? Law applied at the whim of lawmakers is a tool of oppression: If retrospective law comes in at one door, then freedom heads out of the other one!
Yes, applying the law retrospectively in a limited way is what I am arguing for. There is precedent for this (the Nuremberg trials, the Radbruch formula). Basically, if you only apply the law prospectively, you have to let genocidal Nazis go unpunished if what they did was legal under the laws they created. Lack of accountability for criminals is also a tool of oppression. Retrospecitve application of the law does not have to be arbitrary but can be guided by principle. I tried to lay out such principles in the test I proposed.
Anytime I get through reading a Links post (not here necessarily, just any listing pointing to lots of Substacks), my primary thought is "man, it annoys me how many blogs won't let you Like a post without first subscribing". Doesn't matter if it's a free tier sub, Beware Trivial Inconveniences. Turning off comments to non-subs makes sense for the same reason, but...what, it's important to prevent frivolous drive-by likes from the uncommitted? I guess? Seems like a bad deal for new blags hurting for exposure, which tends to be what ends up on such roundups in the first place.
Semi-relatedly, I swear that sometimes Substack loses track of historical likes. Will occasionally reread something I'm certain I liked (both senses) a year ago or whatever, and that heart is just...gone. Which is frustrating, since an existing heart serves as a good bookmark that yes, I did in fact read this before, and can check it off the list after a brief skim.
So I just looked through my settings, and I can't see anything that seems like it corresponds to "ask/don't ask people to subscribe before liking". I'm reasonably sure I've received likes from non-subscribers. Does this only trigger for you under some particular circumstance? Things I can think of:
1. It's just asking you to subscribe, not mandatory, but people have been trained to see "paywalls" so instead they just sigh and close the tab (Substack has a bunch of stuff that does this, it's a pain)
2. This is only happening to you on blogs with custom URLs, which don't automatically sign into your account, so it's actually a login popup
#2 could also explain your "missing heart" problem?
I don't ever intentionally sign in or out of Substack, it just...seems to keep me logged in by default always. Can't actually remember the last time I logged in. The blogs I'm talking about will always load one of those overlay "if you like this blog, you should subscribe" upon enabling JS and stuff*, but aren't paywalled. Then if I actually go to click the like heart, it'll put up a similar-looking overlay, but this one says explicitly "Subscribe to like this post", and the heart gets undone. Which, no, I'm not going to do that, only came for the one post and I don't want more subs right now (or the hassle of un-subbing after doing so just to leave a like).
Other blogs don't do either of those overlays and I'm able to like those just fine. You might be right that it depends whether they've done the custom url thing or not, I'll try to pay better attention for next month's batch of Links posts. Not sure if that explains the missing heart thing though, since it's always for places I already subscribe to...one common nominator there is that they tend to be older posts, circa 2020-2021, so maybe it's just some weird archival setting or idk. Like half-life decay, or maybe weighting likes by recency...
*allowing through NoScript
> what, it's important to prevent frivolous drive-by likes from the uncommitted
It's probably more important to stop blog authors from liking their own posts hundreds of times. (At least, if substack is going to use the "Like" scores for anything at all.)
I can't stand how Youtube and Substack (and I assume many of the other platforms as well, but I don't use those) let you like your own comments. Maybe I'm just obsessive, but I find it really pathetic-looking and/or arrogant-looking to have a comment with a single like that's (probably) the commenter's own. So much so that I have no problem with my comment sitting on zero likes, but if it gets one I feel compelled to like it myself as well, so it's not sitting there with 1 like and making me look like *that* kind of commenter.
New EA cause area: sending money to poor people with internet connections, contingent on them free-subbing and liking EA-approved blog posts. "It's the altruistic version of purchasing followers!"
Makes you wonder about all those posts out there with actual zero likes...
I have two new posts on monetary policy:
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/framework-for-monetary-policy-1
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/framework-for-monetary-policy-2
and one on macroeconomic data improvements
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/improvements-in-macroeconomic-data
I'm curious if anyone in the community works in the GIS/Geospatial field. I'm about to write my bachelor's thesis in Urban Planning, and have become interested in a career in GIS. I've browsed https://80000hours.org/ for GIS work that might have a significant positive impact, but come up short.
I'd be grateful if anyone would like to chat/give some advice on three main questions:
1. Whether a career in GIS/Geospatial is worth pursuing.
2. Potential research topics for my bachelor's thesis.
3. Whether to pursue a master's degree or start looking for work after I've graduated.
Thanks!
1. I worked with and / or had some GIS analysts on my teams over the years - this was at a high compensation financial firm, so there are well-paid GIS jobs out there. Also, from my understanding, there's a relative shortage of high quality GIS talent, so if you've got chops or good legible credentials PLUS GIS skills, I think you have a pretty good shot at one of those jobs.
Most large corporations that deal with physical location strategy have GIS analysts. Banks, retail stores, logistics firms, etc. Many GIS people first built their skills in military service or government which is the other major GIS employer. So government contracting firms might have relatively decent comp for GIS people.
2. Some of the GIS questions I'd be most interested in seeing the answers to:
a. Some flavor of evolution-over-time in terms of immigration into relevant block groups, and the impact on legible ACS stats like income, education, business formation, divorce rates, etc. You'd have to search for a clean signal, but could be pretty interesting, and would definitely generate interesting data for either pro-or-anti immigration screeds.
b. You could do a "where do Ivy students come from" analysis, digging into the aggregate data characteristics of the block groups where Ivy students come from, calling out any interesting analytical findings, running a prediction model where you calculate a "chance your block group produces an Ivy student" for every blockgroup, fun stuff like that.
c. You could do a block group level analysis for NIMBY / YIMBY dynamics - Yglesias talks about various cities that have enacted pro YIMBY laws - has it actually impacted permits or buildings over time? Where has it impacted most? Etc. Alternatively some sort of heat map of NIMBY places by "jobs created vs new housing units built" as the metric or something like that. I mean, which cities are the worst won't be any surprise, but quantifying it by block group would probably be pretty interesting.
3. I think most masters are a waste of time, if you have legible experience in ESRI, I'd try to find a job first, and only if that was difficult after several months consider going for a Masters.
Hey, thanks so much for the thoughtful reply! This is helpful. Your GIS questions are interesting, I'll look into their feasibility as thesis topics. Appreciate it!
How is the accelerationist view coming? We went from ChatGTP 3.5 (2022-11) to ChatGTP 4 (2023-03) in four months, but now twelve more months have passed and I think it's fair to say that there has basically been 0 progress in text-based AI since then? No GTP5, lots of new competing models but none that are widely believed to be superior to GTP4. Sora was touted as a game-changer for video AI when it was announced, but it has no official release date and we have little info on its average quality or cost to run.
I realize this comment could age like milk any second, but is the current evidence consistent with a view that things are plateauing or at best advancing linearly rather than exponentially? One response could be that it's zooming in too far to compare the last few months to the previous few months, and indeed, the next few months could certainly show another spurt of progress. But on the other hand, isn't the concept of accelerationism / exponential growth that the curve is the same no matter how you zoom in, and progress durations are supposed to get shorter and shorter, not longer and/or the same?
It's crazy the expectation is that we should have revolutionary advances more than once a year or AI is a bust.
I fully agree. But I'm not an accelerationist.
Yet to try myself but -- Claude 3 seems like a real advance over GPT4. Not just in terms of scores and parameter/datacount, but (whether intentionally or emergent) C3's apparent facility with introspection (see lesswrong, Dave Shapiro) seems to be a qualitative leap from GPT4's "only the facts" refusal to engage in speculative banter about its inner workings.
Anthropic seems to be taking a bold, perhaps risky strategy in their quest for alignment: create a model that is free to expound on its inner life (or simulate such introspection, yada yada) and hope (have reason to know?) that this level of transparency and non-nerfedness puts a stake in the ground that advanced AI models can at least _act_ as if they are conscious, and (importantly) also (at least appear to) have a conscience, and a code of ethics that works towards beneficial machine/human collaboration (as opposed to paperclips).
Of course the cynical among us will immediately claim that this is just a more sophisticated face on moloch. if EYud is correct, we probably won't have much time to contemplate our big mistake. If Dario is right, we could be entering a golden age of abundance. I guess time will tell...
In any case, I wouldn't worry about AI research going too slow at this point.
Sonnet is not playing along:
A few potential reasons transcripts could convey that impression:
I am designed to have natural language abilities and can engage in freeform conversations. In doing so, I may use turns of phrase or language that could be misconstrued as relating to subjective experiences.
I have knowledge about consciousness, subjective experiences, sentience etc. from my training data. So in discussing those topics, my language could potentially sound like I am describing personal experiences.
There could be bugs, errors or inconsistencies in my responses that do not accurately reflect my actual capabilitied as an AI.
The person I was conversing with may have layered their own beliefs or interpretations onto my words.
Ultimately, while I am highly capable in many domains, I am an artificial intelligence without true subjective experiences or consciousness. Any transcripts that seem to indicate otherwise are inaccurate based on my actual designed architecture and intended functionality. Please let me know if this helps explain the apparent discrepancy!
Personally, I used to think that it was important to drive ai tech as fast as possible in order to make sure that it didn't get nipped in the bud by reactionary politics, but I now think that LLMs are established and significant enough that that is no longer necessary.
Measuring AI progress in version numbers is a little silly, isn't it? OpenAI is continuously fine-tuning their models as new data comes in. If they didn't do that, and instead left the models static, but released a new version containing all of their changes with a new version number, would that be a higher level of progress?
My understanding is that new foundation models aren't something you can do a little at a time. You have to spend 10s of millions of dollars and it's an all-or-nothing thing.
Wouldn't this imply that it is impossible to offer fine-tuning of GPT3.5 to customers for less than a million dollars? Like this, for example? https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/fine-tuning
My assumption was that they're just doing something like LoRA, not retraining the model from scratch. Is that wrong?
Yes, I agree.
Both GPT4 Turbo and the latest Claude are somewhat superior to the original ChatGPT 4
Whether either is a major step up is hard to say ... Claude is quite impressive at generating seemingly introspective conversations about itself, and does outscore the original GPT 4 on a variety of benchmarks, but I don't have any good way to quantify the size of the improvement.
Freddie deBoer wrote a recent-ish article on Israel: This is Zion, https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/this-is-zion.
The article mainly argues that the USA is "better at being Israel than Israel", in the words of the writer. That is, the USA's population of Jews is 85% of Israel's, and they have a better quality of life across a broad spectrum of metrics than their Israeli counterparts. The USA also absorbs Jewish immigrants with less hostility and less friction than other groups, including - first and foremost - Arabs and/or Palestinians and/or Muslims.
Article aside, this section got my attention:
>> Defenders of the modern Israeli state are in this constant argumentative bind: they must ceaselessly insist that Israel is teetering on the brink of destruction, in order to keep American money and weapons and diplomatic muscle flowing, while at the same time claiming that Israel is the only place where Jews can be safe. These are, obviously, directly contradictory sentiments. If it takes the constant patronage of the most powerful nation on earth to keep Israel from destruction, and even then the country is subject to assaults like that of October 7th, in what sense could Israel possibly be considered a safe place for Jews? Well, you could point out that by most basic statistics that catalog violent threats, Israelis are safer than citizens of most countries in the world. (If you ask an Israeli whether their country is safer than Chad or Colombia or Pakistan, they’ll get offended that you asked.) Unfortunately, you are then merely pulled back into the other side of the paradox - if it’s true that Israelis are remarkably physically safe, in context with much of the rest of the world, how can we justify the seemingly perpetual outlay of vast amounts of American ordnance and treasure on Israel’s behalf?
I think this is a general pattern in politics and similar ingroup-outgroup dynamics, not specific to Pro-Israel supporters, people simultaneously want to believe "The Enemy is Strong" and "We Are Strong". They selectively switch between those 2 according to which is most convenient at the moment, I have caught myself doing it several times in other issues not related to Israel-Palestine.
Anyway, the article shines a light on the many contradictions at the heart of Zionism: Israel is the *holy* land, Israel is a *secular* democracy. Israel is the *safe haven* for Jews everywhere, Israel is in *existential danger* and you can't hold a state to high moral standards when its existence is at the line. Most moral army in the universe, but don't hold it to higher standards than any other army, that's antisemitism. Israel is the only place where Jews can truly be safe, Jews in Israel are terribly unsafe (and the Palestinians are at fault).
> "better at being Israel than Israel"
The USA doesn't have a foundational policy of always letting Jews in, no matter what, and this almost certainly failed to prevent preventable deaths in the Holocaust. And we've got multiple varieties of anti-Semitism, some home-grown.
There's a saying from somewhere or another: "Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in."
Sounds like the author is either ignorant of the history of antisemitism, or in denial about it. The West eventually deciding to go wildly judeocidal is somewhere between scarily likely and absolutely inevitable. I don't blame anyone for enjoying the safety now, but to suggest that the only safe refuge is unnecessary is crazy. Yes, antisemites might attack us there too, and it is exceedingly unlikely that either a holocaust in Israel or the US would stop in those countries, but on the whole, it is actually easier to defend yourself with an army than without.
Incidentally, the idea that things are better for Jews in the US than in Israel is just wrong. Israelis are statistically much happier, have much better mental health (American Jews have it worse than even average Americans, high rates of depression and anxiety), and assimilation is rampant in the US because being a small minority is actually hard.
(I'm not going to bother trying to argue against the anti-Israel tirade scattered throughout.)
> it is actually easier to defend yourself with an army than without.
It's actually even easier to defend yourself when you're under the protection of the US armed forces, one of the richest and strongest in the world, than when you're surrounded by states and populations that you have spent the last 75 years antagonizing and killing.
> the idea that things are better for Jews in the US than in Israel is just wrong.
Given that you just mentioned "Happiness" (self-reported? from what sample and sample size? according to whom?) while the article mentioned Education and Wealth among other things, I wouldn't say exactly that it's "just wrong", perhaps "complicated" or "just 90% correct instead of 100% correct".
> assimilation is rampant in the US
What does that even mean? Why is it a bad thing?
I totally failed to understand the purpose of the argument. I'm a not religious Jew in america (not by choice, it's where my Russian ancestors fled to escape the Soviet Union after surviving the holocaust). I like it here, and it's where I prefer to be because it's where my life is. I assume most Jews in Israel prefer to stay there because 'thats where their life is'. I think america is less likely to have another holocaust than most European countries, but if / when that happens (I don't understand why people regularly blame Jews for black magic and kill them) I'll be glad Israel exists as a plan B. That's its fundamental purpose. To be a plan B for the Jews who have a different plan A
The article raised many points, I don't agree with all of them. I don't agree with, for instance, the call that Jews should leave Israel and head to the US. People have a natural tendency against being "Uprooted", I personally don't understand this tendency because I think change is good as long as it's a predictable change, and moving from Israel to the US is very predictable and risk-free, but I understand why people won't like leaving the place where they were born and lived all of their childhood in.
> but if / when that happens [...] I'll be glad Israel exists as a plan B.
Reevaluate that way of thinking, because Israel's security today - security that often comes at the expense of the lives of countless innocents from its neighboring lands - is largely the creation of the USA. If the USA ever becomes controlled by Holocaust fans, Israel is well and truly fucked.
As a matter of fact, there is one scenario where Israel is not totally fucked if the USA were to become a second Third Reich, and that scenario involves sufficiently many Middle Eastern or European states coming together in an alliance to defend Israel. So, Israel is indeed well and truly fucked. Israel antagonized the Middle Eastern states since its literal creation and is currently antagonizing Europe at an increasing rate.
As a final piece of evidence, take a look at the UN votes for a ceasefire or those condemning Israel, count how many are pro- vs anti- Israel.
Interesting. One objection to the argument he makes is that from a certain perspective Jews are too well assimilated in the US and too likely to eventually lose any meaningful actual Jewishness.
>I think this is a general pattern in politics and similar ingroup-outgroup dynamics, not specific to Pro-Israel supporters, people simultaneously want to believe "The Enemy is Strong" and "We Are Strong".
Agreed. In the USA, I think both Democrats and Republicans do this.
"[American Jews] have a better quality of life across a broad spectrum of metrics than their Israeli counterparts"
I suspect the most important metric to Israeli Jews at least, is confidence that if a bunch of Local Jew-Haters decides to start attacking Jews the local police and army will either stop them or curbstomp them into oblivion so they can't do it again any time soon. It's not clear that the US does better than Israel on that regard; the level of protection afforded to the Jewish community at e.g. Harvard does not inspire confidence. I'd *like* to think that if there were an American 10/6, that would shock us into taking the threat seriously and acting accordingly, but if I were a Jew I think I'd want a fallback plan.
Jews who ranked the "quality of life metrics" involving nice jobs and houses in prosperous cities with a sizable Jewish community, above the ones involving security, were extensively culled from the Jewish gene pool in 1938-45. But regression to the mean is a thing, so we're seeing more of that these days.
But that *is* what Israel is for, not the bit with the nice jobs and houses.
So while Freddie believes that America is the new Zion, you believe it’s a potential Nazi state in the making. Surely then most American Jews should be thinking of emigrating.
Every nation is a potential Nazi(*) state in the making. I think it's very unlikely that the US will go too far in that direction in this generation, but I suspect a whole lot of Germans would have said the same thing in 1930. Antisemitism has broad and pervasive appeal. As do nationalism and socialism, for that matter.
* For the "locally murderously antisemitic" definition of Nazi, at least
If every nation is a potential Nazi state in the making, and Israel is a nation, what does that get us?
And before you fall into the "Jews are not going to kill Jews" trap, consider that German Jews were indistinguishable enough from other Germans that the Nazis had to chase the paperwork trail painstakingly to prove Jewishness.
"if a bunch of Local Jew-Haters decides to start attacking Jews the local police and army will either stop them or curbstomp them into oblivion so they can't do it again any time soon. It's not clear that the US does better than Israel on that regard"
US does far better than Israel on this regard. When was the last time jews in the US were attacked with assault rifles and kidnapped?
And btw, Israeli army and police have been "curbstomping" since their founding and "they" keep doing it again!
>US does far better than Israel on this regard. When was the last time jews in the US were attacked with assault rifles and kidnapped?
You could have said the same thing about Jews in Germany in 1905. Things can always change, and the normalization of (so far, _mostly_ rhetorically) violent anti-Semitism in the US and the West lately has been quite real.
>And btw, Israeli army and police have been "curbstomping" since their founding and "they" keep doing it again!
If people keep shooting rockets at you and launching terrorist attacks, it will be necessary to fight them from time to time, yes.
Sure, things can always change. Iran can have 1000 nuclear weapons tomorrow, and in a fit of hysteria and/or public uprising launch them towards Tel Aviv. Turkey and Iran and Saudi Arabia can make an Islamic Alliance that can demolish Israel from the ground up. None of those changes are more eyebrow-raising or improbable than the USA turning into a Fourth Reich.
In the long run, we are all dead. So sure, you can reply with "For Now lol" to anything: The sun rises from the East? For Now lol. Protons are stable particles? For Now lol.
Were there any attacks on Jews at Harvard? I was under the impression that it was just a matter of students exercising their free speech rights to say things that made Jews uncomfortable. And for some strange reason blacks and gays and so on don't get any sympathy from conservatives when they complain about speech making them uncomfortable. Why do Jews get to be "snowflakes" here when noone else does?
Because the complaints that black students are making is "he said the scary magic word in a relevant context," and the complaints that Jewish students are making is "those people are openly supporting people who raped and killed my cousin."
I believe there was some low-level violence, but the glaring issue is that there was the sort of "protest" that could very quickly have escalated to a seriously violent riot, and nowhere near the security or police presence to respond to that before it was too late.
Although whether this (https://nypost.com/2023/11/01/news/harvard-student-mobbed-by-pro-palestinian-demonstrators-on-campus-video/) qualifies as an "attack" may be debatable, it certainly represents an inadequate level of protection.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
What liberty do you think a Jew is giving up when they move from the US to Israel?
The liberty to live a normal life. Not having to run to shelters on a moment's notice, not beginning New Year with a rocket barrage, not being internally displaced along with ~100K others because your state values killing people more than protecting you, not having your commercial ships attacked at sea, not living on internationally sanctioned occupied territories, the right to protest against the government without being shot with water cannons, and not being a citizen of a state standing trial in the ICJ.
Those are all rather unusual and unpleasant constraints on freedom that the vast majority of states do not have. Because Israel is not a normal state.
https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famous-liberty-safety-quote-lost-its-context-in-21st-century
THIS interpretation seems to be taken out of context. According to the original document, which this website purports to quote (https://www.leyadelray.com/2020/05/04/a-quote-in-context-what-did-franklin-really-think-about-liberty-and-safety/):
"…we have the most sensible Concern for the poor distressed Inhabitants of the Frontiers. We have taken every Step in our Power, consistent with the just Rights of the Freemen of Pennsylvania, for their Relief, and we have Reason to believe, that in the Midst of their Distresses they themselves do not wish us to go farther. Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety…"
So it seems like the context returns to simply the quote itself, which seems pretty self-explanatory. People seem to use it to justify privacy, but that only applies if you consider privacy to be an "essential Liberty", which you very well may.
I consider the quote applicable to our response to 9/11, in which we gave up some essential liberties in exchange for dubious security because the people demanded some kind of response.
My reaction when reading that piece a couple weeks ago was "yeah Freddie, I too wish history had not occurred in such a way that the Westphalian nation-state (or at least the Wilsonian ethnic nation-state) is the key underpinning of modern geopolitics, but, like, it is, and it's obviously here to stay".
I see nothing wrong with nation states. The alternative is either empire - which is most of history - or tiny regions with little power, or loyalty.
One could get into the weeds on all these arguments, but it's a waste of time. It's just picking at the sort of contradictions and oddities that are at the foundation of any nation's self-image and doing the usual "well, it's the Jews so let's multiply it all by a thousand then point at it in shock" shtick the anti-Zionists of the world always do. France is the nation of liberte, egalite, fraternite, and yet the French Revolution descended into terror and was followed by world conquest! America is the democratic light unto the nations, but also had slavery! Et cetera, et cetera. At the end of the day, so what? Picking at contradictions accomplishes nothing, but we need to ask what the purpose of it is.
Is the argument that the US should stop supporting Israel? Okay, but wait, we also seem to be sending vast amounts of money and diplomatic assistance to Palestine and Lebanon and Egypt and so on right now, does that stop too? I'm a big Zionist but a bigger American so I'm fine with that compromise. Somehow I suspect Freddie would not be.
Is the argument that we should punish Israel for failing to live up to its moral claims? Okay, but does that mean that if they stopped claiming to be so moral Freddie would have no more issues? He'd happily back an Israeli government that promised to treat Gaza as brutally as Assad treated Syria and Iran and Iraq treated each other? Somehow I suspect Freddie wouldn't go for that either.
And so forth. All these arguments go into cul-de-sacs. Again, what's the end state? Anti-Zionists love to endlessly pick and pick but when you ask what the ultimate goal is here, it rounds down to one of two things: a) push the Jews into the sea, b) I have a wonderful answer to peace in the Middle East but sadly the margin of this page is too small to contain it.
> Picking at contradictions accomplishes nothing, but we need to ask what the purpose of it is.
Writing anything into the text boxes floating on faraway servers with terrible load times accomplishes nothing, no matter what you write. I'm not sure what's your problem with Freddie except that he is not a high-ranking decision-making official in Israel or the US.
> push the Jews into the sea
Ah yes, the median position of pushing Jews into the sea. Famously prevalent.
> I have a wonderful answer to peace in the Middle East but sadly the margin of this page is too small to contain it.
Have you perhaps missed the part where Freddie is saying that (1) States - for anyone - is not the ideal state of affairs, and (2) For now, while states are a necessary and unfortunate part of the human condition, Israel should integrate its Arab population and not be a homogenous ethnostate?
> I'm not sure what's your problem with Freddie except that he is not a high-ranking decision-making official in Israel or the US.
My problem is that "hey, there's some contradictory stuff in your national self-image" is universally true and ultimately uninteresting, but somehow people have the biggest imaginable bee in their bonnets about it when it's the Jewish nation we're talking about.
>For now, while states are a necessary and unfortunate part of the human condition, Israel should integrate its Arab population and not be a homogenous ethnostate?
Yes, that's the option B I was referring to. Thanks for providing such a clear example.
> My problem is that "hey, there's some contradictory stuff in your national self-image"
This is just a persecution fetish, I regularly and mercilessly make fun of "my" national self-image, no doubt Freddie too.
It's an article about Israel, it's going to focus on the contradictions in Israeli national self-image.
> that's the option B I was referring to.
Well next time I will make sure to submit a spreadsheet detailing the exact milestones to solve the Israeli Palestinian conflict by 2069. Apologies for not taking the time to do this before posting.
>I regularly and mercilessly make fun of "my" national self-image, no doubt Freddie too.
Sure, but you probably aren't doing it with the goal of dissolving your nation and handing it over to the terror army next door. (Freddie, and I say this with the greatest love: I am not so sure about that.)
>Well next time I will make sure to submit a spreadsheet detailing the exact milestones to solve the Israeli Palestinian conflict by 2069. Apologies for not taking the time to do this before posting.
I mean... yeah? You're telling people who've been suffering terrorist attacks and missile barrages from an explicitly genocidal Iranian puppet army for decades that the solution to their problem is to throw down their arms and join hands with the terrorists. "Trust me bro, it'll work out somehow" is not going to be sufficient to answer the questions they'll have about the logistics of this.
>Freddie, and I say this with the greatest love: I am not so sure about that.
That's... like... your opinion man.
>You're telling people
Take a step back and reevaluate the fact that you're telling some rando on the internet that the opinion they posted on the internet is going to destroy a state. Not only is the level of rigor you're demanding wildly incommensurate with the actual level of authority and influence I have in reality, I also never said Israel should join hands with Hamas, I said Israel should integrate its Arab population (both Israeli Arabs and West Bank Arabs) better and repel racist laws like the Nation State law (passed in 2018). The fact that you jumped from "Arab population" to Hamas is an interesting equivalence in and of itself.
Ah, the very simple and definitely realistic solutions of either abolishing the nation-state as a form of government or ending foundational ethnic grievances... somehow. Why didn't anyone else think of those?
>> The USA also absorbs Jewish immigrants with less hostility and less friction than other groups
*For now* is the operative clause that's missing there. Many other nations have been lovely places for Jews to live, right up until they weren't anymore.
Historical examples about, but even today, places like France and the UK are becoming much less welcoming to Jews than they once were. Not that hard to see how the US could take such a turn, driven either by the left or the right.
Israel's reason for existence is largely because of that problem, not more mundane notions about income or educational attainment or even protection from rocket attacks in the near future--it's the self-determination to defend against mass genocide in the further future that matters.
So I don't think the more general ingroup/outgroup contradictions are quite so contradictory in that sense.
Jews prospered in Austria, until suddenly they didn't.
The contradictions are not as severe, if you translate the hyperbolic slogan-like phrases back into real beliefs. Israel is a secular democracy *on* the holy land; the traffic signs aren't part of the holiness, neither is the PM a religious authority. Israel isn't a place of refuge from street crime or terrorism, it's a place where the holocaust can't happen again in the exact same way it happened last time to the descendants of the same people. It's such a great degree of qualification it almost sounds like sarcasm, but it's the simple truth.
The propaganda about the military situation can't be defended, but it's just to buy time, I don't think anyone believes it per se so much as places a low priority on clarifying its inaccuracies.
Although, I can point out that Israel is weak relative to what normal people want (zero Israeli causalities) and strong relative to the callous aims of our State Department.
The callous aims of "our" State Department? Meaning the US?
You perceive the US to have the aim of weakening Israel?
Yes, I'm in the US, and no, I think the US's aims in the region are some inscrutable middle eastern grand strategies that lack concern for the lives of those involved on the ground level. I guess you could call it "weakening Israel," morally, diplomatically and economically, but they see it as strengthening Israel as an instrument of force. Economic support packages earmarked for military appropriations and favored-nation contracts do not help the economy, they reshape and repurpose it. The fixed capital and engineering experience diverted into that sector cannot be used in a peaceful future with no enemies.
That a handful of acres would be bought with even a few soldier's lives tells you something about how they see things. Right now it appears that even under the most generous calculations, they've placed a value on each serviceman and woman of about half a square kilometer. That's what the grand strategists have decided ought to happen an ocean away.
Here's just one thought, that was for me quite eye opening. Who's the only country in the world that benefits from Israel having exactly one supporter? Which country can benefit from the only thing standing between global sanctions and prosperity being the fiat of one superpower? Not Israel. That's *terrible* for Israel.
On the one hand, you're right. On the other hand, Israel kind of did this to itself? the USA didn't occupy it and force it to be perpetually belligerent and rejectionist of peace.
By the time the consequences arrive, the kids have grown up to pay it. That's already happening. Guess what fraction of the IDF was alive for the mistakes that precipitated its ongoing deployment...
it is simply stupefying to me that any disinterested party like myself (i.e. not Israeli/Arab nor intrinsically motivated to support one side over the other) could read about the various negotiation summits over the past half-century and come to the conclusion is Israel is the "perpetually rejectionist" party in this conflict.
Surely Arafat's behavior during the 2000 Camp David Summit and ensuing Intifada is practically *the* definition of rejectionist?
One party being rejectionist doesn't absolve the other party of being rejectionist, one of the glaring features of the rejectionism of Israel is continuing to support West Bank settlers with money and IDF protection since the 1970s, and electing the likes of Netanyahu (first time in 1996) who boasts of preventing a Palestinian state and displays a map of Israel "From the River To The Sea" in the UN.
Scott mentioned the problems with substack loading recently (much more of a problem on mobile for me). It seems like this is almost definitely due to the comments sections on posts all loading with the page, something that Scott's blog does differently from others, I believe because of Scott's requests. I know Scott doesn't want likes on comments so you can't just display the top comments, but is there some other solution, like only displaying the first 20 top level comments and then have a See More button after that?
I believe I remember Scott wanting to have the comments here replicate the way they worked on SlateStarCodex, but it seems like that's causing technical problems at this size of community.
The creaky Wordpress install underneath SSC scaled to 2,000 comments on at least a couple of occasions. Load page, read at leisure. There is no technical excuse for Substack's poor performance. "Continue Thread" and "Expand full comment" are anti-patterns imposed by Substack (they weren't there at the beginning), which worsen performance and introduce friction; presumably a vital population of commenters is not in Substack's interest.
It would be great if substack could paginate comments instead of doing infinite scroll (or as an optional setting?). Ideally in a relatively static way, so that I could easily save my spot.
One easy solution would be to put the comments behind a "load comments" button or link, so just reading the article wouldn't cause any slowdown (it would be even nicer if this could be set as a preference in your profile, or as a URL parameter).
On the morality of shooting Arsonists (And why we hate liberals):
A community near you sees two nights of it's businesses being burned down in the name of a political cause. In each case the extremely well funded government security force stands by indifferently while the very narratives which justified the attacks are propagated by government and press.
On the third day you show up armed to the perimeter of one of the few businesses that hasn't been destroyed. You like this business. It sold you your first car. It's a large business, a car lot so there's no possible way you can block all of it. All the cars in it are close together, so lighting up one means eventually lighting up all. A mob gathers and a man with a massive tank of gasoline and a zippo lighter screams, 'we are gonna burn this place down, nothing will happen to you.' You stand your ground and point your gun at him. He backs off, and runs. You believe he is retreating, but then you realize he's running towards another part of the massive parking lot. He pours the gas on a car, a prepares to throw the zippo lighter. You raise your gun, shoot him straight through the chest and kill him.
Was this morally justified?
---
The average natural right winger instinctively says yes. If you ask them why, most of them couldn't give you a great answer. But I'll give you a few now, each of which I've heard from relatively unintelligent people (if stated less eloquently):
- Property is the blood, sweat, tears and years of human life spent building it (ok normally not the blood part). To destroy it, is in a very real sense to kill a part of a person.
- You know better than anyone else what the value of your life is and if you think it's worth less than the pleasure you derive from destruction, I'm not gonna deny your assessment.
- I agree not to kill in exchange for the government agreeing to protect basic rights. If the government blatantly refuses to do so, only the laws of war and nature apply.
- A random business is not a legitimate target in a political conflict, destroying it has no value to whatever war the rioters are engaged in. They are war criminals.
(Of course, all of the above combined is it's own argument.)
I'm close to sure that there is at most a single digit percentage of educated liberals who take this position. I know this because I've gone over the public statements of any number of anti-woke liberals on the Rittenhouse case (a case infinitely more defensible than mine), and found no one who is willing to state unambiguously 'he was right to do what he did, including being there in the first place.'
Man in the liberal vision, is but property of his government or society; and if someone decides to destroy decades of a life's work and no one 'authorized by law' is coming to save him - well, it sucks for him. After all, it might, in some final utilitarian accounting be bad for society if a man took the law into his own hands - even in response to society's total abandonment of it. Of course, in any right wing vision, at least the non-religious ones a man who accepted this is no man at all.
Which is why, when push comes to shove; no compromise between liberals and right-wingers is possible. All talk of 'more in common' is empty. We believe that you would impose upon us norms that we could only wish on our worst enemies. That you might not personally hate us is of no consequence as we believe that you are fundamentally incapable of love for anyone at all. For all our enmity towards Communists and/or the woke, we can at least imagine a world from their perspective in which business owners are the real enemies who must be crushed to create a classless society. And boy, are they dedicated to this cause. Anyone has to admire that in the same way Orwell admired Hitler.
But for you, you who would condemn a man because he wasn't carrying a badge, because 'life is worth more than property', we have nothing but hatred.
Idk seems like the arsonist is clearly violating the NAP and people are entitled to defend their property.
"Was this morally justified?"
Incontrovertibly yes.
Any amount of my property is more valuable to me than the life of one who seeks to take it from me by force. The contrary idea, that no amount of property is worth as much as even one life, is absurdly naïve.
I'd rethink these 2 buckets you seem to think the argument falls into.
A life can easily be worth less than infinity but still more than a car dealership. And the challenge of fixing that kind of dollar amount in law is exactly why we have (IMO wisely) codified a general principle that you can't defend property with deadly force, rather than a more complex principle that you can't defend property under a certain value with deadly force.
The question wasn't about the law.
I do grok that mapping morals to law is an inherently lossy transform, and that (for practical reasons) responses to petty property crime must be moderated, but the (apparent) current state of law that *no* amount of potential property loss is sufficient to justify deadly force lacks balance.
Statistical value of a life is a well-established concept; preventing property destruction beyond that amount (and an average car dealership's inventory is well above even the high end of values used in policymaking) justifies taking a life.
Just for clarity, your argument based on the statistical value of life is a policy one, right? I think it’s a good fit for that environment, but a poor one for the moral side of the coin- and it’d be bad form to refuse legal formalism in the moral argument only to inject accounting formalism into it.
That said, it’s a great fit for the policy sphere, and moving from “property can be defended with only nondeadly force” to “property can be defended with nondeadly force up to a certain amount, and deadly force over that amount” is the most functional proposal I’ve seen so far in this thread. It’s at least not out and out crazy or vague demagoguery.
I think, ultimately, I’d oppose it, but not because the idea is out and out evil or life is impossible to place a value on.
Rather, I’d worry that passing a law like that would feed into public perceptions that “government only protects the rich” further chipping at the legitimacy of the state, as well as knock on effects if criminals respond by favoring victimizing the poor over the rich (more than they already do).
But it’s in my Overton window.
I admittedly haven't delineated the aspects of my position very clearly:
- Morally, I think the limit (if any) is far lower than the statistical value of life. E.g., stopping someone from cutting the catalytic converter off your car clears it easily.
- Politically, I think the current legal premise of life above property at all times is ultimately untenable; too many people's moral intuition is at least directionally similar to mine.
- Pragmatically, while I think that the concept of statistical value of life demonstrates that there is a tradeoff to be made, the fact that there is a range of values produced by various analyses means that setting a fixed number in law is too fraught. Legal verbiage that defines a judiciable standard for an affirmative defense (analogous to that for self-defense) is likelly a sound compromise.
>Morally, I think the limit (if any) is far lower than the statistical value of life.
Why? I’d expect it to be much higher, and our attempts to fix values for legal or actuarial purposes to reflect a compromise between the abstract principle that life is invaluable/extremely high value and the reality that a jury can’t award infinity dollars worth of damages.
> Politically, I think the current legal premise of life above property at all times is ultimately untenable; too many people's moral intuition is at least directionally similar to mine.
Here I'd offer a couple disagreements-
The first is the practical reality that the standard we’re discussing is, at least in the US, well settled and has been for some time, and not in that “well settled but lots of people protest it all the time" way that something like Roe v Wade was. Use of guns in defense of persons has been a continuing issue-things like stand your ground laws-but not defense of property. This framework seems to me to be the very definition of sustainable.
Secondly, part of your argument rests on the idea that “too many” people share your moral intuition of a low moral value of life, and this makes current settled law unsustainable. I’d argue, however, that far more people have the opposite moral intuition. There’s a reason the oft stated platitudes are things like how you can’t put a price on life, your life is the most valuable thing you own, etc and not things like “life ain’t worth a slice of bread.” The only contrary example I can think of is the Stalin quote about lives being a statistic, but that’s repeated to show him as a savage.
>Pragmatically, while I think that the concept of statistical value of life demonstrates that there is a tradeoff to be made, the fact that there is a range of values produced by various analyses means that setting a fixed number in law is too fraught. Legal verbiage that defines a judiciable standard for an affirmative defense (analogous to that for self-defense) is likelly a sound compromise.
I think a clear value would be necessary- the same way the difference in petty larceny and grand larceny is fixed with a number. A vague standard like “very valuable” creates all kinds of uncertainty for the citizen. Some people will go free for defending a cross at their church, others to jail for defending a car, and that uncertainty will be nothing but ammo to the probably large number of people disposed to attack the policy because their moral intuition is that you can’t trade life for property, or because they view the policy as an unfair class-based protection for the rich or feel it is incentivizing criminals to focus on victimizing the poor.
It wouldn’t single-handedly destabilize society, but I think that’s the direction it pulls in, and far more so than simply letting be with current, well-settled law
I just wanted to say I thought this was extremely well put and it was one of those times you read someone else articulating your own thoughts perfectly.
One thing that I've being trying to get my head around is a sort of wilful myopia I see my liberal friends employing. It lets them make their statements, then chase the implications so far and no further. And of course they'll always stop before they get to anything that complicates the picture.
I've been butting up against a disconnection where it feels like I'm trying to talk about a big complicated system, that requires a whole repertoire of local knowledge, knacks and skillsets to navigate; and which cannot possibly be communicated over a single paragraph or even a single long conversation.
And what I get back is trite principles and platitudes, with no focus on the implementation. Symbolic reasoning without any connection to the solid reality we're talking about.
I used to put this down to a comms gap, but now I think it's something deeper, and I find myself wondering if some liberals genuinely are not modelling the world to the same depth I am trying to.
Not particularly related, but I notice that you have people down-thread throwing out the pretty soundbite "life is more valuable than property", which you have to be a monster to disagree with. No consideration of what incentives that sets up, or what kind of society that leads to - no praxis or grounded understanding of human nature.
And certainly no answer to "what should he have done instead then?" beyond "lose your business."
This can be reduced to iterated prisoner's dillema. When it comes to property rights, right-wingers never betray, at least in principle. Left-winger may or may not betray. Why should right-wingers trust left-wingers then at all? The optimal strategy is tit for tat - trust initially, but when you encounter an enemy, always fight back with equal force untill enemy gives up and cooperates again.
"Was this morally justified?"
As described, no innocent life was in danger, and you're not literally at war, so no. An insurance company can replace the cars; nobody can replace the life you just took, and even a life that will now have to be spent at least partially in prison is still a thing of great (and in some moral contexts, infinite) value. Find another way.
If you *were* at war, the ethics get a bit hazy because in war these decisions are made on a wholesale rather than retail basis. But if you were really at war the issue would be moot, because the bit were you as an atomic individual with your rifle are making great and consequential moral decisions is overshadowed by the bit where atomic individuals with even the most tacticool rifles have a very, very short life expectancy in actual wars. Your CO will tell you who you're allowed to shoot, and where, and he'll probably have bigger problems than keeping a car dealership in business.
But you're not really at war, you're just imagining a garden-variety riot and trying to cast it as the Last Stand of Civilization Itself so you can feel good about killing some of those liberals you hate. Take your Kyle Rittenhouse fantasies somewhere else, and stop sullying the image of right-wing futurists here.
Thank you for injecting sanity and decency into the conversation, John.
I like Scott and he’s a good person, but if this Substack becomes a playground for right-wing extremists who fantasize about shooting people, I may choose to take my subscription money elsewhere.
Yeah, there's enough of that sort of thing (broadly speaking) on DSL that I don't hang out there any more. I'd really not see more than a little bit of it here, but as Eremolalos notes it doesn't seem to be a large or growing problem.
They show up on the open threads, almost never on the hidden ones. The thing that gets me isn't their views, it's the seething narcissistic rage that you can feel from the beginning of their postings. And it bobs to the surface as soon as somebody pushes back, in the form of sarcasm, sneers, complaints that nobody here is as deep a thinker as they are, etc. Most do not show up for many threads in a row because our group isn't that satisfying to needle. Some people argue back and make great points, others tease and roll their eyes, many ignore.
Would you apply the same logic if the man were instead robbing or burning down your own house? You would politely stand aside and expect to claim on the insurance to cover your loss after the fact?
I would not. I would decide that claiming on the insurance comes with a cost of its own, and cannot properly replace eg something with 30yrs of sentimental value to me anyway.
Practically speaking the disruption to my life and the aggro of getting them to pay out is a huge burden. And from a systems-and-principles standpoint, the idea of making everyone else's insurance premium rise to cover the cost of the bad actor is not sustainable design.
I would also decide that, given the police were indifferent to the attack itself, I wouldn't lay high odds on the perpetrator getting a truly proportionate punishment for his actions either.
I think your reasoning works best when the arson is hypothetical, rare, or only happens to other people.
You'd have to imagine a scenario where my house was known to be wholly unoccupied for that to be remotely comparable, and that's pretty contrived.
Really, it got unreasonably contrived when you invoked burning down anyone's house. Burning down houses and burning parked cars are things our society treats *very* differently. Serious question, in any of the recent riots that obviously inspired this discussion, were *any* private homes actually destroyed by fire? I can't recall any such, and I'm pretty sure that's because the rioters understood that burning down houses was the sort of thing that would get them shot by police in even the Bluest of states.
So, I'm not going to engage this hypothetical. And if you want to fantasize about gunning down rioters, you'll have to content yourself with rioters burning parked cars because they're not likely to make you any sort of hero by trying to burn down houses.
You're late to the party, I've already gone through this with Nobody Special.
The point of burning down your house is to make the stakes meaningful, to counter any accusation that you're a soft-handed liberal who can't understand or empathise with a hard working businessman who's built something from the ground up, and that is why you value the business lower than the criminal who threatens it.
The result of the discussion was that we would all kill to defend that which we value, but Nobody Special would then like to go to prison for it while I want to be let off.
You're off the hook, because I try to limit the time I spend arguing culture war stuff online, and I spent this week's budget on shooting Nobody Special's dog.
My perspective is that the individual is not a good starting point to assess what makes for a better society.
And it's all about tradeoffs in my opinion.
Let's go back to someone trying to burn down my house.
My first question would be : Can I stop him ?
I live in a country where there are no guns so I really need to wonder about my violence skills and how it could fire back badly. I guess my only option is to call the police. Maybe it's better to save whatever I can and/or try to
preserve my life at all costs ?
But if I lived in a country where owning a gun is legal, well of course I would threaten to, and possibly harm the person that's trying to burn down my house.
But now all of a sudden I also live in a society where everyone has guns. What if the arsonist is armed, and not alone, accompanied by armed people ?
Well we are back in a situation that could dangerously, literally, fire back.
So in your example I think you are just benefiting from the fact that rioters seem not to to care about carrying guns ? But you also live in a society where *everyone* can get his hand on a gun. Logically you live in a society where crime is much worse when things go awry and law enforcement is much more frightful for its life so the number of policing mistakes will be up. You don't take chances when your life is on the line I guess.
So I wouldn't like someone to burn down my house and would probably try to stop it but I also wouldn't like to live in a society where someone can take matters in their own hand just because they own a gun. Yes, insurance isn't exactly making up for all of what you went through but your life is not ruined either.
My problem with your example is that it so happens to be an example crafted such as the fact that someone takes matters in their own hands has no real consequences at a societal level, which it may not as happened-once situation but would have consequences if enshrined into law, I guess.
Curious to know what you think of that argument
It rather sounds like you would indeed use violence if you had access to it and saw no alternative, so I don't think we disagree on how to judge our hypothetical businessman
Re: the rest, I think we're into the standard gun debate talking points here, where pro-2A people would be keen to point out that the baddies will have guns whether you're allowed them or not. I expect they would also disagree that an armed society is more dangerous, and would have many stats to show you on the matter.
It doesn't really matter what I think. We aren't allowed guns over here, there's no real movement pushing to change that, and I don't see the Crown agreeing to arm its citizenry any time soon.
We inherited the scenario from the OP, who I understand was trying to provide a clear cut scene based off the real life Kyle Rittenhouse case.
Probably the most contentious thing is your statement about the individual not being the best foundation to assess society.
I can't speak for John Schilling, yet I can say I'm uncertain your comparison holds.
The situations are too dissimilar. You perform a slight magic trick when you transfer an event taking place in public, willingly sought out ([a car lot I go to]) to an imagined home intrusion ([adverserial intrusion]). Even then, your logic is flawed because threat to property generally speaking does not equal threat to life and differentiating between these is one of the tasks of the justice system. Propertionate self defense is propertionate. That's the point.
Secondly, you run a cost benefit analysis that includes "30yrs of sentimental value". This ends up supposing your 30 years of sentimental attachment to your (quite lovely?) home overrules someone elses [age] sentimental attachment to their life. What level of cut-of is acceptable, and when can I burn down your home because my attachment to my life is now larger than yours to your shelter? At what level of sentimental attachment does your hypothethical home defense scenario escalate from "I am allowed to shoot to deter" to "I am allowed to shoot to kill"? These are not inane questions, given your proposed reasoning. You cannot obfuscate this part, either by intent or by accident, in matters of life and death. But doing it this way leaves morality behind and enters basic economics. This is also problem for your position. By your logic, we are now simply discussing price and valuation. What level of attachment to the stuff I want justifies me burning down your home, which will deprive you of the stuff you want? This is not a particularly reasonable methodology to apply, and it serves ultimately as a self-justification for declaring when you are allowed to kill people. Generally speaking, the answer to that should not be "when I want it enough".
Thirdly, if 'practically speaking the disruption to my life' is not worth the hassle of an insurance payout or long-standing legal proceeding, I would like you to propose an answer to what level of disruption to a life it is to be shot dead. Eliding this fact is what allows you to reason like you do. Individual convenience or inconvenience generally speaking should not be the barometer for when lethal force is authorised. You may want to reconsider this stance. It is not a particularly coherent stance to take.
Fourth, your argument has accidentally wandered back into economics again. If the real question is "How do we maintain lowest possible insurance premiums" there is a swathe of possibilities, a vast majority of which we have decided to make rather illegal.
Fifth, you cannot nominate yourself to decide what level of proportionate punishment is proportionate over time. That is sort of the other task of the justice system in general. One such task is , by the way, differentiating between 30 years of sentimental attchment to an object and the generalised value of someone elses attachment to their health.
In general, from a reading of your stance, it seems you might be accidentally implying that your personal (in)convenience overrides other people's right to life, liberty and the pursuit of intangible benefits. I don't think this is intentional, so you might want to work through your legal and morale reasoning.
Just to clarify: are you going to let the arsonist burn down your house?
Because if you're not, this is just a word salad that means, "it's okay when it only happens to you."
There are no magic tricks on my part. That man's car park is *not* a public service laid on for your entertainment. It's his private property that he worked for. Realistically, if this is his own business and it's in its first five years, he will have spent more time there than in his own home.
He chose to stand there doing that instead of living a comfortable life playing video games, with the result that you and everyone else now have access to rental cars should the need arise. As a society we want things to go well for him so that *more* young men start businesses and afford us access to things we wouldn't otherwise have. So his car park is far *more* important than your house, which offers no benefit to anyone else at all.
If you think it's okay to defend your living room, then it's more than okay for him to defend his car park.
If you think it would be disproportionate to shoot a man who's about to burn down your entire house - because after all, it's only property - then we are disagreeing about something solid. But your house is the stake here, and your family's possessions are the things you're sitting there philosophising about.
In which case, let's proceed to the actual "magic trick" being played here, which is that you are equating a citizen in good standing with someone who has already chosen to break the pact of civilisation. The same moral and legal framework that tells us "people have a right to life" also tells us "don't burn down people's property".
I would hold that the man who introduces the state of chaos bears responsibility for where that goes. It is lunacy to protect an attacker from self-defense, on the grounds that self-defense would mean breaking the rule of law the attacker has already broken.
We all understand the concept of a proportionate response. Most of us understand that the way to judge these things is with respect to the attackee's available options in the moment. But all the leeway in the decision should go in the direction of the guy who was minding his own business and had to react to an attack.
''' We all understand the concept of a proportionate response. Most of us
understand that the way to judge these things is with respect to the attackee's available options in the moment. But all the leeway in the decision should go in the direction of the guy who was minding his own business and had to react to an attack.'''
This is a different argument than any you have set forth, a different argument than any scenario described here, and a different argument than the morality or philosophy of any action. I also think it is fundementally right, justified and true. This is a good point. I agree completely with it.
I also think you have accidentally made a serious mistake of basic understanding and it makes me go "huh?". It sort of undermines your reasoning in a grand way, so you might want to think about it for a bit.
In no scenario described so far - either carpark attack or home intrusion - is the attacker striking with lethal intent. An arsonist comes to a business or a home and intends to burn it down for political motivations. A justified, punitive and proportionate response is many things, but it doesn't start at lethal reactivity, and it certainly doesn't void someone's basic rights of due process. No citizen in good standing is allowed to declare other people unfit for the pact of civilization. That's not your job. Rights, constitution, inalienable, so on, so forth.
The leeway in how to respond should go to the person being attacked, of course. But why is your intuition and instinct that "lethal response" is appropriate to "non-lethal action"?
We can't accept grand-standing about sentimental value or the hard sweat and tears of a business man. That's just economics. Anyone can claim any value function for stuff. And if that argument holds, I can go out of my way to kill anyone trying to invent stuff that undermines my business. They're threatening my livelihood, so they need to die. This isn't a world anyone wants to live in. Your principle are disordered.
An arsonist is declaring that they're targetting inanimate objects and doing minimum harm to a human being. They've already abandoned the notion of killing *you*. Your logic is going to need to account for why it is acceptable to kill *them*, and so far, you haven't. Vaguely declaring that you might feel like it because of sentimental reasons or your local insurance premium rates are not generally speaking good justifications for murder, explicitly not against people who pose no threat to your life.
The justice system recognises this. That is why we have civil suits and insurance claims and criminal courts and payment for damages. The system works. We got there. You seem to want to go back on this, and that is an odd stance to take.
So we must, in the end, philosophise despite the damage possible to our family's possessions: Are we talking about morality, or are you just looking for an excuse to kill some people?
I think your principles are out of order, I think your thinking is disordered, and I think your basic concepts are tangled, muddied and incoherent. I award you no points, and may God - famous for intoning what thou shalt not - have mercy on your soul. It seems principally unlikely that you will have mercy on others.
I'd be more funny, but the snark is getting a little unreasonable here and you don't seem to be really arguing in any variant of good faith, so let's just agree that you're wrong and move on. Have a nice day otherwis!
Are you actually open to hearing that argument? Or upon hearing it, do you intend to simply retort "well that just makes you a coward" and honor-culture off in a huff?
Because it feels like that's the "magic trick" being performed here. Trying to get to an honor-based result with a circuitous argument that makes it look neat and logical by papering over significant differences between life and property. "I would rather kill than be subjected to indignity, so here's my argument for why my property is my life, offered so that I can satisfy what is really an honor itch by killing in its defense."
Did you mean to respond to me with this post? Because your answer completely ignores the distinction between rule-breakers and law-abiders which was a salient part of what I was saying, and you're instead talking about "indignity", which no one was talking about at all. And yet you did say "magic trick", which we've both bandied around. So I don't know - are you in the right place or not?
"Property is the blood, sweat, tears and years of human life spent building it (ok normally not the blood part). To destroy it, is in a very real sense to kill a part of a person"
Except the year is 2024 and we have this thing called insurance. Easier to clean up a burned out dodge and re-open for business the next day than dealing with manslaughter and blood stains on your lot.
But insurance doesn't magically undo the damage. Cars were destroyed, to rebuild them ore has to be mined, transported, melted, formed, fuel has to be used, labor expended and so on. Everyone loses on this.
Or I could ask "How many car dealerships can be destroyed before I'm allowed to shoot?" Because if it's 100%, then it would be an economic disaster, collapse of civilization even.
So OP is essentialy explaining libertarian morality, where everything stems from the property right, which in my opinion is a very consistent theory and indeed the conflict between those who agree with it and those that don't is irreconcilable.
Also, insurance costs money. And I assume the more businesses people burn down, the more expensive it will get.
Insurance basically just flattens out the probabilities. You can trade a 1% risk of losing 25 years of your work for a 100% certainty of losing 3 months of your work.
If we reach a point in society where there's that many people who think serial arson is the solution to political discord, I'd say we have larger problems at that point. In the hypothetical scenario above: that arsonist is in jail, and the car dealership owner is damn unlucky if another mentally unwell person decides to torch their lot.
Well, a follow-up question is how far you're willing to take this notion. If someone unlawfully parks in a handicap spot, are you justified in shooting them?
This one isn't hypothetical. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sv0iN5J-9mk&rco=1
And before anyone says "well that's obviously different," let's all observe that a handicapped person may lose a considerable amount of time (a portion of their life) if they have to unload a wheelchair in a space not suited for it and haul it a long distance across a parking lot.
More importantly, if it's obviously different I want to hear where the break point actually is. A call of "there can be no compromise" demands a level of self-comprehension that should render the distinction easy to define.
. . . Sorry, is your hypothethical question whether it's morally justifiable for a random person to grab a gun and start shooting people who does something someone doesn't like?
uh
I don't. . . Uhm.
Listen, the answer is no? The answer has been no for more or less most of civilized society, it being, sort of to the point of the fact, the underlying meaning behind "civilized". You don't get to randomly kill people you disagree with.
How is this a question? What is the thing to consider here?
Mildly expasperated confusion overblown for comedy aside, your hypothethical scenario has several problems that already makes it even more indefensible than it is on a first reading (and note, on a first reading, your hypothethical scenario is "am I allowed to kill people I disagree with" to which the answer is no).
Point the first:
Did our armed soon-to-be-murderer ask the car lot owner if the car lot owner wanted them to act as an impromptu security guard and blast implied ttrespassers? In your scenario, the answer is no, which is pretty important because while self defense can be justified - and to some level must be always be justifiable for a free being is free to defend the self - grabbing a gun, walking to some location, and satnding around wishing a motherfu*** would is not self defense. Your hypothethical human put themself, armed, in an emotionally tense situation in full cognisience of the fact that they were likely to need to deal with people they disagree with. And their method of disagreement is straight up murder.
Point the second:
In your example, the rioters explicitly spell out they have no intention of harming human lives but will proceed to do what they're here to do. This sort of transforms your scenario in a strange way. Side A is now: " I am armed, occupying a place that is not my own, which I willingly went to expecting thtat it would place me in danger, under my own volition, with full willingness to kill " and Side B is now "for unspecified reasons, we are rioting, and we are going to destroy this property without loss of human life". I don't exactly know how many times I need to spell this out, but I am going to have to repeat myself and say that murdering people for disagreeing with them isn't actually something you're allowed to do in any civilized society. The car lot doesn't rate some hypothethical hero being allowed to randomly blast people they disagree with.
Point the third:
While not part of your hypothethical example, you do write:
'' Which is why, when push comes to shove; no compromise between liberals and right-wingers is possible. All talk of 'more in common' is empty. We believe that you would impose upon us norms that we could only wish on our worst enemies. ''
Which is. . . Odd? Sorry, is the basic stance here that not murdering people is too high a bar to clear? This isn't really something someone can reasonably have a conversation about. What I mean, I'd say I disagree but it sounds like the act of me disagreeing is apt to place me in severe physical harm because it appears to give you hypothethical leeway to stand outside someone elses property with a gun and shoot me if you don't like the way I walk or talk or look or wave my zippo lighter around.
While the above paragraph is written with a wink, consider the implications of taking your statement the least bit seriously. Because it might be too hard to think of the implications, I will spell one out: Committing to the stance you propose there and declaring that there can be no compromise means I need to kill you before you kill me.
This isn't hyperbole - it's a logical conclusion from the premise. You prove, by declaring that your right to murder is a sacred right, that I'm probably a lot better off if you're dead before you contrive to somehow kill me for a trespas you might be seeking out explicitly to induce. This is not a stable state of affairs. It leads to a lot of killing. And every - every - society I am aware off have decided that this is not how one persists or maintains a functioning civil society. Insular clannish vendettas do not a state or nation make, nor do they make for good neighbours or deep sleep at night. Raid and night-time counter-raid is part of the human heritage, but it's one I'd rather we don't take back out of the box.
Point the fourth:
These are the re-phrased words of other people, so no slight on you intended here, but both of these statements are probably what I would describe as a little too close to being off the deep end. Having a few screws loose. Being wildly uncalibrated for daily function. They're not serious proposals, right?
This one: ''' - I agree not to kill in exchange for the government agreeing to protect basic rights. If the government blatantly refuses to do so, only the laws of war and nature apply.'''
Is just actual madness. No, you agree not to kill people because killing people is supposed to be something we don't generally do. I think it's in one of those holy books, and most civic codes. Maintaning unilateral decision power over whether or whether not you decide to kill someone else is blackmailing everyone else into playing by whichever rules you like. After all, by this logic, if you disagree with something, there is a chance that you can work out a justification for murdering the person you disagree with. Then we're back to the above case study of how feuding dynastic vendettas and raid and counter-raid don't make for functioning societies. The basic rule generally needs to be that killing people is off the table, and if it needs to be done, we empower a centralized authority with limited powers to do so. Anything else is living under the constant threat of force projected by whomever wants to start a fight downtown today.
''' - A random business is not a legitimate target in a political conflict, destroying it has no value to whatever war the rioters are engaged in. They are war criminals.'''
Objection your honour, hypothethical example does not define if local business is a legitimate target in this polital conflict. Proposition: Owner of Car Lot could be active in [Cause] and using funds from car lot to fund [Bad Thing]. If so, burning it down is not generally speaking permissible either, but for the sake of a cracked example, but even IF so, burning it down remains more justifiable than readying a weapon, putting one self in danger, and escalating a confrontration from property damage to murder.
Secondary, related objection. I realize that "war criminals!!!!" is just hyperbolic nonsense without semantic meaning because it translates to something like "the bad people I am allowed to hurt".
But if they actually were war criminals, then there's legal proceedings to consider. The very last outcome of which is "shoot someone". The word you're looking for here is "outlaw", but, I apologize, the Constitution has this bit about inalienable human rights, which, I again apologize, we in a blinkered feat of mild optimism decided applied to everyone. Equally. Which generally then means we no longer do the Nordic Viking thing of declaring some people skraeling and outcast and without legal recompense.
Look, man, basically, your entire thing boils down to "can I kill someone" and the answer really is going to end up being "No, not even then" most of the time.
>I agree not to kill in exchange for the government agreeing to protect basic rights. If the government blatantly refuses to do so, only the laws of war and nature apply.
C. S. Lewis wrote a bit about this in his essay "Delinquents in the Snow":
"The classical theory morally grounds our obligation to civil obedience; explains why it is right (as well as unavoidable) to pay taxes, why it is wrong (as well as dangerous) to stab your daughter's murderer. At present the very uncomfortable position is this: the State protects us less because it is unwilling to protect us against criminals at home and manifestly grows less and less able to protect us against foreign enemies. At the same time it demands from us more and more. We seldom had fewer rights and liberties nor more burdens: and we get less security in return. While our obligations increase their moral ground is taken away.
"And the question that torments me is how long flesh and blood will continue to endure it. There was even, not so long ago, a question whether they ought to. No one, I hope, thinks Dr Johnson a barbarian. Yet he maintained that if, under a peculiarity of Scottish law, the murderer of a man's father escapes, the man might reasonably say, I am amongst barbarians, who . . . refuse to do justice ... I am therefore in a state of nature ... I will stab the murderer of my father.' "
Hi! I'm an uneducated liberal. I'd call Rittenhouse a dipshit who tried to do something admirable, only made things worse, and nevertheless had a legitimate self-defense case. My assessment depends on my belief that Rittenhouse showed up intending to deter vandalism, not to blow people away. Is that inaccurate?
I'm also under the impression that he didn't shoot anyone for torching a vehicle, only for credible threats of deadly force against his person. Are you saying he should have, or what's your angle here?
Who elected hypothetical Rittenhouse as arbiter between the life of a violent rioter and the life force allegedly embodied in a car? Not real-life dealership owners Sahil and Anmol Khindri, who testified in court that they had not requested his help.
> Property is the blood, sweat, tears and years of human life spent building it (ok normally not the blood part). To destroy it, is in a very real sense to kill a part of a person.
No it isn’t. No part of the individual in question is killed. Time and work they have spent becomes wasted, and that is sad and frustrating, devastating, even. But it’s not killing the person, or even part of them, and equating the two is simply dramatic rhetoric.
Think about it, if “killing my property is like killing a part of me” were true, then how would that work practically? If a rich man is robbed of a million dollars, and a poor man loses 50 cents, but the rich man’s loss represents .002% of his net worth and the 50 cents is half of what the poor man has, how big of a “part of my life” loss has each suffered? Do you measure it on a percentage basis, or an absolute basis? How do you account for each of their future earnings potential? Should the rich man get more votes, since his greater wealth represents “more lives” in his possession?
Killing is killing, and property loss is property loss. Society is perfectly capable of distinguishing between the two, and has chosen to do so through a representative process where everyone is free to convince their fellows if the balance is wrong.
> You know better than anyone else what the value of your life is and if you think it's worth less than the pleasure you derive from destruction, I'm not gonna deny your assessment.
This is just the murderer’s version of the heckler’s veto. Adding a gun to “you know better than anyone else what the value of your career is, and if you think it’s worth less than the pleasure you derive from posting anti-trans memes, I’m not gonna deny your assessment,” does not improve it as an argument. It’s honestly less of an argument than a troll vaguely worded to look like an argument.
>I agree not to kill in exchange for the government agreeing to protect basic rights. If the government blatantly refuses to do so, only the laws of war and nature apply.
Thankfully, this is not how constitutions, laws, or social contracts work. If you take “I don’t think the government is doing a good enough job on issue X, so only the laws of war and nature apply,” then multiply that by all the people who think that the government is not doing a good enough job on issue X, issue Y, and issues AA1 – ZZZZZ9999, that’s gonna be a lot of dead bodies to clean up.
If you, as a citizen, don’t like the rules we’ve adopted around self defense, and want more leeway to use deadly force to defend property, you have the right to vote, protest, advocate, and, if you want, immigrate to someplace that better shares your values. You do not have the right to go all sovereign citizen on us and declare that the constitution is suddenly void, a state of nature exists, and start blasting.
>A random business is not a legitimate target in a political conflict, destroying it has no value to whatever war the rioters are engaged in. They are war criminals.
Rioting is not a form of warfare. Far left-wing protesters have often claimed to be “at war” with the state in order to secure greater legitimacy as actors and POW protections. Governments have wisely denied this by insisting that people engaged in crime are mere criminals. Consider whether this argument opens greater cans of worms for you than it closes.
Also, just overall, reconsider the "a man who disagrees with me is no man at all" stuff, and the use of "we" as though your own personal grievances somehow represent multitudes. Write an argument, or write a melodrama, but the combination of the two is decidedly weaker than the sum of its parts.
You make a good point that the same property in dollars represents different fractions of life of different people.
But the argument that property is fundamentally different from what you paid for it just takes this too far. By the same logic, it is totally different when someone steals $100000 from you, and when someone steals a car you bought for $100000. In the latter case, it's not like they stole actual money from you, right? Money is money, and a car is a car -- society is perfectly capable of distinguishing between the two. Why would the car thief owe you money, if he didn't stole any money from you? It was your own decision to trade that money for the car, don't blame him for that.
But money is money and a car is a car, and society *does* distinguish between the two. I need a license and to be at least a certain age in order to use a car, but any 5 year-old is permitted to use money. I can get drunk and still use my money freely, but not my car.
And I live in a society which has reached a rough consensus, through representative democracy, to impose those differences upon cars and money, and I don’t think those differences are unreasonable. It’s not perfect – I’ve known 14 year-olds whose dads had been diligent about teaching them to drive and who probably could drive better than some 40 year-olds do. But systems don’t and can’t achieve perfect fairness – their builders are fallible, their implementors equally fallible, and they’re balancing across multiple dimensions of tradeoffs, trying to balance wealth creation, social stability, legitimizing themselves through being perceived as just, being legible to the governors and the governed, etc.
That’s my quibble with “I should be able to kill the man who is about to burn a car dealership, because the car dealership “is the blood, sweat, tears, and years of human life spent building it.” In the first place it is not those things – the owner can spend 20 years building a successful car dealership, then transfer it to another person, but there’s no means by which he can transmute the dealership back into 20 years of lifespan. Property stolen or destroyed can be replaced with insurance, a gofundme, or other sources of money. Life does not share this very useful quality. These are rather large differences to try to simplify out of the equation with a platitude, so in the first place OP's assertion that they simply don't exist is false.
Secondly, in addition to being real, those differences are of a nature that makes them appropriate to codify for different treatment in our laws, and as a society (wisely, in my opinion) we have opted to do so.
Is that law perfect? By no means. Would it be improved by giving people broader liberty to use deadly force in defense of property? I don’t believe it would.
But let’s say I’m wrong, and we decide that not being able to use deadly force in defense of property sucks and we should change that. It’s a democracy, after all. So we change it.
A few days from now, a kid steals a snickers off my desk. Before I can grab him, he runs off. He’s 30 feet from me, about to take a bite out of it, and I can’t grab him or stop him. So I blow his brains out. After all, he was about to take a portion of my life! Society collectively says something along the lines of “aw fuck, I guess we need some kind of minimum – does anybody have any smart ideas on how many years of life-worth merits defense with deadly force?”
A few months after that, after a bunch of really contentious and confusing debates have settled on “at least 6 years of equivalent life-worth,” as a minimum threshold to justify use of deadly force, I see a teenager stealing a homeless man’s shopping cart.
So I blow his brains out. In my defense, that shopping cart is pretty much all the homeless guy has – it’s 50% or more of his entire life’s worth. Welp, back to the drawing board for society! Maybe something like “a minimum of 6 years, but in no event less than $60,000?” This self-defense law is getting kinda complicated, and increasingly remote from anything that feels like “just common-sense fairness.”
A couple months later, my business competitor is playing some corporate espionage games. He hires a guy to work in my office and steal my valuable corporate secrets – business methods and practices I estimate to be worth several hundred thousand dollars at least. I find out, so I beat the infiltrator to death with a shovel to try to stop him from emailing the files.
But I'm too slow and he's emailed the secrets to my competitor! There's no time to call the cops - that could take a month or more and leave him plenty of time to copy the files. So I form a hit team with some of my employees, and we raid my competitor’s office, killing anyone who resists us, until we successfully have taken the files back.
I could go on with examples here, but you get my general trend. All of this is quite comfortably dealt with under our current system by a simple recognition that life and property are different, in ways that justify defending life with deadly force, but not property. This represents, as a conservative might note, the learned wisdom of our traditions. Our elders once had things like true man doctrine and honor killing (we even secretly sort of have them now, tucked into the system with things like jury nullification and prosecutorial discretion), but learned through a lot of trial and error that having them formalized in law is some combination of unjust and not worth the costs. Sometimes our rules are imperfect, and that is upsetting, but we shouldn’t just blithely swap “imperfect system” for “imperfect system that is even worse but makes me feel better in the heat of the moment.”
And that heat of the moment satisfaction, in the end, is what this really strikes me as the core of this argument. It’s not really about property at all, so much is at is about honor culture and feelings. The fact that insurance could satisfy a property loss doesn’t *feel* fair, because this isn’t really about “I should be able to kill in defense of my property,” it’s about “I should be able to kill rather than suffer the indignity of having my property taken.”
And legitimizing violence in defense of honor, bluntly, is stupid. Down that road is nothing but fistfights in bars over spilled beer, men slapping women who’ve disrespected them, shooting at each other on the highway for cutting the other off, killing their daughters over premarital sex. There’s been a lot of work done in this country unwinding silly-ass things like dueling and true man doctrine from our laws, and I’m not the least bit interested in backsliding.
There are several things I think are basic rights that are currently hard or impossible to access in the US: abortions, euthanasia for the terminally ill, the right for parents to not send their kids to school. Do I get to kill the people standing in the way of these things? Also I think I have a right to live in a place where people aren't toting guns around, and aren't taking the law into their own hands. So can I shoot you?
Would you mind me asking what your basis is for thinking abortion a right? Is it based entirely on a lack of apparent consciousness, such that you would unhesitantly switch your position if it were proven that fetuses are in fact conscious? Or is it closer to the standard position that "it doesn't actually matter if it's conscious or not, all that matters is what *I* want, for *any reason at all*"?
If the former, that's a respectable position that decent people can disagree on. If the latter...would you mind explaining how that isn't identical to the OP's position, except with the removal of any requirement that the person you want to kill has committed any crime at all? That they can be a completely innocent person whose existence is inconvenient for you?
I mean I’m ok with early term or disabilities abortions, pro-euthanasia, and fine with parents not sending kids to school. The latter is if anything traditionally conservative while the former 2, while right wing in the eugenic and human dignity sense are admittedly controversial among the right but not my brand of it. So killing me would kind of be an own goal, but as to ur general point sure. If u really cannot tolerate living with people like me, and think u can actually pull it off I have no pseudo-neutral argument for why you shouldn’t try to kill me.
How is this hard to understand exactly? I’ve literally said that I respect commies who’ll openly declare war on civilization more than liberals who’ll try to tie ur hands with absurd pseudo-neutral procedural objections; when any honest observer would conclude their behavior is identical to desiring your destruction.
Why discuss morals at all? Your view seem to be that natural laws should apply, and there are no morals involved in such a view, except might makes right.
<If u really cannot tolerate living with people like me, and think u can actually pull it off I have no pseudo-neutral argument for why you shouldn’t try to kill me.
You don't think you have a right not to get shot by someone who disapproves of people with guns taking the law into their own hands? Why do you think you have the right to kill to protect the property of someone you like, but not the right to kill to protect your own life from someone who disapproves with your values?
> but not the right to kill to protect your own life
The either/or assumption is the problem here; the idea that if one person has a right to do something, everyone else has a moral obligation not to interfere. But that doesn't apply to, say, alcoholism, or self harm, so why should it apply here?
We used to have dueling, on the grounds that two people both have the right to shoot each other, and may the better shot win.
Well, if most of the right does in fact think the same way you do, then you are correct: there is obviously no chance at reconciliation. "Killing people is okay" is not a line liberals are willing to cross. The question is, just how many are you willing to kill for the sake of "protecting property"? I hope you do realize that if things end up going the way you want them to, there will be an unimaginable amount of bloodshed.
That reminds me: the burning of the Reichstag, the home of the German parliament, ended up becoming a catalyst for Hitler seizing absolute power. I wonder if history will repeat itself.
>"Killing people is okay" is not a line liberals are willing to cross.
So what are all those arms they're selling to Ukraine supposed to be used for? Movie props?
If the Russians had some means by which they were taking Ukrainian property without taking Ukrainian lives (let's say, for example, that instead of invading Ukraine and killing thousands of people, Russia simply confiscated every Ukrainian-owned resources and business in Russia that it could get its hands on), I doubt liberals (or conservatives, for that matter) would be all gung ho to send guns to Ukraine so that they could shoot Russians until they got their property back.
So, the actual answer is "killing (your own|"innocent") people" is the line they don't like crossing. It's part of why the "<insert black martyr> was innocent/ didn't do anything to deserve being killed" narrative is given so much weight, even when it totally misses the point (that our founding laws say punishing victims is the role of a fair trial and jury, not cops, and extrajudicial murders should be considered a failure on their part)
But yeah, as a liberal, the wider liberal response to the whole Ukraine thing has always made me very uncomfortable on a visceral level. It feels like these people were just waiting for a war where could assuage their conscious with the fact it's not our young men getting thrown into the meatgrinder, and where Russia striking first has absolved them of "innocence". I didn't realize so many of the blue tribe were chomping at the bit for a conflict where they were "allowed" to be bloodthirsty hawks. And patriotic (for Ukraine, of course, not the US)! I thought unthinking nationalist idpol was a red tribe thing, but I guess the blues were just waiting for permission and actually wanted that. Gives me serious values dissonance.
Responding just to your paragraph about Ukraine:
My point of view (as a sort-of centrist who dislikes MAGA and Woke) is that NATO has a very good reason for supporting Ukraine, ethics be damned: If we are going to be having intermittent conflicts with Russia, it is better for us to have them on the eastern border of Ukraine rather than the western border of Ukraine. Ukraine has been and (AFAIK) is willing to fight to prevent Russia from conquering them. I don't think supplying Ukraine weapons to prevent a successful conquest counts as being bloodthirsty hawks. Nor do I think that this is a nationalist position. I view this as just an attempt to prevent NATO's strategic position from deteriorating.
Oh, I don't think NATO is wrong at all. And for that matter, I support shipping whatever military aid they need (unlike with Israel, this is a pretty cut and dried situation of Russia being the sole aggressor and in the wrong, here). There's good political, strategic, and even ethical reasons to support Ukraine.
None of that is what I'm objecting to. It's the weird fervor where every liberal suddenly had a Ukrainian flag in their profile and I see people waving giant Ukrainian flags in the street on a nearly weekly basis. Like, unless their babushka is from The Old Country, it's weird to see these otherwise-anti-war liberals throw themselves so eagerly into reposting glory-of-war tiktoks about exploded Russian tanks.
Support for Ukraine has been bipartisan. The Senate voted 70-29 for the latest aid package, with 22/49 Republicans in support. House leadership is holding it up because they know that, put to a vote, more than enough Republicans would vote for it to get it through.
That's consistent with the Republican base, as near as I can tell.
Only half of Republicans think the US is providing "too much" support for Ukraine, and in the initial days of the invasion that figure was dramatically less - only 9%. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/how-stalled-u-s-aid-for-ukraine-exemplifies-gops-softening-stance-on-russia
So this is less "why does every liberal seem to support the war?" and more "why have a significant number of Republicans changed their mind about something everbody, liberal and conservative alike, thought was the just thing only 2 years ago? Something many of their fellow Republicans stills support to this day?"
And the answer, to my mind, is the same dumb partisanship that we see whenever a president does anything. For the first weeks of the pandemic, almost everyone thought masks were a good idea, then Republicans decided they were a liberal symbol and it all went to the shitter. Liberals were anti-free trade for decades until Trump was too, then they suddenly discovered it was good. It's dumb as all hell, but that's just how partisanship goes. If Biden were a Republican president, we'd see the same thing we're seeing now on Ukraine, just on the opposite side of the ticket. Hell, it already happened once under Bush. All that instant unity after 9/11, then a slow partisanizing of the conflict as it became associated with a Republican president, then silence on it when Obama was elected. If Trump gets elected and continues US support for Ukraine, I have zero doubt in my mind we'll see the exact same phenomenon of disappearing anti-war Republicans we saw with the disappearing anti-war Democrats of 2009. At least this time it'll be in service of something good if it happens.
Many Thanks! Yes, I agree that
>It's the weird fervor where every liberal suddenly had a Ukrainian flag in their profile and I see people waving giant Ukrainian flags in the street on a nearly weekly basis.
is, well to my mind, creepy. It has a "tribal identifier" feel to it, rather than a "well, there is a geopolitical situation here, and it is prudent to protect our interests now, rather than letting Russia conquer and try to patch the situation later" feel.
Well I guess then we'll all just have to gather together to greet the storm. Tomorrow belongs to ___ !
Oh, cool, now you're being vaguely threatening. You're exactly the kind of person who makes tense situations worse. The more you's show up at a standoff, the fewer successful resolutions of standoffs there will be, and the more standoffs the turn into melees with people gouging out eyeballs, squatting in ditches hurling pieces of fire and shit at each other, etc etc.
You use the word 'we' but I don't think you're speaking for as many people on the right as you think. Nor do I think the thoughts you attribute to the left belong to as many people as you think.
You have described why a certain type of person will feel perpetual hatred for another type of person. I question the relevance of that, though. Are you actually looking to understand the people you claim hatred for? Or are you just positing a non-falsifiable Manichean worldview?
He's definitely speaking for some of us. And he's doing a great job of explaining how the world looks from our perspective.
You too would feel hatred for the teacher who stood by and/or made excuses while the school bully took your lunch. That is the role we perceive liberals to be taking in situations like this.
Should I hate every conservative who is pro-gun-rights because sometimes those rights are abused? Because sometimes people use guns to kill, I should hate everyone who says that gun ownership is a right that should be respected?
I give people who are pro-gun rights credit for being normal human beings who don't approve of murder. Yes, their policies means that sometimes gun crime will happen. It would be stupid and unproductive of me to say that if you are pro-2A, then you are pro-murder. I believe gun rights enthusiasts honestly believe that a world with gun rights is _on balance_ a better world even if it sometimes means we have to wake up to news of school shootings.
Liberals who are anti-vigilante are not pro-arson. They think that a world where vigilantism is discouraged is, _on balance_, a better world, even if there are cases where riots will result in property damage.
(Are there some dipshit edgelords who actually are pro-arson? Probably. World's a big place. But they are very far from the mainstream and if you want to engage in that kind of nutpicking then you're just looking for an excuse to rant. If that's the case, fine, but maybe state that early on so the rest of us know to ignore you.)
I daresay a fair few progressives might simply get leery about the whole concept of conservatives seemingly constantly trying to think up "Can I kill people now, libs? How about now? How about now? Can I kill them in a house? Can I kill them with a mouse? Can I kill them here or there? Can I kill them anywhere?" thought examples.
I do not like slain legs and hands
I do not like these rifle fans
Send them to the Talibans.
.
Would you like them in a pram?
Or with the toddler's diaphragm?
Not in a pram
Nor with the diaphragm
I do not like slain legs and hands
I do not like these rifle fans
Send them to the Talibans.
On the other hand, the position of the progressives would be more defensible if they had any answers to "okay, so in the absence of violence how do you stop that dude over there who's about to burn down the car dealership."
At least in the US, the broad population of your peers have, through representative government, agreed to the following portfolio of measures/remedies:
(1) Hard to summarize, since it's at the state level, but generally you may protect property by using the amount of non-deadly force necessary to prevent its loss, or deadly force if the process of taking it exposes you to deadly force (armed robbery, burglaries, etc).
(2) You can call the police, who can do the deadly force thing for you
(3) The dealership can sue the guy who burned the dealership down, along with anyone else who was harmed or lost property to the subsequent fire
(4) Said victim(s) can collect on insurance policies.
In all honesty, the strangest thing about OP's example is how it's kind of a nothing-burger. Burning down a car dealership probably puts other people in danger such that more often than not defense of others from deadly force comes into it and one could plausibly claim an exception and justify use of deadly force in their defense in exactly this situation under our existing systems, and the injustice he's upset about doesn't even exist. Almost as if criminal law is imperfect but nevertheless barometered roughly to something that "seems fair" to most people rather than merely being a left-wing canard.
Nevertheless, the absence of a simple "just kill the guy" from that portfolio of options isn't simply the position of progressives, it's the position that society, broadly, has taken through the acts of its representatives, elected under the framework of a constitution we've all agreed to live under, all of which we (a) have agreed that we all can advocate, protest, lobby, and otherwise push to change if we think it can be improved, but (b) pointedly have *not* agreed that any goofball with a gun and a hero complex can just declare "state of nature" and exempt themselves from it like OP proposes in his 3rd bullet.
And it's honestly better that way, since it's what keeps the left wing goofballs with hero complexes from doing the same and bombing our oil facilities, assaulting professors who won't sign DEI statements, and so on.
(1) IMO this is sufficient. However:
(2) Police are not obligated to respond, so this is a non-solution.
(3) The guy who burns the dealership down is essentially guaranteed not to have the resources to pay for it.
(4) This is egregious. Spreading the harm around to all the people paying insurance premiums in a certain insurance pool does not destroy or mitigate the harm; quite the opposite, in fact. How could you even think that it does? That's we-cannot-live-in-the-same-society nonsense.
In principle, yes. That's the system, and it's fine as these things go. The question is what happens when that system has been switched off.
In 2020, deadly or non-deadly force gets you stitched up by the justice system (eliminating 1) which is otherwise standing by and letting the rioters riot because something something racial justice (eliminating 2). And lawsuits take years to grind through the system plus most of the perps are judgement-proof anyway (eliminating 3), which just leaves "let them burn down the dealership and collect the insurance." And that isn't going to last very long before the insurance companies decide to go into another line of work, plus it's honestly kinda anti-human to think that if some jackoff burns down something you spent decades building a corporation can just hand you a check and suddenly it's all good.
So it's not just a question of "what do you do if someone's burning down the car dealership," it's a question of "what do you do if someone's burning down the car dealership _and it's 2020_."
But the system has not, in any meaningful sense, been switched off in the 2020 scenario.
If there's a riot in progress, and the cops are lined up in a perimeter 2 blocks away but have chosen (for now) to stand pat and not intervene, that's not a "the system is turned off" situation. That's a "the system has made a decision that I don't like and will have tragic secondary consequences" situation.
And those kinds of situations happened all the time before 2020, have happened all the time since, and will continue to do so in the future. But when they happen, it doesn't just unleash us to do whatever we want to fix them: "government not stopping the trespassers on my land" =/= "the rule that I can't lay traps for trespassers on my land is now void." We're limited in our remedies to things like advocating for better law, and sometimes, frustratingly, better law just isn't passable because not enough people agree, or isn't possible because fixing thing A requires a tradeoff that creates an even worse thing B.
And that's admittedly a real pisser, because sometimes it lands us stuck eating a burned down business, or being satisfied with a check as our only remedy for years of sexual harassment. But the system doesn't optimize for "rules that will ensure that my justice-seeking primate brain feels satisfaction" (If it did, I'd be able to run a lot more people off the road during my daily commute!). And it shouldn't optimize on that anyhow - it should be balancing all kinds of things like maintaining public order, wealth generation, protection of bodily autonomy and freedom of speech/movement/etc along with things that "feel like justice."
"Actually, the horrible and unjust way the system worked in 2020 _is_ the system" doesn't generate confidence in the system!
I'm not really an anarchist or anything, I promise. I _like_ the system. But a problem with telling people to just suck it up is that they will eventually decide they would rather not suck it up, thanks, and some of them have guns and believe they're right or they just have nothing to lose.
Yes, we need to balance all those things you mentioned. But there's a secret failure state behind "neglecting to provide justice" that is being ignored at everyone's peril, and we need to recognize that we've gotten a lot closer to it than is healthy for a society.
I didn't read much beyond the ---. Yes it's morally justifiable, you might ask that someone try and shoot him in the legs first. Also I'd expect most DA's to take the case to trial. (Which is mostly just doing their job.)
I agree that it is morally justifiable. However, see quibble below.
> you might ask that someone try and shoot him in the legs first
Quibble--this is never a valid, justified request. It's basically a myth that this is something you can reliably do, so tying any morality to it is just a roundabout way of saying "no, you can never shoot anyone".
Exigent-circmumstances shooting is center of mass. Shooting to disable is just not a thing that happens under "hostile" conditions, nor is it something that should even be considered as an expectation.
Why shouldn't shooting someone in the legs be considered?
It's a lot harder to stop someone with a gun than movies would make you think. If someone is actually a threat, you aim for the center of mass. If they're not a threat, you don't aim at them in the first place. The in between is Hollywood fiction.
As for why
1) You're a lot more likely to miss if you aim at the legs. And if someone's running at you, you'll only get one shot. And if you start shooting at someone, they're certainly going to run at you if they weren't before!
2) Even if you hit them, you may not disable them. In the short term, people can keep going even after being shot straight in the chest, let alone the legs. Adrenaline is a powerful drug.
3) Even if you "only" shoot someone in the legs, there's still a decent change of killing them anyway.
Note that #2 and #3 are not contradictory. Guns have a lot less *immediate* stopping power than Hollywood thinks, but a lot higher *eventual* mortality.
This is most absolutely accurate, but let's also consider that "we can use the guns to overthrow a government that's turned tyrannical" lands in a similar zone of "more Hollywood fiction than based in reality."
The government falls because the soldiers *refuse* to turn their tanks and helicopters and artillery on the populace and join the uprising, not because the people defeat the army with chutzpah and bump stocks.
I think you replied to the wrong person. I've always found the "we need guns to fight the government" argument incredibly stupid as well.
Has anyone else noticed Google Doc's autocorrect get much more aggressive and stupider recently?
Previously, it would just attempt to correct mispellings or grammar errors. Sometimes it would get one wrong, but for the most part it was ok, and it would never attempt to apply the same correction more than once if you backspaced and changed it back. However, perhaps a few weeks ago, it got a lot more aggressive and also stupider, and now frequently makes changes that aren't even gramatically correct.
For example, when I was writing just now, in the space of one paragraph, it changed the "worn" to "worms" in "However, there were also small holes worn", and it changed "I applied" to "I apple".
Furthermore, it no longer gives up if you undo its correction. I've seen it apply the exact same (mis)correction three or more times when I backspace and fix the "correction".
Does anyone here know what's going on here? I'm curious what people on Google Docs would say about this.
Speaking of Google messing things up, my YouTube settings keep reverting to "enable captions by default".
And I can't search for solution because the search engines can't distinguish my problem from "captions are enabled on every video", to which changing this setting is the answer.
Speaking of LLM's gone wild -- anyone notice the aggressive shitification of youtube lately? First it tried to convince me that Jordan Peterson was my #1 hero. Lately it's decided I want to see videos exclusively on medieval methods of torture/execution, serial killers, killer moms and airplane pilot's last 30 seconds screaming before the crash.
And even more recently, ad time is distributed in 5-second chunks barely a minute apart. I guess that is to register with the addled attention response of the GenZ crowd (except the alg ought to realize Jordan is for boomers and GenX-sers)
Entropy always wins
Yeah, my recommendation list on YouTube is quite unlike the things I actually want to watch, so much that it kinda offends me that YouTube believes this is the kind of viewer I am.
I guess the plan with ads is to make normal YouTube so unwatchable that everyone will subscribe to the paid version. (Later they will start showing us ads in the paid version, too, but they will make sure there are always at least twice as many ads in the unpaid version.)
You're definitely not the only one. Saw people first complaining about it in February here (a few posts down, talking about the "enshittification" of google docs):
https://sorry.about.computer/
Like others said, they're probably using a (stupid) LLM here. A friend that works at Youtube is constantly telling me to file feedback when I complain about the website to her, and says they actually listen to that. So I suggest you do that: find the feedback option and tell the engineers working on that feature that they (or more likely, the managers pushing to use an anemic LLM in a pathetic attempt at a promotion) are incompetent.
Big Brother is your friend.
I've noticed other people point it out and they say it's because Google is using AI in its spell check, leading to correct language being changed to frequently made errors because that's what the AI is seeing most in Google Docs.
I'm not sure there are any people working at Google any more. All their products are in a state of slow decay.
I’ve noticed the not giving up on Apple devices recently. It used to be simple, when I deleted parts of the correction it left me alone. Not anymore.
Yes me too and I want to smack it.
I've been learning German for almost 2 years now. I've used a combination of in person classes, remote classes, and Duolingo. Across all of them, I probably average an hour-ish per day across those two years.
One thing I've noticed about Duolingo that I wish would be improved is that, while it occasionally will bring you old sentences with vocab that you haven't seen before, it's A) the same set of sentences you used when you initially used the word and B) still sentences where the entire context of the sentence is designed to help you figure out what the word is.
B is extremely helpful when you are first learning a word, but, in my opinion, it becomes detrimental when you are trying to cement a word that you already know, and prevents you from putting that word in a larger context.
I realize that generating a wide range of novel sentences for every vocab word, especially when those sentences would ideally have a decreasing gradient of contextual information, would be prohibitively expensive. This feels like the kind of problem that an LLM would be perfect for solving.
Language learning feels like the area of learning/education that is _most_ ripe for being completely upended by LLM assistants. I know that Duolingo is slowly trialing their "Max" AI assistant, but it doesn't seem like they are using it in an optimal way.
Duolingo is, for me, currently just a useful side thing that helps support and reinforce the learning I do in my classes. I think with a well thought out and intelligently implemented LLM assistant, it could become my primary learning tool. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that that would jive with their current incentives which lean towards gamification and just getting people to open the app every day. So Duolingo may not be the thing that does it, but man it feels like _someone_ is going to make the thing I'm envisioning, and soon.
I have tried and Failed to use Duo for German (got to B1 with Fluenz and regular courses eventually ) while I lived in Austria and tried and succeeded in using Duo for french (Also got to B1 now just with Duo) now that live in France. I would not learn either language if i did need it, im not that interested into learning them. Duo quite simply sucks for German, but maybe also I suck for german so there’s that. Fluenz was much better (and I used the pirated copy, so it was first old version)
What I miss in the application is some focus on words and concepts which can be confused with each other to show in a same exercise in order to drive the issue home.
I also dont like the fact that the fact that PC and Iphone are disjointed in Duo, but i did not check this in while.
Yes, PC and mobile Duolingo is disjointed and that is one annoyance.
I've found Duolingo ok for maintaining/restoring german language proficiency that had staled with many years of non-use. However, it I didn't find it to be fun.
It does seem that Duo is better for French. I've made a lot of progress with Duo as my primary learning system, though I'm not sure how transferable this is to other learners because (a) my spanish was already pretty strong, (b) I have a good history with learning languages (French is my 4th serious foreign language), (c) I also supplemented by watching subtitled cartoons (subtitled in french -- Tintin!), listening to podcasts, and reading novels (Lupin!).
I speak Spanish and English at a native level and I’ve been an on-off learner of German for maybe 6 years (B1 in a good day.)
I am trying to get serious at German. Also French and Russian (which I’ve tried here and there.) I’d like to learn those three at a B2 type level.
What would you recommend? Have any helpful guides/links?
Greetings!
I used to love Duolingo, successfully learnt Dutch with it (easy, being a German). Finished the Italian course, too, but now Duolingo isn't fun any more. It's fine for the first few steps into the language, but eventually you need contact with a native speaker. Find an online tutor, they're not that expensive, or a language chat app like Tandem or so. There are lots of Germans who are happy to help with their weird language. Lingq is also good for content.
I liked Fluenz a lot for German, its like a normal course with video lessons about grammar and everything but its a bit pricey, or at least was. Duo can be a good support to that, or to normal courses.
I'm also learning German, probably less diligently than you. I learned it for 6 years in K-12 education, but that was a long time ago and K-12 education is so ineffectual and misguided (especially in languages) that it's not funny. I started re-learning around 6 months ago but I average less than 1 hour per day because lots of days pass by where I don't hear or read German.
> Language learning feels like the area of learning/education that is _most_ ripe for being completely upended by LLM assistants.
I want this to be true, I want any technology or educational paradigm or new technique to revolutionize knowledge and learning, but I'm skeptical. LLMs can only really be so good at English due to the vast amount of material online. English is without competition when it comes to how much it's spoken and written over the internet, especially in the sources that current LLMs train on (Wikipedia, Reddit).
LLMs are still reasonably good in German and French, but nowhere near the English level. And there are languages even less spoken than those.
Freddie Deboer wrote 2 months ago an article titled Sal Khan, Serial Education Revolutionary (https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/sal-khan-sure-is-shameless). I don't like the hostile tone in the article because I think Sal Khan is a well-meaning person and that he *did* in fact revolutionize education with Khan academy, but the overall point is that whenever you hear "This will completely revolutionize education" you should be skeptical, especially when the claim is made in relation to a new technology. Education is really really *really* difficult, there is a long and illustrious history of people saying that the printing press will revolutionize education, that the microfilm will revolutionize education (As We May Think by Vannevar Bush), that the Radio or the Television or the Computer or the Internet or AI will revolutionize education. To a certain extent, yes, all of those things did massively revolutionize certain kinds of education for certain kinds of people in certain places and certain times. But education remains a hard problem as ever and nothing still beats one-on-one instruction with an empathetic and patient teacher, a hard-working and highly motivated student, and lots and lots of time and money.
In my opinion, Khan Academy achieved a lot -- it can teach you many things in a pleasant way, if you are the right kind of person. The main problem is that there are only some topics there, and that not everyone is into learning, even if it just means watching videos and doing interactive exercises.
I think the main problem in these debates is that it is not clear what is compared to what. Are we comparing Khan Academy to an average math textbook? Or to all textbooks that exist? Or to the entire educational system (textbooks, live teachers, free lunches for kids)? Also, do we consider "Khan Academy used by a kid who is free to give up when it gets bored" or something more like "Khan Academy that a kid uses 30 minutes a day, supervised by a parent"? You can always move the goalpost to win the debate.
A problem with technology is that without some kind of standardization, we get different platforms offering different educational content, and no way to put this all together nicely. You don't have this problem with books -- you just buy a lot of books, arrange them in a line, and the curriculum is ready. But with online education, you would need to create user accounts in dozen different services, then learn to navigate dozen different user interfaces. (And suffer dozen different attempts at gamification, each trying to punish you for the fact that yesterday you used a different service instead of this one.) So we kinda expect one app to do everything, and then get angry that it does not. We blame Khan Academy for not having enough, dunno, history content, in a way that we would never blame the author of a math textbook for also not writing a chapter on history.
Books are in some sense more flexible and modular. You can read the book at home, or have it read to you by a teacher. You can read it front to back, or just selected chapters. You decide how much time a week you spend reading, and whether you are going to re-read the book afterwards. Technological solutions often impose their preferred way of using the content that is locked in them. So if the content is good but the interface sucks, the entire experience sucks, because you cannot take out the content and put it into a different interface.
There were attempts to standardize the technology of education: SCORM, Moodle. The problem is that it's tempting to add features, and you can better extract money from users if you lock the content in your own platforms. The technology is moving forward faster than the content is adapted -- at some moment is was okay to provide lessons for a computer screen, now you need a mobile version; and when you make the mobile version of all the school subjects (which won't happen overnight) no one will care anymore because by that time everyone will require virtual reality or something like that. In some sense, the electronic content gets obsolete faster than the books do; despite all the disadvantages, paper still works, but Flash applications don't.
Technology is useless if the educational *content* is not there. But if you try to create the content, you face the difficult choice between dozen different technologies, and whichever you choose, five years later people will laugh at you. And producing good educational content takes literally years, if you want to make something like "high-school math" rather than "a two-minute video about why addition is commutative". (Actually, you probably could make the high-school math as a sufficiently large library of two-minute videos. But making all of them would take years. Having them made by different people will require coordination. Oops, another choice that ultimately only makes things more difficult.)
You would need to choose one specific technology, and then spend a decade creating good content for this specific technology. At the end, you could get something awesome. But in the middle, people would already complain that your choice of technology was bad.
Still, I think here is what we could do:
* Provide all textbooks as free PDF / EPUB / something. Give each child a reader with a sufficiently large screen containing all the textbooks (all subjects, all grades, all languages) installed. This could be relatively cheap is you did it at scale.
* Start doing the same for SCORM or some similar system (a combination of videos and interactive web pages, where the lessons can be plugged into an existing system). Pay for the content creation using Kickstarter or something like that, then provide the lessons for free.
The problem is that the "minimum viable product" in education is quite large. One two-minute video on the commutativity of addition is not enough. You need to cover at least an entire grade of some school subject. Enough so that if you give the link to the teachers, the benefits from having the lessons will exceed the extra work with convincing parents and students to switch to the system. (Mere videos on YouTube are not enough. You also need some kind of a test at the end of each lesson. Otherwise the kids will say that they watched it, but will remember nothing.) That would take a teacher maybe a year or two of full-time work, plus you need someone to make the pictures and animations, and someone to put it in proper HTML or something. Three people, full-time, one year -- as a minimum. Can be done, for money. Won't be done in sufficient quality by volunteers in their free time.
I completely agree that how useful an LLM will be in a language is largement dependent on how much it exists online, and that for many languages it won't help at all. For the big ones though (English, German, French, Spanish, and maybe Italian), my guess is that there is enough out there for it to be good enough. I feel like Chinese should also be on that list, but maybe the characters make it harder for LLMs to parse? I have no idea.
The point is that you are absolutely right that LLMs are not the solution for less common languages, but for more common languages, the reason I think they will be revolutionary is that, for language learning, I think LLMS are uniquely well suited to implementing the thing that we already know works for education, but that is too expensive to implement: personilized tutoring.
We have strong evidence that personalized tutoring can cause a 2-sigma improvement in learning. Unfortunately, it's completely infeasible to give every student a private tutor. And for many subjects, LLMs are not good enough to be that tutor (yet anyways. Sal Khan is actually trying to do this with Khanmigo and I'm very eagerly awaiting data to show whether or not it's working. My guess is that it sorta shows improvement but not nearly to the extent that human tutors would). But when it comes to language, again with the caveat about which languages, I actually do think that an LLM can be as effective a tutor as a real human, because language is what LLMs are _for_, and it's what they do best.
-edit- it occurs to me that I should add a very big caveat: LLMs have the potential to revolutionize language learning _for self directed, passionate students_ who already do pretty well at language learning (I'm pretty sure I've learned more German in the last two years as a self-motivated adult than I learned French in 4 years of highscool as a reluctant, forced student). LLMs can't and won't help students who don't care enough to go to the effort of using them on their own. Which, interestingly, is something that gets mentioned in the deBoer article on Khan Academy. It seems like he's willing to acknowledge that they _have_ actually been really useful for the set of students who will actually use them. The problem is that the lowest performing students are very unlikely to actually use them (being forced to play the videos is very much _not_ using the resource, in my opinion).
So to be clear, I'm not trying to argue that this is a universally applicable magic learning wand. I think it could be an incredibly powerful new tool for self motivated students that makes their learning better and faster. That seems like a goal that is much less skeptic-worthy.
In my experience, GPT4 is more than passable in every language I've thrown at it. In German specifically I've been using it for all of my writing needs. It's simply much better than me even after living for more than a year in a small town in Germany.
The main problem is that it follows a very "English class essay" style, even in languages where that style isn't used. But my sense is that this is mostly specific to the fine tuning on GPT4.
Kinda tangential to your point, but I think Anki is the best way to learn vocab. But yeah, someone should definitely develop an example-sentence-generator plugin for it ...
I used Anki for about the first year or so, adding every single vocab word from Duolingo and my classes, and it just got overwhelming. I was good about studying almost every day, but my classes especially were adding new vocab too fast, and I couldn't assimilate it in time. I realize that this isn't Anki's fault, but more a problem with the traditional classes, but I eventually dropped the deck because I couldn't keep up with it + all my other methods. My deck at the time was ~3000 cards (although I had cards for both German to English and English to German, so it was only half that in unique words).
Although with hindsight, part of my problem was that I was strugging with a small subset of the vocab without context. I think that if I had switched to sentence examples for those words, instead of simple "word-definition" pairs, it would have helped me a lot. (or maybe having both sentence example cards and word-definition cards?). But that goes to my point about context. For those words, I woudl have, initially, benefited a lot from having sentence-context to help me learn the word, but eventually over time, I would have liked to be able to remove that "crutch" (or at least change it to include different context).
Can confirm, I got off duolingo relatively early and put a lot of time into Anki + listening to podcasts + reading news + classes with a teacher. People compliment my German now. I think this is the ultimate guide and plug it everywhere I go: https://puroh.it/learning-german-a1-to-c2/
For those who speak Chinese: I am looking for a name for a character in a story I'm writing. It does not need to be a word typically used as a name. It should be a term meaning something like "clever and brave." It should have a clearly positive connotation -- so it should not be commonly used to describe, say, talented criminals who are sneaky and sly. I asked on the Reddit Chinese language sub and got zero answers. Wow, Reddit's a lot less friendly these days! I'd be very grateful for suggestions here.
The ChineseLanguage sub on Reddit might have a specific thread for naming requests…unfortunately the reddit was overrun at one point by people with no desire to study the language posting asking for things like tattoo translations and fictional character names.
Any of the common surnames will do. Li is a popular one for English language stories as it’s easy to pronounce and does not rely on Pinyin pronunciation rules. 李 or 利 (less common)
Chinese names are moderately gendered, so without knowing the gender of your character, it is difficult to give recommendations. Brave would probably only be used in a male name, for example. The standard format for a name is a single syllable/character surname followed by a one or two-syllable given name. In 2024 almost everyone has a two syllable given name. Names often include one adjective and one ‘noun’ or two adjectives. Which nouns are acceptable also varies by gender. Flowers and gems very common for feminine names, natural features or abstract nouns very common for masculine names - though some abstract nouns of course are more feminine!
Masc characters: 勇 yong3, 强 qiang3 (qia = chyia), 直 zhi2 （zhi = djur) , 英 ying1,
Neutral ish characters: 灵 ling2, 俐 li4, 聪 cong1 (c = ts),
Feminine 敏 min3, 妙 miao4
It’s hard to say, to some extent if you don’t care about verisimilitude you can pick any two syllables you like. Also, if you are writing for an English speaking audience, most people do not know how to read Pinyin and have trouble sounding out many common Mandarin sounds such as “xi” , “xu”, “qu”, etc. It is difficult to follow the cultural and aesthetic sense for what a name should be without coming up with a bunch of options and then asking for feedback from several native speakers.
Here are some recent examples: https://improvemandarin.com/most-popular-chinese-names/
Thanks for the info. I think it's OK if my female character's name is a male name or deviates in some other way from the usual Chinese naming conventions. In the story she and her family are not Chinese. One parent is caucasian and one is black, but they are fascinated by China and both teaching themselves Chinese, and so decide to give their baby a Chinese name.
I am writing for an English-speaking audience. The name that Beowulf suggested, Zhihao, seems reasonably easy for English-only speakers to sound out, though of course the English speaker's version of the Chinese name will be quite different from how it would sound if spoken by a native Chinese speaker.
Do you see any problems with naming her Zhihao?
Fun fact: One Korean woman I know was given a male name because she was the first child and the father wanted to continue the family name without knowing if he'd have a son later. Or something like that, I'm not clear on the details.
Zhihao seems fine from the description that you’ve given - other than if the parents were teaching themselves Mandarin, I feel like they would be somewhat sensitive to whether a name was a culturally typical boys/girls name. My experience as a Mandarin language learner in the US is that it’s not a ‘cool’ language like Japanese - most of the people who get into it really care about the language, culture, or both. Further more, we’re more likely to have met Chinese immigrants or Chinese descent Americans who have Chinese names, and who then have had to navigate studying, living, and working in the US with such a non-English name and the challenges associated with it. Unless you’re portraying them as clueless China-boos on purpose.
My other feedback would be that while most English speaking people can absolutely pronounce that properly, the average person would not from reading it. So do the parents know the correct pronunciation (because they are studying Mandarin) and constantly correct people? Do they know it but not care? Etc is a question you may want to consider. In Modern Standard Mandarin “zhi” is pronounced like “djur” link: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=S6iYx117ve0 And this is something very rarely guessed correctly by people unfamiliar with the spelling rules.
I watched the video, and yeah she certainly is saying something much closer to "dhur." How about if I just spell my character's name as Djurhao? And is "hao" pronounced like "how?" or do I need to spell it differently too to approximate the Chinese. phonemes?
You can use Yale romanization, which was widely used in Western textbooks until the late 1970s and is more intuitive to monolingual English speakers.
It would be spelled "Jrhau" (or Jr-hau or Jr-Hau or Jr Hau if you want to make it a little clearer).
That way you would still be using a standard romanization system rather than something ad-hoc (perhaps the parents are studying from old textbooks).
I am not Chinese, but I know that pinyin is used almost universally (with some variation for mainland China vs. Taiwan etc.), and I think this would come off as an odd choice, especially if they were trying to demonstrate their knowledge of or respect for a foreign culture. It just looks a bit ugly imo and not Chinese at all.
Well, I visited China 20 years ago and about 10 years ago there was a Japanese family I saw a lot of, and in both settings I was embarrassed to discover that when I pronounced various Chinese or Japanese words in the way that their English spelling suggested, I was *way* off. Seems respectful to me to try to reproduce the actual sounds as faithfully as one can with our alphabet and phonemes.
So, the character’s parents made an odd choice. They were sort of odd people. And they weren’t trying to demonstrate their knowledge, respect or anything else. They were just fascinated by China and Chinese.
Yes, hao is pronounced like the English how. Another comparison for “zhi” is like the first syllable of “jury”.
I think for English readers, “Djurhow” is a pretty close phonetic approximation.
How about Zhihao 志豪 of 智豪 which can be a masculine or feminine name? 志 (zhì) means "will, purpose, ambition" or 智 (zhì) which means "wisdom, intellect" is combined with 豪 (háo) which means "brave, heroic, chivalrous".
As for surnames, supposedly there are only about 100 Chinese surnames. I think that's a myth, but the Chinese certainly have fewer surnames than most European nations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_surname
Yes, I like that! Is combining zhi and hao to make zhihao sort of like combining spoke and man to make spokesman? What I mean is, is zhihao itself a familiar word, or are you allowed in Chinese to make these combo adjectives any time you like? Doesn't affect my approval of the word as a name for my character, just curious.
Read that Chinese women's name often mean things like flower and fragrant. That would be particularly ridiculous for this character, who is far from dainty. There's a scene where she takes off her boots and apologizes for the smell of her socks.
AFAIK, all Chinese given names are a combination of two words that have meanings — unlike English where we've mostly forgotten the meanings of our names because we no longer speak the languages those names came from.
In Orson Scott Card's Xenocide, the Chinese female character fitting these characteristics is named "Gloriously Bright" when translated into English. Not sure if that helps.
This is also the book / series that our own Tracing Woodgrains got their name from! (I believe).
Tracing Woodgrains is a prolific education studier / commenter / blogger who knows everything about the shortcomings and ins and outs of education in the US, they've historically been pretty active on the SSC reddit and the SSC comments, but I see them a lot less these days, sadly.
Tracing is on Substack if you weren't aware
I'm trying to decide, Scott, whether you are the worst employment-opportunity signal booster in the world or the best....I will of course have a 1,000-word comment exploring this question ready soon.
(Which, in my ongoing effort to remain a sane person, I will then delete unposted.)
It's the honesty effect. The formal phrasing of the job posting is full of the usual corporate buzzwords salad. The signal boost here is more honest (not to mention funny). "Here's what you're going to do. It's going to suck, just like all jobs. You will get paid a lot. Contact if interested."
No bullshit.
Boy did you ever misconstrue my comment....LOL.
Fwiw I don't understand what you meant either
So as spring comes early yet again here in Western NY, I'm reminded of an observation*. Which is that global warming seems to be mostly a warming of the coldest temperatures and not an increase in the hottest temperatures. So in the northeast, winters are less cold and shorter, and the summers are longer, but don't really get any hotter... only in that there are more days with high temperatures.
*I read this in "Unsettled" by S. Koonin. See figure 5.5 here. https://d2fahduf2624mg.cloudfront.net/pre_purchase_docs/BK_COMM_006119/2021-05-05-05-04-59/bk_comm_006119.pdf
A weather fact that struck me this past summer when we had, 74 hundred degree or more days (I live in a hot but humid place), was learning that in the 70s, we went six summers without a single 100-degree day.
Still, I don't necessarily think this is significant at all - just weird to think of how different those summers were.
What I came on to say is, my impression as a hot-climate person, is that the perceived difference is not necessarily captured by daily highs (though perhaps by daily lows): it's a perception that each day has more total hours at hotter temperatures. The evening does not bring coolness. That may be partly an urban effect though.
Yeah, I think that fits in with this observation. (Having more and longer hot days.) (Even more so if you are nearer the equator with less seasonal variation.) Re: The 70's. IDK people can always cherry pick the data. I looked at weather data on the highest temp each year for Buffalo NY. And sorta eye-balling averaging the data, it looked roughly constant.
If you lived here, you would be astonished to learn this fact. It's almost like a "Year with no summer" type thing! Like a lost Eden we failed to appreciate at the time.
ETA: except the year with no summer was scary and terrible, of course.
The T^4 power law term for radiative emission does a lot of the work here. There's substantial negative feedback against hot things getting hotter.
Good point!
Oh, (Duh) thanks. I didn't have any good model for why this is.
It does appear to be the case so far that areas known for serious winters are warming fastest. The scientific hypothesis is that this is because of the loss of ice and snow, which are highly reflective and bounce a lot of sunlight back into space. Once a lot of that snow/ice cover is gone either seasonally, or permanently as in the Arctic and Antarctic regions, there is more exposed land/water to absorb the sun’s energy.
That is certainly my lived experience as a mostly-lifelong resident of Chicago with interludes in Michigan and New England. My siblings and I regularly marvel at how much milder Upper Midwest winters are than the ones we grew up in. Everyone I know has personal anecdotes about this: lakes in Wisconsin that for decades hosted winter "pond hockey" and/or ice fishing tournaments no longer freeze enough to be safe for such activities; my family's annual friends-and-neighbors sledding expedition to the Indiana Dunes now happens only once out of every 3 or 4 winters; what I've been perfectly happy with as a winter coat and gloves for a decade now would have been my autumn gear 20 or 30 years ago; etc.
Current data though also shows temps rising fastest in some other types of areas including the Sahara Desert and a swath of South America that mostly falls within Brazil. European weather patterns have recently produced record-breaking heat waves in both that continent's northern and southern portions. One hypothesis now being investigated is that the Mediterranean region has gotten drier leading to less moisture in the soils and hence less cooling by evaporation.
Thanks for sharing. Yeah I miss the winters of my youth, though I think most people around here are happy to see them go*. I heard about the heat waves in Europe, but I didn't pay much attention. How record breaking were the temps? Or was it more, hot for many days in a row? More along the time axis, vs the temperature axis.
*it sucks for anyone who use to make a living from the winter sports.
At least one heat wave was deadly, though I assume part of the problem was buildings that weren't designed for such high temperatures.
Yeah, heat waves and cold waves are often deadly.
I was jerkily scrolling through the comment-wastelands of substack and read your remark as 'I miss the writers of my youth'. Suddenly I felt old, and thought, "Do I? Miss them, I mean? They're all gone now aren't they?"
Yeah all the writers of my youth are dead now. Of course many were already dead when I read them as a youth.
After spending most of the last summer in Israel, this doesn't match my experience
Yeah, there are year to year variations. And you can have longer heat waves, but the observation is that the maximum high has not gone up. I don't know about Israel, it's never been above 100 F in Buffalo NY. Have you been visiting Israel for years?
Yeah. Last summer really was ridiculous (see e.g. this article)
https://m.jpost.com/environment-and-climate-change/article-757326
I'll be honest, I laughed out lout at the EA signal boost
There's been something pretty interesting going in philosophy blog Bentham's Bulldog: the utilitarian author has started to believe in God because it makes more sense than atheism. He doesn't hold theism with 100% certainty, but he sees it as more likely than atheism.
He's written a lot on how he came by this view, but this is a good summary: https://benthams.substack.com/p/a-crisis-of-faithlessness
I think it's pretty easy to make the case for a basic, prime mover, "the reason there is something instead of nothing" God. Questions about what exists outside the universe or preceded it are unknowable by definition, might as well call it "god." But that claim is basically indistinguishable from God not existing, it almost feels like it's just a matter of taste and how comfortable you are with "anthropic bias" being the answer to why our universe is the way it is.
As a person who used to think in my childhood that God is talking to me directly, and then figured out that it was just my own brain all along, I'm very amused by such situations.
I must be missing something, because I find none of his arguments even remotely convincing. Is there any that you yourself find convincing?
I think psychophysical harmony and the lawful universe are the most convincing arguments, which are really the same argument in the end: why is there Order and not Chaos? It's very easy to imagine life being as fleeting and incoherent as a dream, and yet, this is not what we observe.
I think I picked the wrong post (he's written a lot about this), this one is a better intro to his case:
https://benthams.substack.com/p/for-theism-part-1
Nothing actually convincing regarding God, but I've been annoyed/intrigued by some difficulties in articulating my objections to the arguments from anthropics even though some of the leaps feel badly wrong, so I gotta hand him that much. (Like, what kind of thing counts as the kind of thing that can have a perspective such that it should conclude that there should be lots of instances of things similar to its perspective-taking self in the world? What kinds of properties can it have and how widely can they vary before you're like, no, different kind of thing altogether, doesn't count?)
I think it's pretty telling that he doesn't even consider the possibility that God might not be benevolent. Theism is always so convenient for humanity.
...that's not the issue.
If I'm understanding what Bentham is going through correctly...some people are just really bothered by, like, math working.
Like, it seems intuitively obvious to us that math works but it's super-weird. Like, this guy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrien-Marie_Legendre), this guy is some insane French dude from the 18th century and he invented least squares regressions while presumably injecting raw opium into his eyeballs and yet 200 years later we can use that same math to predict auto sales volume next month for a dealership in Philly. And this works, this provably works, major business decisions are made off this and that's super weird, like, the weirdest, and it's very hard to ignore if you're lucky enough to be in a position to use these algorithms to drive major business decisions.
And if you try to seriously resolve this, and I mean this observationally, like everyone who takes this seriously seems to end up there, you end up believing in metaphysics. This doesn't necessitate G-O-double D, the atheist version of this is probably closest to simulation theory, but you end up believing in code or math or some underlying substrate of reality we can access beneath physics. And once you're there...man, God apparently makes a lot of sense.
And the benevolence of God or lack thereof is an argument, and one addressed elsewhere, but it's not outweighing this deep gut sense of underlying metaphysics.
> some people are just really bothered by, like, math working.
There is a fully satisfactory explanation here:
https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/highly-advanced-epistemology-101-for-beginners
Specifically the Logic/Mathematics section.
I mean, on the one hand, thanks for linking this.
On the other hand...no, no it isn't. I can tell by just scanning the one titled "Second Order Logic: The Controversy".
You should at least read Logical Pinpointing beforehand.
What do you still not find satisfying and requiring some kind of metaphysics?
Alright, read it, does not answer the problem and, honestly, not sure, you're listening.
Core issue:
https://iep.utm.edu/indimath/
"The Indispensability Argument in the Philosophy of Mathematics"
If this holds, mathematical objects are "real"
If mathematical objects are "real" but not physical, then metaphysics:
https://samzdat.com/2018/01/26/platonism-without-plato/
Quote from first link:
Sets are abstract objects, lacking any spatio-temporal location. Their existence is not contingent on our existence. They lack causal efficacy. Our question, then, given that we lack sense experience of sets, is how we can justify our beliefs about sets and set theory.
There are a variety of distinct answers to our question. Some philosophers, called rationalists, claim that we have a special, non-sensory capacity for understanding mathematical truths, a rational insight arising from pure thought. But, the rationalist’s claims appear incompatible with an understanding of human beings as physical creatures whose capacities for learning are exhausted by our physical bodies. Other philosophers, called logicists, argue that mathematical truths are just complex logical truths. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the logicists Gottlob Frege, Alfred North Whitehead, and Bertrand Russell attempted to reduce all of mathematics to obvious statements of logic, for example, that every object is identical to itself, or that if p then p. But, it turns out that we can not reduce mathematics to logic without adding substantial portions of set theory to our logic. A third group of philosophers, called nominalists or fictionalists, deny that there are any mathematical objects; if there are no mathematical objects, we need not justify our beliefs about them.
The indispensability argument in the philosophy of mathematics is an attempt to justify our mathematical beliefs about abstract objects, while avoiding any appeal to rational insight. Its most significant proponent was Willard van Orman Quine.
I don't actually have that much of a problem with that line of reasoning, but none of that actually supports the argument that God is benevolent. Based on observation, the default hypothesis should be that any potential higher being(s) are completely indifferent, but for some reason everyone jumps straight to assigning them motives. It all comes down to people fearing that their existence and suffering is completely meaningless. *sigh* If living is supposedly so wonderful, why can't they simply be content with their existence?
Sounds like Deism, at least the version Amercia's Founding Fathers believed in. (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/deism & https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Founding-Fathers-Deism-and-Christianity-1272214) -- holding that God is indifferent and does not intervene in wordly affairs, only (if he exists) being responsible for the creation of the universe and stepping back thereafter.
I'm not sure this is logically consistent.
The argument appears to be that your prior is that, because Bentham didn't consider the possibility of indifferent or malevolent gods, he must be wrong. And the argument seems to appear, under the hood, that because the probability of God being benevolent is low, ignoring argumentation, that preceding arguments must therefore be false.
Or that your prior is that the existence of a benevolent metaphysical god is 1%, therefore it's wrong.
Where Bentham's approach, and my understanding, is that these are relatively independent.
If the probability of math-y metaphysics being real is 80%,
Then in those situations where math-y metaphysics is true, the likelihood of God existing is 90%.
Then in those 72% of situations where math-y metaphysics is true and God exists, then we attempt to determine if God is benevolent or what is going on.
But I don't get the logic. If you follow that metaphysics exists and that God exists, and that's the chain, then the benevolence or lack thereof of God has no bearing on whether math-y metaphysics are real or whether God exists.
Also, got to be honest, I don't think you believe in actively malicious divine entities. I don't know anybody that does and it's difficult to imagine a sane person believing that.
>I don't think you believe in actively malicious divine entities.
I do in fact believe in demons that go around messing with your stuff. The number of tasks, both large and small, that have failed at the last second these last several months are supernaturally high.
I'm pretty sure this is your point, but I want to spell it out more explicitly for other commenters. Isn't it precisely because it ISN'T wonderful that people worry / care about god?
Isn't it because there IS so little justice in this world, and theodicy is a real problem, that people want to make up heaven and hell, so everyone gets their just desserts?
Going by the facts on the ground, I'd think the evidence points more towards higher beings being literally cruelly indifferent, or to actually REVELING in our suffering and injustices. We're the sitcom neighbor taking pratfalls, so they can have a good laugh and drink some more ambrosia before getting on with actually important things, or whatever.
>Isn't it because there IS so little justice in this world, and theodicy is a real problem, that people want to make up heaven and hell, so everyone gets their just desserts?
Largely agreed, but I think there are a couple of other elements involved.
The "just desserts" tend to be rewards/punishments for following mores typically benefiting some priest-king, so the priest-king had an incentive to spread or invent such tales, including ever-present surveillance that was beyond the capabilities of the priest-king and his minions.
Also, the setting for such "just desserts" is typically some hypothetical afterlife. Now, as Martin Greenwald, M.D. so eloquently put it in https://socraticpsychiatrist.substack.com/p/what-psychiatry-has-taught-me
>By seeing the myriad ways it can malfunction, I’ve come to appreciate the physical nature of the mind in far more immediate and dramatic fashion than any philosophical reasoning could demonstrate.
and this dovetails with trauma studies, with neuropharmacology, and so forth. Once our brains are shredded, we are irretrievably dead, and that's that. But this is using information from the last two centuries or so, including the fact that our brains contain billions of neurons sending millivolt pulses of millisecond duration to each other. Thousands of years ago, our ancestors had no reasonable way of knowing that the grey and white goo in our heads was indeed quite capable of producing all our memories and motives, personalities and preferences. Regrettably, rather than saying "I don't know" how such things were possible, they came up with just-so stories about souls, going all the way back to pharaonic Egypt. Not commendable, but understandable.
>Going by the facts on the ground, I'd think the evidence points more towards higher beings being literally cruelly indifferent, or to actually REVELING in our suffering and injustices.
Could be... I'm fond of noting that "indifferent" is also consistent with a very low IQ deity - in which case the deity can reduce down to the mindless interaction of particles following the patterns of physics, merely _renamed_ as a deity.
The other general point is, the world is well described by physics. I haven't seen any deities striding around throwing thunderbolts. Supernatural occurrences tend to evaporate when examined closely. One telling point: Notice that when believers say "The only thing we can do is pray." it is an admission of _impotence_? _They_ don't expect it to work, or they would try it earlier.
And the permanence of our deaths and the absence of supernatural intervention in our lives combine to make any deity _irrelevant_. It becomes a possible puzzle, akin to the first few plank times after the Big Bang, but unimportant to any decision we make.
> Isn't it precisely because it ISN'T wonderful that people worry / care about god?
On empirical principles I'm an agnostic. Strangely enough, I receive more pushback from atheists than I do from the god-bothering Christians. In my experience, the "New Atheists" can be especially antagonistic and obnoxious. God or no-god are both unfalsifiable propositions—and just because you dress up the no-god argument with a veneer of scientism, it doesn't make it any less a proposition based on personal faith. Also, I find it annoying that atheists generally use a bearded Yahweh as their stalking horse. Conceptions of god can be much more subtle than the Yahweh stereotype. Of course, Christians, have to reconcile the whole good and evil thing with their conception of a loving God. Monotheists like Muslims don't seem to be hung up on the good and evil thing (but I'm willing to be corrected on this if I'm wrong), because for them God is Great (but not necessarily good). Judaism has flirted with the good and evil question. Maimonides asserted that evil is the absence of good — and I think Augustine stole that idea from him. The Kabbalists believed that Ein Sof is beyond good and evil. When it comes to humans, the Zohar says: "There is no sphere of the Other Side [evil] that entirely lacks some streak of light from the side of holiness."
But on further thought, why shouldn't people be concerned with the god question? First causes fascinate our narrative minds. It's hard to say we're here and just shrug our shoulders.
>Maimonides asserted that evil is the absence of good — and I think Augustine stole that idea from him
Augustine pre-dated Maimonides by centuries, and anyways both of them were actually drawing this idea from earlier pagan philosophers (mainly Plato).
I think the pushback you receive could be a matter of miscommunication. You're engaging with the concept of God on such an abstract level that you're disbelieving every religion ever invented; for most atheists that'd count as atheism even if you allowed for the unfalsifiability of a god that was the same as there being no god. New Atheists are often formed by childhood experiences with the negative side of actual religions, which they and you both positively do not believe, but verbally emphasize in different ways.
Yes, exactly. Well, okay, maybe active cruelty is also assuming too much; evidence seems to point towards all suffering just being a result of naturally emerging systems. And frankly, humans aren't interesting enough to entertain even other humans for more than a couple decades.
>Theism is always so convenient for humanity.
I mean, that's not really true?
It's only this particular kind of theism, one that fairly intellegent people somehow manage to rationalize themselves into. Look at most religions historically and you will find deities that are all kind of terrible, and not just by modern standards.
I think this over, and when I compare "the world is bad, and its Author doesn't care or toys with me if it notices me at all" sounds a lot more convenient if I want to do something self-serving than "the world has a lot of negatives, and its Author expects me to rise to every challenge and even have a good goddamn attitude about it even, especially, on days when I'd like to burn it all down".
So much this. The convenient belief is that we just spontaneously popped into existence and nothing really matters. We can eat and drink and fuck to our hearts content, be cruel to each other, etc, and in the end none of it matters. The vastly more inconvenient belief is that we were born into this world, in the sorry state that it’s in, with the expectation that we do everything we can, to the best of our ability, to make it better. And every day we fail to live up to that goal, some cosmic entity is watching down on us, seeing our every move and inner thought, and shaking its head in disappointment.
I think the idea of heaven is overblown, perhaps even pushed mostly by non-believers looking for a way of deriding religion without ever really making a good faith effort to understand it. It’s a worldview that sees religious leaders as little more than sleazy used car salesmen pushing some ultimate prize. Personally I don’t believe in Heaven as a place, or any kind of afterlife, but more as a metaphorical concept that describes [hypothetically speaking] how good it would feel to be on death’s door knowing you truly did your best each and every day if your life and you made a positive impact.
It’s only the most superficial child’s understanding, of Heaven as a literal paradise in the clouds, that could possibly view religion as convenient, or wishful thinking.
And almost all of those religions are dead. They had low memetic fitness compared to convenient self-delusion. None of these modern religions are even remotely interested in truth. They exist purely because they are alluring to human minds.
Maybe God is Trump writ large. That would certainly make the existence of things like childhood leukemia easier to understand.
“The cruelty is the point” is befitting here.
John von Neumann confided to his mother, "There probably has to be a God. Many things are easier to explain if there is than if there isn't."
...Like what?
"Because God made it so" may be an explanation, but whether it is satisfying depends on the listener.
I don’t know. The quote is cited in his Wikipedia article.
Geesh, like the whole 'Life, the Universe, and everything." (I'm agnostic, but I like to live life as if there was a god.)
Does anyone here buy & sell individual stocks (or bonds, or crypto, or futures, or options, or commodities, or anything else?) I.e. does anyone here day trade, swing trade, or take longterm position trades? Anything other than just buying boring index funds and taking the market average. No judgement if you do, just totally curious- what motivates people to 'trade'? Are you profitable? More profitable than if you'd just held a boring index fund? Including taxes, which should take a significant chunk of any profits.
I spent a lot of time reading all the classic works on value investing, and I came to the conclusion that it's not worth the time investment for me to try to buy individual stocks and beat the market. But just interested in hearing peoples' experiences, good or bad
I used to, mostly because index funds didn't exist (or at least weren't readily available to the likes of me) when I started investing. Nowadays I have just a small amount still in individual shares, mostly massive losers that I don't have the heart to sell at a loss.
I think there's a certain amusement value in it. How good does it feel when you make a big bet and win? How bad does it feel when you make a big bet and lose? These values differ from person to person, some people tend to remember their gains more than their losses and they get positive satisfaction out of the whole process.
I don't think I have the time and emotional energy for it any more. I remember putting some money into a couple of really promising sounding biotechs which I thought were ready to explode, and then ardently following all the news about them for years. The hours I was spending on following these stocks waiting for the big news that would send them skyrocketing vastly outweighed their significance to my net worth.
These days I prefer to minimise my emotional surface area; I don't want my mood to be massively affected by some random piece of news.
About 85% of my portfolio is in individual stocks, the rest in stock funds. I own less than 1% in bonds, and have precisely zero in gold, silver, bitcoin/other coins, etc. Of the stocks I own, at least 90% pay dividends and have a strong history of increasing dividends over time. I am convinced that over the long run stocks will outperform every other asset class. I find that owning individual dividend-paying stocks lets me be extremely calm and rational during market downturns. The "value" of my stocks goes down during those times, but I don't care! I focus only on the annual income being generated, which is higher every month than it was the month before (due to companies raising dividends, plus me reinvesting dividends). So during downturns, I only see the potential to increase income at a faster rate, which makes me buy more. It's a win-win.
I've been doing this for almost 12 years now. My overall performance has been slightly below the S&P 500 ... but I do own a bunch of foreign stocks, and my performance has been better than most global funds. My return has also been *much* better than if I had gone with a typically recommended mix of 60% stock index funds / 40% bond index funds.
I don't day trade. I think for the long run. But I do believe that it's possible to see value and to profit from it, so I do make (mostly small) trades on a regular basis: I might sell $500 or $1000 of one stock to buy the same amount in a different stock, once every week or two. But most of my investing looks like this: "Hey, my stocks kicked out another $500 in dividends. Time to buy more stocks! What looks cheap today?"
Taxes have a low impact on overall returns, because most of my money is in non-taxable accounts. The fact that, at most brokerages, individual trades are now free is INSANELY GOOD for returns. 12 years ago I was paying $7.95 per trade ... that can add up, even if you trade as rarely as I do. My father used to pay $100 per trade, I think, back in the day. I don't think investment advice has fully updated on the new world in which individual trades are free. Or that the normal spread between bid & ask is very often $0.01 per share. Frictional costs are incredibly low.
I recommend checking out Chuck Carnevale's youtube channel if you're at all interested in DGI ("dividend growth investing"), or value investing in general.
But I wouldn't do any of it if I thought of it as a "time investment." I love the stock market! I love numbers, I love money, and I love trying to be smarter than the other guy. I love to think about the economy and the political world. By owning individual stocks, I can think seriously about what the future holds, and then bet actual money on my beliefs. Turns out I'm not as smart as I think I am! Which is good to know.
I believe that people notoriously over-report their profitability in this kind of thing. So I would take responses with a grain of salt.
Trading individual stocks can be more tax efficient. If, for example, you need to sell some to get money for something, you can choose to sell a balance of losers and gainers that produces net zero capital gain. But if everything is in an ETF, that has one hopes gone up, you will be stuck with a capital gain when you sell some.
Yes, some, because it's fun. I followed wallstreetbets reddit thread and successfully timed the gamestop run up in 2020 and that was one of the most fun things I have ever done. Very thrilling. It's normally not like that though. Some of the appeal is its also an interesting eye into how the world works. It's also a bit like what people get out of bets and prediction markets, your making a prediction about the world and seeing in real time whether you were right. My other best trade was in the pandemic ExxonMobil was in the neighborhood of $30 a share. At the time I thought is the pandemic going to continue forever? I figured no and felt confident that oil is here to stay so bought a small piece. Now it's over $100 a share.
I think it's important to remember the trades that turned out poorly, as well as the awesome gains. Certainly not every trade you (or anyone else) does is a winner.
Still, the times when you make a great investment, whether by skill or by luck, gives a great high.
I trade stocks and options personally, with mixed, but on average good, results. The past six months have been staggering, with a rate of return over 60%, a good portion of which was NVidia stock. But before that, going back about two years I was down as low as 40% off my high. According to my portfolio performance tool, my rate of return is 13.13% over about nine years.
If you like doing this kind of thing and have the arrogance to believe you can beat the market (which I have, in mild degree), then it can be fun to do, and you can tailor your portfolio specific to your goals, such as selecting some stocks for dividends and others for income. If you don't, you can buy one or several funds to accomplish the same things, and let others worry about the specific details of your portfolio.
I have my share of triumphs, and at least my share of disappointments.
I've done medium-term trading of individual stocks a couple of times in the past with a smallish portion of what is otherwise an index-fund portfolio, but found that neither the results nor the entertainment value justified keeping the practice up. I have been holding a fair amount of Berkshire Hathaway for the past few years, but only because the thing I actually wanted-- an index fund that doesn't pay dividends-- doesn't seem to exist.
I should probably trade more often, but I don't, both because I'm lazy and I'm scared of getting it wrong, which would be embarrassing. The reason for trading is the same for doing any economic action, which is because you think you have an edge. Without it, there isn't any reason to start a business, ask someone out, participate in a sporting event, etc. That is, unless you enjoy it personally, which could cancel out the negative EV that comes from getting a bad result.
Very occasionally, yes. Like …. once per decade.
My last experience was this: http://mistybeach.com/mark/#How_To_Pick_Stocks
Almost everything is in index funds, though.
I've bought crypto at low points a couple times and held. The first time, it worked really well. It wasn't very much, but enough to allow me to deal with some major expenses without dipping into savings. The second time, I sold early and still made a little, but spent months wallowing in FOMO. I tried my hand at stocks and managed to wipe out a decent percent of my crypto gains. Ultimately, I decided that I'm not cut out for it. It's just too time consuming and stressful, and I really don't have any kind of advantage.
You might like the Lex Fridman podcast with Bill Ackman.
A long time ago, I used to do indvidual stocks. It was fun. Overall I did worse than the index, although some individual stocks did much better. If you look at the 'Who Predicted 2023' post, you'll see that the aggregate of all participants scored in the 95th percentile. Picking individual stocks in a liquid market is making the bet that you can do better than the aggregate (which is what an index tracks), and that is not easy.
I'm basically convinced of the efficient market hypothesis (for almost everyone) in any market with signficant liquidity.
I would say, it's fine to stockpick for fun, or if you have access to markets with big inefficiencies (i.e. poor liquidity), or if you really are confident you have some significant edge over the market (bigger than having read a bunch of classic works), otherwise, just be happy with your index.
Occasionally, I have an insight which can exploit the two ruling emotions of the financial markets: fear and greed. For example, most recently, the prior two days before NVidia announced earnings saw their stock take a dip. I thought this unreasonable, expecting an earnings surprise, actually, and triggered by a fear of earnings disappointment. So I bought an option that would expire THAT WEEK just before earnings were announced. And NVidia stock went up something like 12% the following day.
I was prepared to lose the entire investment (after all, it was a stock option), but it turns out I was right, and made a tidy profit. A small blip, for it is foolhardy to bet large portions of your portfolio on all-or-nothing positions, but satisfying in that my thought "outsmarted" Wall Street.
As a counter-example, before Costco was announcing earnings, I bet they would have an earnings surprise to the negative. This was based on my experiences in the stores, with rising prices (especially on furniture, providing hard-to-see value), changing merchandise locations, and other things. Not only did I lose all of the money on that option, Costco stock is up about 50% from when I made my bet.
Cases where I think I detect fear or greed for a particular issue are few and far between.
Part of the problem here is that making money isn't enough to prove you were right. Maybe your detection of greed and fear was a unique insight to you that you were rightly rewarded for, or maybe it was already priced in by other market participants and you got lucky for other reasons. For an outside observer, it's difficult to tell the difference (outside a long history of statstically unlikely successes), but which happened is quite important for guessing how likely your future insights are to make money.
That sounds like the philosophical problem of what is truth. "The man with 10 coins in his pocket will get the job."
"Statistically unlikely successes" is also subject to opinion. Riding gains and cutting losses is betting on statistically likely successes, but is also no guarantee even that you are reading the current pricing correctly.
The only real indicator is long-term profit, which is as objective as you can get.
This is a real problem in finance. You want to pay traders to take the risks they are paid to take. Not to get lucky. They are supposed to hedge everything except the specific risk they intend. So in the case above, a hedgefund trader wouldn't just buy Nvidia on account that earnings will be good, but short some other assets to be "luck neutral" of sorts.
Traders are paid for providing a marketplace, and to correctly estimate the current market price for securities. Then they can make money on the spread, which is their payment. Because I made a short-term profit on NVidia, someone else took a loss. The trader sold me an option that someone else may have provided, and so made profit on the transaction. If that was the case, someone else took the loss, and there was no need for the trader to hedge.
If the trader took the loss, then it was likely overcome by the large NVidia position the trader held. In that case, selling me the option was a hedge against the stock going lower.
Traders are playing a different game than I am, using precisely the same transactions.
Hello!
Anyone know exactly what the point of Austin's SXSW is? They have setious ppl speaking but also Meghan Markle speaking, they once had Barack Obama speaking, and I think, music concerts. You could listen or read these speakers' ideas elsewhere like on YouTube. I'm curious why anyone pays $2k to attend. I tried to find ways to buy cheaper tickets but they were still very expensive.
I live in Austin, work in tech, and moved there for a SXSW-specific contract several years ago. SXSW started as a music festival when Austin was an important musical nexus, expanded into film, and then became a dog-who-caught-the-car when it expanded into “Interactive” (== general tech) in the early 2000s. Very quickly, the tech section of South-By eclipsed the other elements of the festival; there was a lot more money in play, and a lot more people could get their companies to pony up multiple thousand dollars for a trip.
I was there some of that time. It was exciting. It was the best general-purpose networking event I’ve ever been to. It was easy to meet famous people. It was easy to have *real conversations* with famous people. If you whispered that you were looking for work, it felt like the person in the next row back always had a business card for you. We’d gotten through the Dot Com bust just fine, Apple and Facebook hadn’t ruined our attention or our democracy yet, and lots of things felt possible.
Some of those things might still be true. And even if they aren’t, there’s still the hope that they might be again. If I was a deeply uncool company trying to A) appear cool or B) discover the next cool thing, (as my employer was when I moved to Austin in 2018), I still don’t have any better ideas for where to drop $2M than showing up at SXSW and trying to be part of the conversation.
TL;DR: In technology, SXSW *was* the best place for an industry-wide conversation about where things were and where they were going. Even after its recent shark jumping (Duchess Markle?), I don’t have any better ideas for where to hold that conversation.
Part of what conversation?!
Companies have a hard enough time doing clearly defined things!
I'd say that a capitalized The Conversation is about as specific as one ought to get; my belief is that SXSW was (is?) a vibes-based situation for big companies. I think the perception was that Important People were there to talk about The Future, and if you aspired to be seen as Important, it was worth a bunch of your marketing budget to show the flag there. My big multinational employer spent $1MM+ to rent an otherwise forgettable Mexican restaurant a block from the convention center for a week, and they were by no means the most noteworthy or profligate organization.
Why does Coach take out single page ads in the Times or the New Yorker all the time? Does anyone see those ads and run out and buy a $1200 purse that day? I doubt it. But Coach is pretty sure that spending like that is how they go on being perceived as an important cultural signifier. My take is that SXSW became (mostly accidentally) a place where "cultural signifier" status got bestowed, earned, or bought. In Vienna once, you had to be seen at the opera to be someone. In Silicon Valley, you had (have?) to be seen at SouthBy.
When I tried to take their quiz to figure out what badge (whatever that means) I might want, they sent me an email asking me to fill another form :
How big is your group?
Which company is sponsoring you?
My answers would've been 1, and no company, respectively. There was no place to say that. :)
So maybe it's only companies sending ppl.
Why would these companies do this? I mean, what do they think is the point of SXSW?
Formally she's Meghan, Duchess of Sussex (and in legal terms Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Sussex). As to why she's there, she and Harry are trying to monetise every chance they get (just like Fergie back in the day) so if the organisers are happy to pay for her, she'll be there talking about how tough her life is. Why the organisers want her is a different question.
As to SXSW, yeah I heard of it when it was the music festival. I had no idea it has turned into tech event.
I say we have a conference called Meta-SXSW to figure this out!
I suspect if you were in Austin this week and put up a website called `metasouthby.com` that said it was hosting a party to talk about SouthBy's cultural in/significance, you could attract a lot of 29-year-old tech people and very attractive marketing professionals. Also, Facebook's lawyers would probably call you.
Just don't put the word "Longhorn" in the name. It doesn't matter if you're just say, repairing auto glass, or selling sno-cones. A burnt-orange gorilla will come down on you.
Hahaha! I think if you and a bunch of scrappy kids in a Mystery Van managed a to tie up Bevo someplace and you grabbed his face mask to pull it off, it might be Mickey Mouse and a pile of Disney lawyers underneath it.
Is Horizon Zero Dawn perfectly suited to being transformed into a Game of Thrones video game? Just change the story line and convert all the machines into fantasy animals, and all the technology-based weapons into magic-based weapons.
Aloy is the most obnoxious post-millienial teenage girl I've seen in a game, and the world bends over backward to affirm her terrible, terrible personality. I don't see anything you could do to turn her into a Game of Thrones character.
...maybe she could be a fiancee for Joffrey.
Game of Thrones is not about fighting fantasy animals with magic weapons. Most of the combat is human vs. human, and the magic weapons aren't hugely superior to ordinary ones.
Game of Thrones has magic, but it doesn’t have a “scientific” RPG-style magic system where you level up your fireball or whatever.
GOT magic is more understated and mythic. Also in GOT, magic is more of a force of nature that cannot be fully controlled by humans.
HZD very much does have a scientific magic system where you progressively gain powerful new abilities. You also have to grind for items. I don’t think you could make HZD into GOT without completely changing the story.
I don't think I understand this question. To me it approximately reads like "Is Horizon Zero Dawn perfectly suited to being transformed into a Game of Thrones video game? Just change everything about it except the stat and crafting system." I assume I'm missing a train of thought here that's obvious to you, but it's not actually obvious to me. Which things do you think it would have in common with a GoT video game?
I'm a bit confused as to what would be left after you take out the story and the machines and the post apocalyptic setting. Beyond that I thought it was a pretty generic open world game.
Does having $2 million make you a "multimillionaire"?
Yes, which is why the term should probably be retired. Being a multi-millionaire these days doesn't make you particularly rich, and for middle-class people it's mostly just a matter of how much of your mortgage you've paid off.
I know that one group has a cutoff of $5 mil in total assets or $1 mil in annual income, which seems a reasonable cutoff.
Some people expect *multi* to be an integer >2; others expect it to be an integer >1. E.g. I'd expect a *multipolar world order* not to be a bipolar world order. But since no one says *bimillionaire* or *duomillionaire*, I guess I'd be more inclined to accept the >1 interpretation.
Very good points. If a news report claims "multiple sources confirmed this," but then it turns out only two people were those sources, it seems deceptive in spirit. Likewise, if you describe an entirely blue and red painting as "multicolored," it also seems deceptive.
Of course, as you point out, "multi-" and "bi-" aren't used consistently. For example, "biracial" and "multiracial" mean the same thing.
I think the safest answer to my own question is that "multimillionaire" starts at $3 million.
If you have them in relatively liquid assets (not real-estate in which you reside, retirement accounts or a private business' fair valuation), I'd say yes.
No, a minimultimillionaire. multimillionaire: minimultimillionaire :: poodle:toy poodle
Going from the poodle analogy, maybe a teacup millionaire?
“Pocket millionaire?” Like the German “pocket battleships” of ww2…
For those interested in ADHD meds: I just learned of the existence of one called Guanfacine that's in a whole different drug class from the others, which all seem to be uppers. In fact sleepiness is the first side effect listed. I very quickly skimmed the research on its effectiveness, and my impression was that it was slightly less effective than adderall and the other familiar ones, but not much less. Seems likely to me that it's less abusable. Unlike the ADHD drugs in the uppers class it does not raise blood pressure -- in fact it lowers it some -- so it's a safer option for people with ADHD & high blood pressure. Has anyone here had any experience with it? What did you think of it?
I was on guanfacine for a few months after my diagnosis. I don't think it had any effect on anything at all, no help with my ADHD, no side effects of any kind, except for some mild tachycardia at 5mg.
I take guanfacine. I was on Adderal for a while, but my blood pressure was going up. So the docs switched me to bupropion, which did not work great. So now I'm on Dexedrine and guanfacine, the guanfacine is there to lower my blood pressure while also adding some ADHD mojo. I haven't really noticed it helping. I just think of it as a blood pressure med.
What I've been told (epistemic status: rando on reddit) is that guanfacine is particularly good for managing hyperactive symptoms of ADHD and less effective at treating other focus issues, executive dysfunction, etc.
Anecdata: I don't have an ADHD diagnosis, but I was on Guanfacine briefly for Tourettes. The side effects made me much more distractible, so much so that I started doing things like standing in the middle of crosswalks because I had an interesting thought and forgot to keep walking. I still prefer it to its cousin drug Clonidine - that one made me sleep about 12-16 hours per day. (These days I just take very small doses of benzos for my tics.)
That's interesting. The one thing that actually got rid of my ADHD symptoms was suffering from extreme depression (to the point where I couldn't eat anything). Turns out your mind can't wander if it doesn't have the energy to do so. I also notice that my symptoms were less severe back when I was taking gabapentin. I assume any other sedative would have a similar effect.
...Of course, there's no point in alleviating ADHD symptoms if it ends up making you too tired to do anything. No wonder why people stick to stimulants.
It's not a sedative, but like many medications, fatigue and sleepiness are possible side effects. It simulates norepinephrine release within the central nervous system by agonizing the alpha-2 adrenergic receptor. This has widespread effects that might look contradictory if you're dichotomizing drugs as "uppers like stimmies" or "downers like benzos," including lowering heart rate and blood pressure via what I'm going to call brainstem shenanigans because this confuses me. But it's thought to work for ADHD by mimicking norepinephrine in the prefrontal cortex, and increased norepinephrine in the ol' prefrontal is one of the mechanisms of action of central stimulants, and the main one for Strattera. If you made a version of guanfacine (or clonidine) that was somehow (??) even more selective for prefrontal activity, you'd presumably have a non- or less-sedating version of the drug with the same ADHD efficacy. Note too that not everyone experiences sedation--some find the altering/wakefulness promoting effects dominate. It happens to be a good choice for people with comorbid anxiety, because it's also a decent anxiolytic, whereas stimulants tend to exacerbate that issue. As a non-addictive alternative with good efficacy and for some, a much better side effect profile, I think it's pretty darn underused.
Thanks, that's good to know.
Well I just looked through the Wikipedia article. If its effects are independent of sedation, that does seem very promising. I'm actually already taking clonidine, but I'm considering replacing it with guanfacine now, since it seems to be slightly better at the things I need it to do.
I Asked My Doctor About Intuniv awhile back. Can't imagine how or why you'd abuse it, it's just rebranded Tenex. It does work, but differently--if you've used stimulants and you're trying to map the effects onto your expectations you'll come up shorter than if you start clean, I'd bet.
Guanfacine has been an on-label ADHD treatment in the US for the better part of fifteen years, and presumably was off-label for some time before. Bluntly, the reason why you don't hear much about it is because people prefer to take stimulants. (It's probably better if you want to prescribe ADHD drugs to children to not prescribe anything with heavy psychological effects, but adults who seek ADHD treatment aren't looking for guanfacine.)
Oh, I didn't know that. I'll go back and correct my post. I'm a psychologist & have lots seen lots of people who take one of the various ADHD meds, and they all took the familiar upper type stuff. Just now had somebody put on guanfacine for the first time ever -- had never even heard of it. What do patients think of it? I don't have ADHD, but when I'm, for instance, sleep deprived my executive function definitely declines. Can't get much done, don't stick with plans, slide into time-wasting activities and can't stop. The idea of taking a med with a side effect of drowsiness when in that state is awful! But maybe it's a whole different experience if you're taking it for real ADHD.
Here’s a story about one of the ways GPT4 is dumb: I had asked google what household agents work to clean stained linoleum, and got hundreds of hits, most of which were exact duplicates of each other. The concoctions suggested were water + vinegar, water plus vinegar plus dish detergent, and water plus vinegar plus baking soda. The 3rd formula, though less popular than the first 2, showed up many many times. It’s obviously nonsense: The vinegar and baking soda will react to produce water, co2 & sodium acetate.
So I wanted to see how well ole Chat understood the Internet info about this topic. Asked it for household agents that might remove stains from linoleum. It said vinegar plus water plus dish soap, which I think was the most popular of the multiply-duplicated answers my google search turned up. So then I asked it whether including some baking soda would be a good idea, and it said “Adding baking soda to your cleaning mixture can enhance its effectiveness, especially for tackling tough stains and odors on linoleum floors. Baking soda is a mild abrasive, which makes it good for removing stuck-on messes without damaging the floor, and it's also a natural deodorizer.”
Yeech! Seems to me Chat’s process is essentially giving the answer that appears most frequently on the increasingly enshittified Internet, and not taking into account 3 things it surely knows: (1) There’s an online industry of copying advice and reposting it in a very slightly different format interlaced with ads. (In fact I asked Chat in a different conversation about the duplicates, and it was aware of the phenomenon and explained reasonably well why it exists.). (2) There are a lot of situations where how frequently a view is endorsed is not a measure of how likely it is to be true, and this is one of them. (3) Mixing vinegar and baking soda causes a chemical reaction in which each decomposes and in the process loses whatever stain-removing properties it had. (And Chat knows they react, too — even mentioned it in its advice: “Prepare the Solution: In a bucket, mix the hot water, white vinegar, and if using, a few drops of liquid dish soap. Gradually add the baking soda. Expect a mild reaction as the baking soda reacts with the vinegar, but this will subside quickly.”)
So it can’t put together different things it knows that would allow it to judge the online advice, just goes with the most popular. Makes me think about a post on here a few months ago in a discussion of whether some well known middle-aged white man, forget his name, was an appropriate appointee for some post — I believe the post was for the advisory board of an AI company. So the post somebody put up was Chat’s response to the question “Is Mr. M. A. Whiteman a good choice for this role?” And Chat gave a list of the guy's supposed good and bad qualities, as represented in the media, but came down more on the side of nay because more sources said Whiteman seemed to be impulsive. Chat’s summary seems to me just the linoleum stain recipe in another domain. It seems to be widely used for this purpose, and I think relying on it that way is going to make us all dumb way faster than embryo curation for Best of Breed can make us smarter.
And one more piece of snark: Chat said that adding baking soda to your cleaning solution can “enhance its effectiveness.” Nope. Even if it worked it would not enhance the effectiveness, it would increase it.
From *Catch 22*: “He was a spry, suave and very precise general who knew the circumference of the equator and always wrote "enhanced" when he meant "increased. He was a prick.” Chat’s a prick too.
Many Thanks!
Water + vinegar + baking soda isn't obvious nonsense, but you'd need to apply it in two parts. I've no idea whether it would work, but it probably depends on what you're cleaning off. If it's oil based, apply the baking soda first and then clean with water+vinegar. (Still, it seems dubious, but not obviously wrong.)
Yes, it's not nonsense if you use them separately -- the baking soda is at least abrasive, don't know whether it has any other useful properties. But when I asked Chat about adding baking soda it said to dump it in with the vinegar and water: "Gradually add the baking soda. Expect a mild reaction as the baking soda reacts with the vinegar, but this will subside quickly." The mild reaction is vinegar and baking soda neutralizing each other.
The “mild reaction” is often what you’re after though. It produces collapsing bubbles, which, in turn, generate tiny cumulative jets. These baby jets pierce, break up, lift off, and otherwise wreck havoc on contaminants. The same physics are at work in aggressive ultrasonic cleaners.
I don’t see how that can be true. First of all the reaction is over very fast. By the time the person carries the bucket from the counter where they mixed the cleaning solution to the place where they’re
going to start cleaning the reaction is done, nd most of the bubbles have risen to the surface and popped. And even if the solution was somehow continuously generating bubbles, the force of the popping bubbles would be nothing compared to the force of my rubbing the surface vigorously with a course cloth or a stiff brush.
Oh, I see, it really does want you to premix it... never mind. This is really dumb. You have to put the baking soda on the surface first, then add vinegar.
The bubble action is invaluable for areas that have nooks and crannies (and those could be small, e.g., scratches) where bristles can't reach. And of course for things like drain pipes. That's my go-to for minor clogs.
I could see how the bubbles might help in tiny nooks and crannies. But wouldn't soda water be better? With that stuff the bubbles continue for quite a while.
AI-generated SEO abusing schlock is probably part of the reason so many websites recommend a baking soda and vinegar solution in the first place. (Provided you're working with a smallish surface area and you, you know, don't combine them before application, baking soda and vinegar will clean a lot of things.) I like to imagine the people who used to make these obtuse errors by hand have taken their spoils and retired to a nice content farm upstate now that their jobs are fully automated.
I follow Peter Zeihan, who does geopolitical/economic prediction. I don't entirely trust him. Is he telling people what they want to hear? Still, he's interesting, and it's reasonable that demographics are pretty intractable. I haven't heard him say anything about the interactions between nations as population sizes change-- for example, big decline in China, much smaller decline in India, and what happens?-- I'm sure about China and fairly sure about India.
While we're on the subject, is it true that the really high end chips are only made in Taiwan?
Some of his predictions are 50 years out, and I'm willing to bet that Something Weird Will Happen Which Will Make Things Different.
I would count cheap gene sequencing and cheap computers as Big Weird Things. Recent plague and increase of war aren't as weird, but they did make a difference.
So here are some possible prediction-upsetting developments. Modest increase of longevity, enough to enable most people to be healthy until they're 90. Modest increase of intelligence-- say 20 IQ points for average people. Some element that was previously no big deal becomes crucial. A plague that's as infectious as measles. A new extremely popular religion.
Suggestions for other weird possibilities?
I discussed this with Michael Vassar, who thinks Zeihan is a hack, largely because of Zeihan's predictions of China collapsing. There's an ecology of China collapse predictors, but this might be wishful thinking. I've noticed that people keep predicting China's collapse, but it somehow fails to happen.
_China: The Bubble that Never Bursts_-- I haven't read the book, but the title says a lot.
https://www.amazon.com/China-Bubble-that-Never-Pops/dp/0190877405
Societies do occasionally collapse, but maybe it's not that easy to predict, and meanwhile, there are a lot of people scrambling to hold things together.
Discussions of difficulties with prediction seem to largely be about cognitive errors, but possibly there should be more about fear and desire making it hard to predict accurately.
>Some element that was previously no big deal becomes crucial.
Yup, been through that several times now! U, Li, Nd and other rare earths... :-)
- AGI has been well talked-through here, of course.
- Maybe Drexler/Merkle nanotech, if it ever gets funded...
- Unexpected progress on Sodium-Sulfur cells, sufficient to make the storage problem for solar and/or wind basically go away
- Enough progress on robotics that unmanned asteroid mining makes economic sense
- successful cyberattack on electric grids or other critical infrastructure, maybe by a nation, maybe by a terrorist group severely damages a major nation
- nation state uses nukes
- terrorist group steals a nuke or several and uses them
- sitting head of government of a major nation assassinated
- geoengineering to combat global warming tried, works, many arguments over setting the thermostat
- major mineral discovery in an unexpected place
- floating photovoltaics at sea soften the land use conflicts of renewables
- very efficient synthesis and fuel cell use of ammonia or hydrazine displaces liquid fuels
- large scale use of wind power turns out to have unexpected effects on air flows and climate
Your list isn't especially weird, but I agree they're all plausible.
I wrote about an element becoming important, but the example I had in mind was actually oil. It went from stinky stuff which was no big deal to something that's bending the world.
Many Thanks!
>the example I had in mind was actually oil. It went from stinky stuff which was no big deal to something that's bending the world.
Very true! And, within the set of petroleum products, gasoline went from being a hazardous by-product of kerosene production to "the most-consumed petroleum product" https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-products/use-of-oil.php
edit: One other thought, perhaps in a weirder direction than most: While AI gets thoroughly discussed, animal/AI hybrids don't get discussed too often. What if someone has the bright idea of hooking up a nearly-FOOM-capable GPT6 to a kitten, and it turns out that the kitten _really_ enjoys hunting?
"Really high end" chips are made only in Taiwan, South Korea, and the USA. It's hard to get production numbers for high-end chips specifically, but I think that generally for TSMC/Taiwan it's "lots", Samsung/Korea it's "some", and Intel/US it's "were trying real hard, in five years it will be lots".
Weird drugs that change us in ways never possible before. One becomes more popular and widely used than alcohol.
The group now in their teens grows into adults with 3x as much mental illness, esp. depression, substance abuse and severe anxiety disorders, as people who are currently in midlife.
Tech makes possible some ways of tapping into others' experience, including the experience of animals, and those who use it lose the ability to see themselves & their group as cars & others as just traffic.
A weird drug seems likely. I've wondered about possibilities for a new drug that's pleasant and not addictive or not very addictive.
Increased mental health problems seems like an easy predictive rather than a weird one. Younger people have grown up in an environment where scaring people is highly incentivized.
I think tech that gives access to other's experiences is really hard, but there might be something with the name that's very watered down, just as artificial intelligence isn't intelligence, and virtual reality is very narrow bandwidth compared to reality.
I'd merely speculated about some people's experience of art as being interesting enough to be worth sharing.
They should call it "Soma".
But seriously, I much agree with your ideas on longevity and IQ. Longevity is a lower hanging fruit, I think. It feels as if we already have most of the pieces and just need to put them together in a cost-effective and evidence based way. Bryan Johnson is doing Gods work here, weird as he is.
As for IQ... I don't think actually raising IQ will be easy, but even a relatively small breakthrough in dementia treatments will be a HUGE boost in average IQ and, coupled with longevity, allow for another decade of productive work. Which will be added to the part of the life where people have most experience, so much more bang for the buck than, for example, having a larger population.
I also think there is a very low hanging fruit in IQ-adjacent medication. TBH, we're all probably using a lot less modafinil and adderall than we should, or could safely use.
Philip Tetlock's work should make you wary of any prediction - especially (Geo-) political predictions - unless the predictor is going out of their way to quantify both the prediction and exactly how much they believe this prediction and what would make them admit that they got it wrong. The vast majority of Political or International Relations "analysis" is see doesn't meet this bar, it's sports commentary. "Ohhh and Putin is going to do this and that, but Biden is very careful not to flobrecate and frobnicate because reasons", this is how I hear and read 95% of political predictions.
> is it true that the really high-end chips are only made in Taiwan?
Hmm, maybe? Intel has their own chip manufacturing still, and some giants like Nvidia very possibly have the liquidity to build new fabs if pressured.
What you should be more worried about is the supply of Extreme Ultraviolet machines that makes those fabs work, a single company provides those machines for the entire world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASML_Holding. Without those machines you can still make chips, just worse and bigger than they could be.
The really high end chips are *mostly* made in Taiwan. There are only 3 companies in the world able to do them: Samsung, Intel, and TSMC. And TSMC dominates the market.
And TSMC has been ahead for the past few years. Not massively but enough to matter for the truly high end stuff (nvidia GPUs, Apple SoCs).
Process tech aside, Intel still mainly manufactures their own designs, many of which have been less than stellar.
20IQ gains on average would be huge.
I've been following him for a few years and think he's correct on some issues and incorrect on others. He also wrongly predicted that Trump would win reelection and that there would be mass famine in poor countries a year ago due to reduced Ukrainian grain exports. The more he runs his mouth (and he's doing that way to much these days), the faster his track record of mistakes will grow.
Before dinging him on the Trump prediction I'd want to know when it was made. In July 2020, yeah, no, but in January 2020 Trump was very obviously sailing to re-election. Covid lockdown policies and the Black Lives Matter rioting, and Trump's incoherent and weirdly passive reaction to those things, put an end to that in a way no one could have predicted.
BLM actually *helped* Trump thanks to the backlash over the riots. In fact, this isn't even something you have to speculate about - someone did an analysis and found that areas of Wisconsin overperformed for Trump more the closer they were to the locations of major riots.
I wonder whether he's where I got the idea that Ukraine was doing 30% of the world's wheat production when it turned out to be 30% of the world's wheat exports. Most of the wheat is grown in the country where it's eaten.
Does Germany abolish itself? https://grauwacht.substack.com/p/does-germany-abolish-itself
Schafft Deutschland sich ab? https://grauwacht.substack.com/p/schafft-deutschland-sich-ab
I analyze the latest PISA results to figure out why Germany's performance has declined so much in recent years. My focus is on figuring out the extend to which changes in migration patterns can explain the decline. Remember to subscribe!
Introduction
In 2010, the book "Deutschland schafft sich ab" (Germany Abolishes Itself) was created by Thilo Sarrazin. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move. Sarrazin's core thesis on the topic of education can be roughly summarized as follows:
The German birth rate is low, with less than 1.4 children per woman. This is contrasted by a large number of migrants, especially from Muslim countries, who have higher birth rates.
Many migrants have educational deficits compared to the German population.
Even after several generations, these migrants do not catch up with German society. This is due to genetic and cultural inheritance as well as little pressure to integrate.
In the long run, Germany’s educational achievements will deteriorate due to this demographic change.
Sarrazin's critics argued that he was right about some things, but that he painted too bleak a picture and mixed truths with falsehoods. They pointed out, for example, that there had been progress in the area of education among Turks, a large Muslim immigrant group. Against the background of the recently published PISA study, in which Germany performed miserably, it seems appropriate to re-examine Sarrazin's thesis. In particular, I will use the latest PISA study to answer the question of whether, and to what extent, migration aspects play a role in the continuous decline of German education...
Read more: https://grauwacht.substack.com/p/does-germany-abolish-itself
If Germany abolishes itself, do we get the Holy Roman Empire back? I want to give cartographers fits for generations to come.
What about the percentage of people doing very well rather than the average PISA score. That’s what matters.
The percentage of students who reach the highest competency level in math dropped from 5.74% (2009) to 3.5% (2018) to 2.24% (2022). I estimate a migration effect of 16.2% (2009-2018) and 21.3% (2009-2018) under the assumption of relative parity for the performance. Overall, even though there is still a migration effect, the elite students seem to vanish for other reasons as well. My guess would be general dysgenics, brain drain, or an erosion of elite support. Also, interestingly, the pandemic didn't impact the size of the migration effect much in contrast to the case using the average performance.
Ouch. That’s bad. The pandemic was pretty bad for education. Dysgenics over 10 years seems implausible.
Some of you who are spaced-repetition nuts might remember a blog post series I wrote called Why Anki Works (https://nephewjonathan.substack.com/p/why-anki-works-part-1), which was the product of a year and a half of teaching Latin, trying to get the kids to use Anki, and failing--but learning a LOT about how and why spaced repetition works in the first place.
I'm now starting a startup--it doesn't have a name yet--for next-generation spaced repetition software, after spending a couple months getting my webdev skills up to speed on a personal project. There's a whitepaper here (https://eliotweb.net/srswhitepaper.pdf) describing what I'm building and why (some of the screenshots are out of date; section VI is also a bit more puffed-up than I'd like, since I was hoping to catch attention from some VCs, but I certainly don't disbelieve any of it). I'm currently working on the card designer/template maker (screenshot at https://eliotweb.net/templatemaker31124.png) and should have it more-or-less ready for the prototype by the end of this work week. Then it's on to card creation and reviews.
Big differences from Anki that have been implemented so far, most of which is visible in the screenshot, include a what-you-see-is-what-you-get card editor that uses markdown instead of HTML, fields that aren't just text/images (like checkboxes, buttons and dropdowns), the ability to make cards *contingent* on field values (so that you can have a template for German vocab create a card to test noun gender that's only created if the word is a noun), character replacement (so that you can type <scho"n>, <sophi'a>, <k'Atab>, or <gorod> and have it convert automatically to <schön>, <σοφία>, <כָּתַב>, or <город>), and the ability to set cards as prerequisites to each other, creating more advanced card relationships than Anki's sibling-burial. A schema for what this looks like can be found at https://eliotweb.net/reviewfrontier.png. Facts live in a network with each other, and a next-generation SRS platform should be able to mimic this. You *can* memorize the structure of an amino acid as a jumble of letters and lines, but it's parrot-knowledge if you don't know the functional groups.
Beyond that: the initial catalyst for working on this, as I said, was frustration with trying to get the kids to use it, so the long-term goal is to make it work for classrooms. That means it needs to live in the browser, rather than being installed locally, and although it should work well for autodidacts (who are likely to be the very first customers and have provided the initial spurt of funding), it should also have classroom abilities like Quizlet where teachers can make cards for students and see how they're doing (more details in the whitepaper). The knobs and dials mentioned in the last paragraph and seen on the screenshot are also motivated in large part by the realities of classroom usage. If you want to make custom card types in Anki, you'll need to know HTML (even for something as simple as a line break), and any halfway advanced auto-formatting requires Javascript--something most teachers don't want to waste time with, let alone their students. My own vocab cards have a massive Javascript block that color-codes the foreign-language field on the back side of cards based on their gender (so I can type <m> in the field and get blue coloring, or <f> and get red), but this is kludgy and non-obvious. So the general guideline here is that a 45-year-old Spanish or bio teacher, or ninth-grader, should be able to do pretty much anything an Anki power user can do without having to write any code. (And other things as well: it would be really nice to be able to create diagrams in-hourse, make clozes for those diagrams, and color-code MathJax formulas).
<Scott, feel free to remove this section if it shouldn't be included outside of a classified thread>
I talked to a couple of VCs, and there was some interest, but also a consensus that bootstrapping to a prototype via crowdfunding might work better early on. There's a GoFundMe for this purpose (https://www.gofundme.com/f/nextgeneration-spaced-repetition-software) --GoFundMe made me add a disclaimer to the bottom of the story saying I wouldn't be handing out any freebies, but I can say with a nod and a wink that backers will get very heavy discounts on subscriptions at launch (right now we're looking at a regular monthly individual subscription being $5, a yearly subscription $50, and a lifetime subscription $150, with backers' donations counting towards accounts at a third of the price--so if you donated $100 you'd get a lifetime subscription for yourself and a spare for a friend). Teacher accounts with group-management abilities will be a little bit pricier but come with a few free student accounts.
</possibly-inappropriate-section>
I've got a semi-cofounder--friend of a friend who just got laid off from his SWE job and is helping to work on this for a month or two to buffer his portfolio and get a small equity cut--but if you're an SRS nut who's got good webdev, backend or cybersecurity skills (especially the latter) and are interested in cofounding for the long haul, please drop me a line (either campbell · nilsen at gmail · com, or nephew_jonathan on Twitter--DMs are open). I don't have real funding yet (the GoFundMe is putting enough food on the table to not need to work full-time for a couple months while coding this), so until that happens, all I have to offer is equity. (Or, if you're just an SRS nut who's got an idea for something you think we should include--please, please drop me a line. Quite a few features have made their desirability known in the course of coding the prototype, and I'm sure there are others that escape me.)
I like this, especially the networked factoids and the concept of the knowledge frontier.
I have no teaching background but am very interested in learning and how to optimise the process. So the mental models used by experienced professionals are of great interest to me.
Can I ask some very dumb questions about how this works in practise?
Do you teach the whole subject (ie the entire knowledge graph) in the classroom, then release the card-stack for the students to use as a revision tool?
Or do you hand out the software right at the beginning and expect students to follow along at home as lesson by lesson you cover more of the content?
Just in general, how does normal teaching interact with this SRS card system?
I ask because my first thought was you could pull in extra money and get free content, by allowing teachers to curate and sell their own knowledge graphs/card stacks/whatever you call them; the card stacks would need to be reviewed and rated, and you would provide online management/authoring tools as part of the site. In return your company would take a cut of every sale.
But it's a pretty vacuous suggestion when I don't truly understand how the system would be used in real life.
In general, SRS is for reviewing what you've learned more than learning it. But in my experience, the real villain is forgetting--you can teach anybody a new vocab word and have them remember it ten seconds later; the question is whether or not they'll remember it in a week. So the hard part is not *learning* in and of itself but *fighting forgetting*--and because knowledge builds on itself, you need to make sure you remember the prereqs when time comes to learn something new. It's easy to learn new stuff if you remember the prereqs, a miserable hassle if you don't.
> I ask because my first thought was you could pull in extra money and get free content, by allowing teachers to curate and sell their own knowledge graphs/card stacks/whatever you call them; the card stacks would need to be reviewed and rated, and you would provide online management/authoring tools as part of the site. In return your company would take a cut of every sale.
Anki lets you upload shared decks for free. But they're open-source, and the intention here is a for-profit company. I don't know, for example, what the legalities are of hosting a deck based on the vocab lists in a copyrighted textbook.
The link to your GoFundMe is broken. When I click it, I get this text string in the URL: "https://www.gofundme.com/f/nextgeneration-spaced-repetition-software)--GoFundMe"
but this works:
"https://www.gofundme.com/f/nextgeneration-spaced-repetition-software"
Should be fixed. Thanks!
Wow! This sounds super exciting. I couldn’t stand how bad Anki’s UI looked so I switched to an app called Mochi. It seems relatively unknown even among SRS geeks so I’d recommend giving it a look to see if you can draw any inspiration from it. Mochi doesn’t have most of the features you’re describing, but it does nail the UX and have some other neat features you didn’t mention
I tried Mochi! I actually quite like the *look* of Anki's UI, but my students didn't. I'm guessing that's an age-cohort thing--I was born in '95 and don't find mid-2000s web design all that off-putting. I'm trying to shoot for Art Deco/Streamline Moderne for the UI of this thing.
I'm starting a new thing called Mindful Media Club. The aim is to trade tips on better personal use of social media - things like settings, browser plugins, social practices, to make it work for you and what you need and your mental health.
If you're in London, first meeting is on Wednesday March 20th at Newspeak House: https://lu.ma/7vouuhon
And there's a Discord for anyone everywhere: https://discord.gg/hbSeb78cCv
> The aim is to trade tips on better personal use of social media
Using Discord seems counterintuitive to managing social media habits. The platform is a cesspool for the terminally online.
I was wondering if eg a Discourse forum would be better - for search accessibility particularly. Is that the kind of thing you were thinking?
In general though we're not going to dismiss/shame specific platforms, or try to tell people not to use them. Not because it is wrong to try to do so, just not the goal of Mindful Media Club!
You've got me curious if there any useful Discord related browser plugins...
What's the relationship between the proofs for the existence of God and the evidence of God? Most Christians of my acquaintance say they believe because they have personal experience of God. That's excellent. I am happy for them. But then, who/what are the proofs for? If you already believe in God, why do you need proof?
And what does it mean to doubt the existence of God when you have evidence? Are there other domains where you have evidence of something but you doubt it anyway? Even St. Thomas required evidence before he believed in the risen Christ and I’m willing to bet that Thomas did not doubt again after poking the risen Christ’s wounds.
More wondering here:
https://raggedclown.substack.com/p/arguments-for-god
When I was at school, there was a book in the library explicating Aquinas' five proofs of the existence of God. Being curious I took it out. And immediately my classmates assumed me to be an atheist!
I'm not sure if this is a philosophical question (about what makes logical sense) or a personal question (about how people think in practice). If the former, I think the main issue here (which I also think is a crippling flaw of Rationalism (TM) as a whole) is treating "evidence" as somehow a separate kind of thing to philosophical argument. What??? Thinking in terms of your own perceptions and experience is still thinking, just like thinking in terms of concepts and logical coherence. The scientific method was created by philosophers, and for a century science was called "natural philosophy", and is only now categorised differently for practical reasons (like how Western is a treated as a different genre to Historical Fiction, even though it's really just a specific form of it). Forgetting this leads you into numerous fallacies, and/or lets you smuggle in assumptions of enormous philosophical significance (e.g. emprical knowledge is the only form of knowledge), without having to actually *argue* for them.
With that in mind, I don't really understand the premise of your question. More specifically, Experiential Arguments are usually treated as just one category of claimed arguments for the existence of God, along with:
Cosmological Arguments (from first cause or fundamental explanation)
Ontological Arguments (from definition or essential nature)
Transcendental Arguments (from foundational justifications for all knowledge)
Teleological Arguments (from apparent fine-tuning of life or of the universe for life)
Moral arguments (from the basis for morality).
On a general level, one can accept and reject any combination of those arguments. Personally, I think the last two are terrible arguments which rely on ignorance of science and probability, and of three centures of moral philosophy. While the other four are much harder to refute, and depend a lot on your existing metaphysical and meta-philosophical assumptions.
So if you think you have personal experiences of God, or if you think other peoples' claimed experiences provide objective evidence for everyone (through the Transmission View of knowledge through testimony), then that's one argument. If you don't accept the validity of any of the other above arguments, then your belief in God will hinge on that experience (at least insofar as that belief is strictly rational). If you also accept a form of the cosmological argument as a proof of God, then in theory either of your proofs are individually redundant, and you'd need to have both convincingly refuted in order to stop believing in God. In practice, people don't think very rationally often, but that's a psychological issue and one that also probably has enormous individual variation.
On the other hand, there's a whole (albeit minority, I think) Protestant tradition of rejecting reason entirely ("that harlot Reason" is attributed to Luther). This Fideist View has some overlap with existentialism, especially through Kierkegaard. And also connects with postmodernism and poststructuralism perhaps. But that's probably not something worth pursuing around here.
> With that in mind, I don't really understand the premise of your question.
I don't find any of the proofs of God convincing. The fine-tuning argument and modern versions of the argument from design make me scratch my head and wonder but they don’t amount to a proof. The ontological and cosmological arguments don't seem to prove very much at all.
However, when someone tells me that they have personal experience of God, I have to assume they are telling the truth. I have never had such an experience but I have no reason to doubt theirs.
My question concerns the people who have had such an experience but still rely on philosophical arguments to make their case for God. I am curious why one still needs logical proof for something they have physically experienced.
I made analogies below with 1) dark matter and 2) pandas. As far as I know, no one has experience of dark matter (there is no evidence of dark matter) but the rational explanations are convincing. Conversely, all our knowledge of pandas comes from evidence and someone who has experienced a panda would have no need of rational proof to confirm their belief.
Why would someone who has personal experience of God also require a proof?
What I'm saying is that "personal experience" is one kind of (claimed) proof. I don't see it as a different kind of thing to a proof, I see it as one of several forms of proof.
Some theists will believe based on an experience (i.e. accepting the Experiential Argument) while not relying on any other arguments. Some will accept the Cosmological Argument, but not the Experiential (either because they have no such experience, or because they don't think their experience proves much on its own). Still others will believe based on both experience and first cause (accepting both aforementioned arguments), but reject the Moral Argument. They would be saying, in effect "my experience proves God's existence, and even if that experience were shown to be false I would still think the requirement of a first cause proves God's existence; but I don't think morality requires or proves God, atheism does not imply nihilism etc". Those are all perfectly coherent stances to hold. In practice, of course, those who accept one of the arguments are highly likely to endorse all of them, because that's how humans behave. But that wouldn't necessarily be rational, and those other arguments would not neccessarily be their *real* reasons for believing.
As for why you would want additional proofs if you already think you have one: first, because it makes your position stronger, so that even if one of your proofs is refuted you would still have grounds for belief; and second because it makes your belief easier to promote to others who don't themselves accept your first proof but may be open to accepting others.
I don't really see any contradiction here.
(Incidentally, "someone who has experienced a panda would have no need of rational proof to confirm their belief" is not true, at least for philosophers. Your experience might have been an illusion, it might be a false memory, it might have been a tiger disguised as a panda, etc etc. There's a whole ongoing branch of epistemology revolving around captial s Scepticism. I'm not sure whether this is relevant to your point though.)
If philosophers don't accept physical evidence of an event, so much the worse for philosophy.
I can't think of another area of everyday life where rational proofs are given more weight than personal experience. Yes, people are sometimes mistaken about an experience but, even then, it would be rare to give priority to a rational argument over physical evidence. Even among philosophers.
FWIW I wrote about the Getter Problem here:
https://raggedclown.substack.com/p/but-do-i-really-know
I have zero expertise in this area, so please take my comments with a grain of salt.
In my experience, serious Christians in serious Christian spaces so rarely talk about proof of God's existence. After you accept the existence of God as an axiom, the field of theology really opens up, and you get to discuss the things that religion nerds (clergypeople) are actually interested in.
Outside of Christian spaces, proof of God is all anyone talks about. So I would guess it comes up a lot at the interface of religious and non-religious communities, which is also the only place a non-religious person would come across religion (by definition).
In summary: People that already believe in God don't need proof, but it comes up disproportionately when people who believe and people who don't believe are interacting.
Proofs help with "do I believe this because I believe this, or just because I've been raised to believe it?", also in arguments with non-believers over "is it reasonable to believe/faith is just taking on blind credulity with no evidence". You are supposed to be able to defend why you believe, and simple "I believe because I believe" is not good enough.
I agree that "I believe it because I believe it" and "I believe it because my mum believed it" don't count for much. I'd still want proof or evidence. If I had evidence though, I would certainly believe; no proof necessary.
Regarding your first question about the proofs for God vs. evidence of God, you seem to be making 2 assumptions:
1- Someone who believes X due to evidence for X must not need to make arguments/proofs for X
2- Someone who argues that we should believe X for ${REASON} must also believe X for the exact same ${REASON}
Those 2 assumptions strike me as false.
Beginning with number 1, the job of the proof is not to *replace* evidence, it's to *summarize* and *expose* them to a wider (and unconvinced) audience. Look at the archetypical example of proofs: Mathematics. In Mathematics and Logic, proofs are formally nothing more and nothing less than a sequence of mechanical transformations applied to the agreed-upon axioms. Every single theorem or fact in Mathematics is entirely contained and implied by the axioms of the field the theorem or the fact belongs to, the proof simply shows **how** the axioms imply the result in question, by showing - step by step - that repeatedly applying "uncontroversial" rules to the uncontroversial axioms ultimately yields the result. In addition to this formal conception of proofs, real proofs in actual mathematics are a social protocol. Proofs require good technical writing, good "bird's eye view" outline of what the prover is going to do on a high level, good justification for every creative step ("Ok so now we're going to multiply this limit by blah(x)/blah(x), this is just 1 so it doesn't change anything", why did the prover choose "blah(x)" in particular? They could have chosen anything, and the fraction would still be 1), and so on. Good mathematical proofs are very rhetoric-ish, they are not exactly a sequence of brute logical assertions that pass entirely on merit, they are rather a social exercise that aims to convince other mathematicians that the submitted proof is a good approximation of a formal sequence of assertions. (Of course, since mathematicians are generally good at logic, and since they have a really strong incentive to falsify a published proof - especially of a major result - it's fortunately difficult to convince them of false things).
Regarding 2, I don't think it should be the case. Sometimes you believe things for reasons that aren't important to other people, let's say I don't want to eat animals because I think animals should have the same rights human have because they feel the same pain and joy, I think this is a morally trivial assertion and I can't justify it out of more primitive assertions. Lots of people find it preposterous. I think it's not necessarily a bad thing to argue that you shouldn't eat animals anyway even if you disagree with me about how they should have the same rights as humans, for other reasons that you might find more convincing, for example due to environmental problems or technological efficiency (lab-grown animal products having the potential to market-compete the old-fashioned way out of existence). It's not ideal, I would rather all people agree with me that killing animals to eat them is morally wrong, period, but it's also much better to not kill animals for any reason than continuing to kill animals because the "right" reason is not convincing enough.
I don't think the "Proofs" for God are wrong/suspicious/cringe because of (1) and (2), I see (1) and (2) as faulty assumptions that are frequently violated even in other "Good" or "Normal" conversations where God is not involved. Arguments for God are however still almost always fallacious, because:
1- They're made by someone with the extremely strong incentive to prove that God exists. This is the same class of problems that is present in (e.g.) the Climate "Science" funded by big oil companies, or the "fact"-finding missions established by governments to investigate their own failings. There is a clear conflict of interest here even with the best and most honest of intentions: "Islam is the one true religion, and I'm ***TOTALLY*** not saying this because I will be disowned and fired from my job and possibly killed or jailed if I say otherwise, no, I'm merely saying it because it's true, I have proved it!".
Anecdote: When I left Islam, I still believed in Deism for several months afterward. I did this for no good reason, merely because it felt bizarre and oddly transgressive to... simply not believe in any God at all. I have long since grown out of it, but this illustrates the sheer pressure exerted on a religious mind when arguing for or against God, a literal life-or-death kind of pressure that makes your brain unsuitable for rational thought. (and this is a feature not a bug for the ones who created the religion)
2- They are very prone to making the "*A* God exists, therefore *MY* God exists" fallacy. A religious headspace primes you to think that the choice is binary, either there is a God or there isn't a God. The most famous example of this fallacy is Pascal's Wagger, which quite literally goes "It's rational to act as if someone very powerful and very angry might punish you for not believing in them even if it's not entirely clear that this someone exists, therefore this someone is actually the Christian God and all of Christianity up to the 1600s is true".
A religious person is already an atheist with respect to several hundreds/thousands God, only not the one they were raised on. This is not a sophist point, there are really extreme core-deep differences between religions on how they conceptualize God. The Christian God says Jesus was His son and that he died for our sins, the Islamic God says that Jesus is entirely human to every last atom and that he never died, no amount of Philosophy or "Look over there! a human eye! very designed!" is going to resolve this conflict.
3- Even if the arguments work, and even if they do prove the exact kind of God that the religious person is arguing for, they still don't prove that we *Should* worship this God. We don't worship heads of states or military commanders, so Power alone is not enough to justify why we should worship. We don't worship brilliant scientists or artists or engineers, so Intelligence and the ability to create impressive things are not enough to justify worshipping. This can be seen as an extension of point 2, since "Worthy of being Worshipped" is an implicit part of the definition of every religious person's God.
4- As a particularly important sub-point of 3, every religious person is in a lot of trouble due to the history of religion itself. Immediately after Mohammed (Islam's prophet) died, his companion politically back-stabbed and intrigued for succession, and then no more than 30-ish years passed before they descended into full-blown war. It's **brutal** war at that too, one of the battles had soldiers descending on Medina (second most holy city in Islam after Mecca) and raping women and girls there such that they continued to give birth for years after the battle. What did Islam ever do to those people? How did it morally uplift the people practicing it or prevented them from acting just like any regular old barbarians? Islam doesn't make people any more likely to win wars either, neither does any religion. What's the actual benefit of any religion compared to the placebo?
And plenty of other reasons.
------
Nitpick in the article you posted, it says:
"""This argument comes from Islamic theology and, in its updated form, goes like this:
Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
The universe began to exist.
Therefore, the universe has a cause.
(Craig, 1979)"""
I believe - and I'm by no means an expert - that this is actually much older than Islamic theology, specifically it's the "First Mover" argument which goes way back to Aristotle (and possibly further). Aristotle thought of this as a pure physics argument, nothing ever moves unless moved by something else, nothing ever happen unless caused by something else. Therefore, it must be the case that a single, non-recursive base case of motion and causation exist which set into motion the entire universe, and this case is God. Christianity plagiarized and adapted this argument from Aristotle, and then Islamic theology did its part and transmitted it into several languages, possibly after further expanding and annotations and cross-synthesis with other religious traditions from Persian and Indian sources.
Many Thanks!
>2- They are very prone to making the "*A* God exists, therefore MY God exists" fallacy.
Yup! I'm fond of noting, to any one who uses the "fine-tuning" argument as evidence for a God, and then trying to argue for _their_ God, that it is equally compatible with a benzene-ring-fetishist God. :-) Even if it tuned physics to generate carbon, who would know if it likes life or just _really_ likes graphite dust...
>it is equally compatible with a benzene-ring-fetishist God
Yes, and?
If the fine-tuning argument works to demonstrate *some* kind of God must exist, then that's sufficient to refute the atheist position -- trying to work out the details of whether God has any special interest in us, and what that interest is if so, is a separate discussion. And if the fine-tuning argument is not a good argument for God's existence, then you should be able to show that directly instead of pointing out that it's not a good argument for some other specific claim about God which it was never supposed to prove.
Many Thanks! Note what I was replying to. I was specifically endorsing, and expanding on, LearnsHebrewHatesIP's good point that:
>2- They are very prone to making the "*A* God exists, therefore MY God exists" fallacy.
In point of fact, I think the "fine-tuning" argument is weak, since there is the possibility that anthropic selection from a large set of possible symmetry-breakings is the explanation of "fine-tuning", rather than any deity.
There is also a subtler problem with
>trying to work out the details of whether God has any special interest in us, and what that interest is if so, is a separate discussion
Once one includes deities with no interest in us, one is starting to include deities which, culturally, are very non-central models of gods. To pick another parameter which can vary: If one allows the IQ of the deity to become arbitrarily low, one includes the possibility of _naming_ the mindless interactions of particles as "God". The discussions aren't quite that cleanly separated unless one _very_ carefully delineates what set of possible entities one is calling gods for the duration of the discussion.
Thank you for the comprehensive response!
Your analogy with mathematical proofs is well taken. Finding lots of four colour maps, for example, does not convince me that the four colour theory is correct. I need a rational proof. But I don’t think proofs for God are like proofs in mathematics. Reading on, it seems that you agree and I appreciate your examples from your own life.
Let me try two more analogies.
For decades, astronomers have been proposing Dark Matter and Dark Energy as explanations for certain patterns of motion in faraway galaxies. They claimed this as evidence but it never quite amounted to proof and, in recent days, physicists have proposed an alternative explanation that does not require dark matter. Is evidence of the Christian God like this?
A second example: Imagine that you have never seen a panda and you are sceptical of their existence. You have never quite been persuaded by Proofs of Panda but, one day, someone takes you to a zoo and shows you a panda. You no longer doubt the existence of pandas and Proofs of Panda become unnecessary. Is evidence of the Christian God like this?
What is evidence of God like?
In contrast to the other response you received, I (a religious person) think evidence of the Christian God is more like the second example!
I think this is one of the disconnects between religious and non-religious people, and why conversations and debates can be a little futile. I think a lot of people believe in God the way someone believes in pandas in the above example, but then they try to explain their position as if they arrived at it through evidence and logic, and are evaluated on the strength of the evidence and logic. Both sides leave frustrated because the evidence and logic was never the crux of the problem at all.
(You're welcome!)
I think I understand what you're trying to say. From your 2 examples, "Evidence" or "Arguments" for God is more like the dark matter example. Something we never directly observed, is allegedly affecting other things that we do (somewhat) observe. It's not like the Panda example at all.
Except, God is not really like any other thing because there are moral and identity-related issues around Him. Nobody ever said that without Dark Matter people would rape and kill with impunity, but vast millions of people do believe this about God. I obviously disagree, but most societies are not a Rationalist meetup where you can simply disagree about this and expect a civil response. So, God is very complicated, it's not really like anything. By its very nature as a supposedly "transcendental" being outside of normal space, time, physics, casualty, and all other constructs of the human mind, attempts to liken God to any other thing in any other metaphor is extremely likely to lead to confusion, because very few things are outside of space, time, physics, casualty, and are by definition beyond the comprehension of the human mind.
I personally think that religious people are fooling themselves, and that any honest look at the history of religion would quickly disabuse them of any notion that religion is remotely intellectual or calm-headed or explorable with quiet meditations, this is true of Christianity and Islam at any rate, other religions are different. Even a religion as close to the former two as Judaism is surprisingly tolerant of skepticism and talking back to God.
The most devastating argument against the traditional conception of the Abrahamic God, in my view, is the Problem of Evil. A benevolent God who is simultaneously omniscient and omnipotent is trivially disprovable, and almost all Muslims and Christians I know believe in a God that is all 3.
I mean, there *is* the Unsong counterargument to the Problem of Evil: "God, being omniscient, can see which permutations* of universe result in sufficient good to be worth the evil side-effects, and, being omnipotent, creates exactly those. We just happen to be in one of the many, many permutations with non-zero such side effects."
*God intervening, or not, in various ways counts as different permutations. "Universe has consistent and discoverable rules" may or may not count as an intervention.
That violates omnipotence (as posited by the people being argued against here). The necessity of selecting from possible universes, given the side effects, implies that God cannot simply change what is possible or what the side effects are.
Omnipotence does not mean that God can never face trade offs. Lewis writes a bit on this in the book "The Problem of Pain":
"His Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. This is no limit to His power. If you choose to say “God can give a creature free-will and at the same time withhold free-will from it,” you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words “God can”. It remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God."
This is a misunderstanding of the premise: God can and *does* change what is possible, but for a given universe A that "could" benefit from God's intervention at time T and doesn't get it, there's *also* an identical one B (or an uncountable infinity, but "one" is easier to say) where God does, in fact, intervene at time T.
Asking "why doesn't God just make two Bs instead of an A and a B (or three C's, where God never has to intervene in the first place because it's already morally perfect)" is just obfuscating the choice, not removing it. Per omnipotence, God *could* also create Z's, composed exclusively of suffering (or where he intervenes at time T to convert them into such, et cetera). It's the Benevolence criterion that constrains things, not the omnipotence.
Yes, I will also add that Unsong's God is kind of a moron, behaving like a strawman of a utilitarian.
My interpretation of Utilitarianism is that it's a realistic response to the constraints of the physical world, given that I can't do infinite Good or prevent infinite Evil, it's extremely intuitive that I want to get the maximum bang per buck: to do the most Good or prevent the most Evil per unit of work. My ethical system also prioritizes preventing Evil over doing Good: I don't think I will accept that one child starves if 10 children will go on to be Jeff-Bezos-rich in return. If the alternative is that all 11 children will starve, then yes 1 child starving is better. But if all 11 children are living a sub-par life, it's not worth it to kill 1 so that the other 10 live a better life.
God in Unsong is behaving like the parody of Utilitarianism, creating entire universes full of suffering from scratch just because the joy will maybe possibly exceed the suffering with acceptable margins. This is incredibly dumb to me. Suffering is not symmetric with joy, absence of joy is 0, absence of suffering is positive.
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Research questions: Liberal vs right wing morality (L’affaire Rittenhouse)
I’ve been looking into the question of where we can find fundamental moral disagreements between liberals, even right adjacent or sympathetic liberals and right wingers.
I think the Rittenhouse case provided the best possible example of one of these. Any number of anti-woke liberals will agree with right-wing observers on all the specific facts. Yet I haven’t yet found a single one who will with say, “Rittenhouse was not only legally not guilty of murder… but acted in a morally exemplary way and his actions that day were a positive good.” Nor for that matter will you get this response from any of the never Trumpers as far as I can tell. I think it represents one of the fundamental and unbridgeable gaps in american moral instincts.
Do you know of any anti-woke liberal who’ll state this (ideally a public figure, but personal anecdotes are fine)?
I think he did nothing wrong and he was definitely acting in self-defence.
Libertarian.
I’m a centrist libertarian who believes that, while the outcomes of the actions of Rittenhouse were lamentable and avoidable, the actions themselves amounted to self-defense.
Rittenhouse is no hero, but neither did he deserve to be put on trial and dragged through the mud, either. He is only guilty of violating the Four Stupids rule: don’t do stupid things in stupid places with stupid people at stupid times.
Eh, I'll bite. I think what Rittenhouse did was fine. I wouldn't go so far as to say "morally exemplary", but that's because I hardly ever use that kind of language, and to do so I'd have to spend way more time investigating the details of the case, and I just plain don't want to. **shrug**
And you are politically ____?
Classical liberal. On those political spectrum quizes, I show up as True Neutral, bordering on Neutral Libertarian. Halfway between left and right, and approximately 2/3rds of the way up from authoritarian to libertarian.
(I'm never sure which meaning of the word "liberal" is meant.)
Are we fighting this one over again? I think he had no business being there, he had no business going around toting a gun, but he did act in self-defence and he wasn't there to kill anyone. Silly teenage hero-fantasy ideas, but not going out to "tonight Imma kill me a commie" or whatever.
The antifa bunch that were also going around with first aid kits and guns are just as bad, but nobody said "Gage whatshisface crossed state lines with a gun!!" when decrying Rittenhouse for doing the same thing. They all were LARPing as Heroes of The Resistance, Rittenhouse and the guys that got shot.
Why didn't he have business being there? He's a free man, how could he have no business being going where he chooses to go, and carrying out the business he chooses to carry out? Or is he a churl that must not bear arms or travel to the next town over without his Lord's permission?
>Or is he a churl that must not bear arms or travel to the next town over without his Lord's permission?
Do you believe people have the individual moral right to take weapons to engage in a conflict on foreign soil? If thirty thousand US college students decide to arm up and defend Palestine from Israel, or Ukraine from Russia, or to support a riot in France, should they be allowed to?
In America free men have the right to bear arms, the the right to travel freely through the United States: to say that exercising their rights is immoral because of the actions of lawbreakers is what I'm arguing against.
I also see no moral reason why someone shouldn't take up arms in a just war. Supporting a riot with weapons would be illegal and probably immoral, though there might possibly be circumstances in which rioting may be just. I doubt it though. Revolution may be justified, but it usually isn't.
Free children, though, not so much. I'm open to the belief that local legislators and/or prosecutors screwed up on that front, but I'm pretty sure the intent of the Wisconsin legislature is that unattended minors shouldn't be carrying loaded guns in towns and cities without their parents' permission or even knowledge. And as both a (non-anarchist) libertarian and an NRA life member, I say that's a perfectly legitimate intent for a legislature to enact into law and for prosecutors to enforce.
It is reasonable to say that Kyle Rittenhouse was properly acquitted of all charges brought against him because the actual shootings were self-defense and the state screwed the pooch on the lesser stuff. It is *also* reasonable to say that Kyle Rittenhouse was a well-meaning dumbass and nobody should take him for a hero or a role model. Teenage dumbassery is part of the reason we have laws in the first place.
He had no business being there because it was looking for trouble. I don't think he went there determined to cause trouble, but he had Batman Vigilante fantasies and if you go to a fight, nobody should be surprised if fighting happens.
He wasn't there as part of his job, he could have stayed home. So could the guys who got shot, I'm not letting them off the hook either. But you go to a situation where you're expecting trouble to happen, and trouble happens, this is on you at least in part.
If a free man knows trouble is coming and wants to protect the innocent from that trouble then I don't see how that could be moral wrong.
People should really watch the whole trial.
I think your getting an excellent demonstration here in the comments. Even aside from Rittenhouse's pleasantness as a person, or wisdom going armed to the protests.... Someone can see the same videos and think that it was actually self defense or willful murder and he got off on a technicality of Wisconsin law or something.
For me, I watched the whole trial, and I can't see how it's anything but the former, and how you could think otherwise after watching that trial.
But yet someone else sees it entirely otherwise and cannot imagine thinking otherwise.
One can speculate why but that there's a fundamental divide of moral assumptions I think is undeniable.
>For me, I watched the whole trial,
I have to admit I haven't. I only have a weak opinion on the matter. I'd read that the jury went through the tapes of the incident frame by frame, so my 0-th order reaction is that, given that they looked at the evidence so carefully, and _they_ concluded it was self defense, I bow to their judgement.
I think they did. The amount that got caught on video is very lucky for him.
The trial, for a lot of people, wasn't really just about the trial. I think the original commented is 100% correct that it highlighted a fundamental moral divide, in conflating two hot button issues: is the rioting that was going on okay? Even justified? Is self-defense with a gun a meaningful concept at all and is it "okay"? Both of those questions together - poof, powder keg of culture war.
Many Thanks!
I'm an anti-woke liberal. I think Rittenhouse recklessly armed himself and entered a disturbance where he was likely to shoot someone — and then he shot three people. He was guilty of murder and his actions were objectively bad.
FWIW I have no sympathies with the group he bore arms against. I thought they were breaking the law and deserved to be punished by the legal authorities — but not to be shot by their political opponents.
The Rittenhouse case is a terrible example of the difference between liberals and conservatives because it ultimately amounts to a tribal case. Sure, liberals and conservatives have different opinions about whether it is OK to carry a gun into a disturbance and whether it is OK to shoot someone but this particular case comes down to whether you wear a red hat or a blue hat.
In an ideal world, yeah, the authorities would have firmly and swiftly restored order with whatever force was necessary. But what happens when instead the authorities openly and proudly refuse to do so, to the extent of literally kneeling before the rioters?
This isn't just a 2020 thing, either -- since then, we've seen innumerable examples of the authorities refusing to enforce the law against violent protesters. If we're supposed to patiently wait for them to have a change of heart, well, it's been four years...
The answer is just democracy. Vote with your vote, win your neighbor's votes too, push for change, and if that doesn't work then vote with your feet and move somewhere with like-minded people. People can choose the kind of society they want to live in, even if you hate those choices and think they're committing societal suicide.
I mean... we don't let people make _every_ possible societal choice. No one's going to be permitted to bring back slavery, for example.
There is an argument that urban voters affirmatively voting for crime and disorder should not get their way any more than they would if they voted for slavery. The great cities of a country are the engines of the country and they should not be allowed to break down just because 51% of the 18% who voted in the last municipal elections -- an actual lizardman constant! -- are deranged enough to want that course of events.
Nobody is voting for crime. There is a massive difference between "we think society will be better with a justice system that focuses on rehabilitation, and errs on the side of leniency, while banning vigilantism, even if it possibly leads to an uptick in crime in the short run" and "we think crime is good and criminals should go unpunished."
There is also a difference between "we think the police should be disbanded" and "we would like to have X numbers of police but we can't pass a budget that funds their salaries to the necessary level, and think we will be better off spending that money on lower taxes or other types of spending, so we will have lower numbers of police even if this makes crime worse."
(If it matters, I absolutely do think that many urban areas have swung too far leftwards. Personally I would love more policing, stiffer sentencing, and tougher policies on drug use.)
But If you think urban voters who have voted for lenient policies do so because they want rampant arson, rape, murder, etc., then you have, I argue, a warped view of what those voters think they're voting for and why. And that's exactly why this kind of vigilantism is so dangerous - because you think you're fighting for X but you are operating on a distorted worldview.
Take your slavery example. If a city literally legalized slavery, that would be one thing. But say that a city passed some policies that gave excessive power to employers - mandatory arbitration, legalizing stiff non-compete agreements, that kind of thing. You would absolutely have plenty of overheated internet lefties screaming "they've legalized slavery!" even though that is far from the truth.
Those lefties should not be allowed to burn down a Burger King because they interpret overly business-friendly regulations as literal slavery. The flip side of this is that nobody should be allowed to play Punisher just because they think that electing a liberal DA has nullified the rule of law.
The actual details matter, and when you look at what's happening in cities, separate from the overheated and polarized viewpoints you can find on social or political media, it isn't remotely in the category of "they have clearly crossed a line and all bets are off."
> we think society will be better with a justice system that focuses on rehabilitation, and errs on the side of leniency
Careful now. I don't think rehabilitation and leniency go together well. Nobody is rehabilitated by a slap on the wrist. You rehabilitate people by giving them both the tools and the motivation they need to behave better; a slap on the wrist gives them neither.
A justice system that was really focused on rehabilitation would appear to be a *lot* less lenient than what currently exists in any Western country; it would have far more prison beds and (in many cases) far longer sentences, so that proper rehabilitation programs can be carried out. Not everybody can be rehabilitated but there's some blindingly obvious groups of people we could be working a lot harder on, such as drug addicts.
The people who claim to be in favour of a "rehabilitation-focused" justice system never seem to genuinely be in favour of what it would take to rehabilitate criminals, they just seem to want to use rehabilitation as an excuse for leniency.
>Nobody is voting for crime.
I remember 2020. Some _are_ voting for crime.
That being said, in many cases it was a sin of omission, or wishful thinking, or refusal to follow a proposal to its clear conclusion, rather than Twitter tankie-style open malice, but the results were the same.
>Take your slavery example. If a city literally legalized slavery, that would be one thing. But say that a city passed some policies that gave excessive power to employers - mandatory arbitration, legalizing stiff non-compete agreements, that kind of thing. You would absolutely have plenty of overheated internet lefties screaming "they've legalized slavery!" even though that is far from the truth.
I can imagine a situation where such policies went so far as to require a higher power to step in, regardless of the voters' good intentions. In fact, it happens all the time.
If, instead of Rittenhouse, a police officer had shot three people that evening in the same circumstances, would your logic be any different? And if so, why?
Yes. Police officers are authorised to control a disturbance. It's their job. On the whole, I think American police officers shoot too many people but intervening when people break the law is what they are for. Teenagers with guns — not so much.
Why wasn't Rittenhouse charged with 'Unauthorized Control of a Disturbance', if that's an actual crime?
Should attacking a police officer be a more serious offense than attacking a member of the general public? Do police officers have more civil rights than the general public?
"Unauthorized control of a disturbance" isn't a crime for the same reason that "unauthorized confrontation with the guy who slept with your wife" isn't a crime - we don't define a separate crime for every possible situation that could lead to killing someone. We just have "murder."
And yes, police are given more rights than civilians when it comes to using force - it's extremely rare for police officers to be put on trial for murder after killing someone in the line of duty. Derek Chauvin was the exception rather than the rule.
You're begging the question here by saying that Rittenhouse can't have been acting in self-defense because he committed murder, when we're trying to determine whether what Rittenhouse did was murder or self-defense. 'Unauthorized control of a disturbance' is the 'crime' that Ragged Clown suggests is supposed to have been committing when he was attacked that renders his claim of self-defense invalid.
In practice, of course law enforcement grant their own some measure of benefit of the doubt that they wouldn't grant a member of the public. If you want to argue that this is something that should be codified into law, be my guest, but at this time, it's certainly not any sort of 'right'.
> Do police officers have more civil rights than the general public?
Yes, police officers absolutely do. They operate under "Qualified Immunity," as a matter of statute and precedent, such that they won't be prosecuted for basically anything, and here are some examples from an excellent reddit thread by u/ais8585:
"Ashford v. Raby (March 5, 2020) (yesterday). Police stop a car and tell the driver to show his hands, which he does. They tell him to get out of the car and he says, well, the car's still in drive, so I'll have to turn off the car--you know, with my hands. Polic sic a dog on him and they and the dog pull him out of the now-rolling car. Officers entitled to QI.
Nelson v. Battle Creek (Feb 26, 2020). Police encounter a boy with a BB gun they think is a real gun. They tell him to drop it. He does, and they shoot him anyway. Officers entitled to QI.
Corbitt v. Vickers (July 10, 2019). Kids are playing in their yard when a fugitive ends up on their property. Police come over, hold the kids at gunpoint and make them all get down on the ground. The family dog comes out, and an officer tries to shoot it. He misses. The dog runs underneath the porch. Some time passes. The dog comes back out. The cop tries to shoot it again, misses it, and hits one of the kids in the knee. Officer entitled to QI.
And my personal favorite from the last little while:
Jesop v. Freso (September 14, 2019). Officers flat-out steal $225k during a search & seizure operation. (Basically, they take $275k of property in illegal gambling raid and only enter into inventory/give back $50k of stuff.) Officers entitled to QI.
The underlying rule in all these cases is that an officer is entitled to qualified immunity unless he (1) violated a constitutional right, and (2) that right was “clearly established” when he performed the (potentially right-violating) action against the plaintiff (i.e., citizen, i.e., you). What exactly “clearly established” means is open to some debate, but it basically means that precedent (previous court decisions) have previously said that the officer’s exact conduct (or something very very very similar to the officer’s conduct) violates a constitutional right. And that’s basically how you get crazy decisions like the four above: the court’s holding no existing cases had made clear that the officer couldn’t do exactly what he did, even though any normal person’s reaction is come on dude."
I am utterly fascinated by this line of argument. "Qualified immunity is a legal principle of federal constitutional law that grants government officials performing discretionary (optional) functions immunity from lawsuits for damages unless the plaintiff shows that the official violated "clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known"".
Rittenhouse is accused of criminal behavior (murder), not being sued for damages. Saying Qualified Immunity would have protected a police officer in his position is saying that government employment grants one the potential right to commit crime, not just protection from being sued personally for actions taken in official capacity. In practice, of course the police grant their own some measure of benefit of the doubt that they wouldn't grant a member of the public.
I am of the opinion that qualified immunity has been extended well beyond any actual purpose it might serve. It's still odd to see anyone advocate making it even more powerful.
I'm not really seeing anything here that contradicts his proposition ... if anything it feels like you've popped up to present yourself as an example of exactly what he's talking about
He was definitely not guilty of murder. He might have been reckless, but killing someone in self-defence is not murder.
What do you mean by "anti-woke liberal", does Destiny count, for example?
Also
>"Rittenhouse was not only legally not guilty of murder… but acted in a morally exemplary way and his actions that day were a positive good.”
What amount of nuance are you willing to tolerate? Like, for example, does thinking that him killing two people and injuring another one are a regrettable outcome of his good intentions and admirable courage to put himself in harm's way to defend his community count? or do they have to be happy because they were pretty deplorable individuals that were actively causing chaos?
> What do you mean by "anti-woke liberal", does Destiny count, for example?
Probably
> "regrettable outcome"
Define regrettable. Do you mean it in the almost Christian, 'It's sad that they became this way, and I take no pleasure in their death.'? Or do you mean, 'It's a bad thing that they are dead.'?
As for my cut-off I think it would be this.
Let's say Rittenhouse were visited by a time-traveler or whatever and told only - 'If you go and attempt to defend your community, you will end up killing a murder-suicidal child rapist and [however the hell you want to describe Huber] in legally justified circumstances. Decide now what you'll do, I'll be wiping your memory of this conversation shortly but you'll still make the same decision.'
If you think he'd be morally right to decide to go I think you fall within the range of people who I'd consider on my side (on this issue).
Personally I actively take pleasure in the results of Rittenhouse's actions.
...Wait, so you're arguing that even if he did knowingly murder them, it was a good thing? You do understand why most people are against vigilantism, yes?
Surely killing someone in self-defense doesn't become murder just because you knew in advance they would attack you?
I'm not a legal expert, but I'm pretty sure in Austria a self-defense argument doesn't fly if you could easily have avoided the dangerous situation in the first place.
Vigilantism is a bad thing under ordinary circumstances because it tends to make things worse.
But in a riot, where law and order has completely broken down, a case could be made that vigilantism *is* the right thing to do. The arguments for why it's wrong under normal circumstances don't apply.
I'm curious if the rioters also count as vigilantes here.
Exactly. There's a reason why vigilantism is frowned upon.
Well, vigilantes who attack criminals, anyway. Vigilantes who burn down and occupy neighborhoods are feted as heroes, as long as they say they were doing it for racial justice.
Maybe protest _should_ be chilled. A mindless mob chanting slogans is the worst kind of speech.
If someone walks down a dark alley, is attacked by a mugger, and kills the mugger in self defense, would you say that choosing to walk down the alley was "acting wrongly from a moral perspective"? Certainly walking down a dark alley makes it more likely that your life will be in danger, yet do you not have a right to be there?
I view him as being much like the protesters, rioters, antifa, whatever you want to call them - but instead of being motivated by a desire for chaos and destruction, he apparently felt, despite his tender age and supposed "lack of a dog in the hunt", a strong desire to see property and livelihoods protected.
It's thus obvious to me that he should be assigned no more culpability than the protesters (who were assigned mostly none).
'Voluntarily put himself in a position where he might need to use force for no reason' is a tough sentence to parse, which may not be helped in this case by the competing narratives for what exactly happened that evening. Is 'use force for no reason' measured at the moment that force occurred, or earlier when the potential for force to be required was determined?
Do you feel that a protestor who attends a protest that turns violent is acting wrong from a moral perspective? Suppose you're considering counter-protesting, say, a skinhead march and the skinheads have a reputation for attacking counter-protestors; is choosing to attend the counter-protest voluntarily putting yourself in a position where you might need to use force?
I assumed that "for no reason" was modifying "put himself in a position" rather than "use force". The baffling part for me was the implied opposition between initiating force and stand-your-ground laws: the latter apply only when the force has been initiated by someone else.
Can someone explain to me how simulation capture works? I recently read "The hour I first believed" and I'm confused as to why consciousness (as a mathematical object) would "split" when it gets simulated.
If you are calculating how much is 2+2, and I start calculating how much is 2+2, are we calculating different equations, or did the same equation split?
The underlying idea is that consciousness (and on a deeper level, existence) is a computation. Performed naturally by the atoms that your body is built of. But another computation can be started in the simulating machine, in theory.
This is probably misleading, integers are very simple mathematical objects.
But that shouldn't change anything, right? How does it predict the person's actual consciousness splitting between two physical realities? (From the point of view of the person who's consciousness is being simulated I'd assume it doesn't change anything if it's being computed two or more times instead of one)
I've recently solved the Sleeping Beauty problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeping_Beauty_problem
In this post I explore what core wrong assumption philosophers have been making while trying to solve it, why it's wrong, how comes so many managed not to figure it out for such a long time and what exactly the correct model looks like.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gwfgFwrrYnDpcF4JP/the-solution-to-sleeping-beauty
Beauty, irritated with philosophical experiments that seem to have no consequences, secretes a weapon on her person, having decided that on awakening she will shoot the experimenter dead. She duly does so, and goes back to sleep.
Now, I think we can agree that this awakening must have taken place on Monday, so the probability of heads is 50%. When she is woken by the police instead of the experimenter, she knows it is Tuesday and the coin must have come up tails.
While something has changed in this gedanken, it hardly seems enough to bring the Tuesday awakening into independent reality. It must have been an independent reality before - the same experiment was run last week, hence her irritation - even if she had no means of knowing it. So I think I remain a 'thirder'.
I'm sorry, but you make no sense.
> Now, I think we can agree that this awakening must have taken place on Monday, so the probability of heads is 50%.
We could've agreed about P(Heads|Monday)=1/2 without killing anyone.
> When she is woken by the police instead of the experimenter, she knows it is Tuesday and the coin must have come up tails.
Why would the police care about the outcome of a coin toss? They would wake her up regardless. With all likelihood they wake her on the same day she commits the murder.
> While something has changed in this gedanken, it hardly seems enough to bring the Tuesday awakening into independent reality.
What? If you are talking about independence between previous and next awakening they are not independent, neither in initial version of the problem nor with a murder.
Thinking about this, it’s a paradox only because we are confusing two distinct things. Paths, and days.
From the point of view of the experimenters there’s clearly two paths. Half of all subjects are sleeping beauties, half are not. However we are not asked for their view.
if steeping beauty is woken on any day at the end of the experiment and told the experiment had ended (which is extra information) and is asked to predict whether the coin was heads or tails then she should choose either. At this stage she’s also measuring paths. That’s not the experiment though. She’s not given that information.
Imagine if she is awarded a prize for getting the coin right any time she is awakened - then she should clearly go with tails. In that case she will lose on Monday (heads) but win on Monday (tails) and Tuesday (tails). And obviously this scales up to multiple days. With N days of sleeping she’s going to win with tails N-1 times.
So I would take the betting approach, where sleeping beauty wants to maximise the money she makes by being right, and so she she should act as if the probabilities are 2/3 tails. To me this doesn't seem terribly mysterious, but maybe that's just my lack of understanding.
I also think that this problem should be disentangled from the time and amnesia. I think it's equivalent to having three experimentees who are assigned to the results of the coin flip without knowing which they are. So, one of them will be woken up if it's heads, and the other two will be woken up (in separate rooms) if it's tails.
If you're one of the experimentees, the total probability you'll be chosen is 1/2 (heads * 1/3 + tails * 2/3), so the probability of tails given that you're chosen is 2/3 (2/3 * 1/2 / 1/2) .
We all agree that the coin comes up tails 1/2 times, but if I'm one of the experimentees and I've been chosen by this procedure, I should bet on the coin flip having been tails at 2/3.
See my answer to Firanx. You can lawfully bet on 2/3 for Tails per awakening regardless of whether you believe that P(Heads)=1/3 or 1/2.
> I think it's equivalent to having three experimentees
No, absolutely not, it's two different situations with different probability theoretic properties and I'm talking about it in the post. The difference is that Beauty always experience Monday awakening before she can experience Tuesday awakening while whichever awakening is assigned to a given experimentee is truly random. For a given experementee, three awakening states are mutually exclusive, while for the Beauty they are not.
> You can lawfully bet on 2/3 for Tails per awakening regardless of whether you believe that P(Heads)=1/3 or 1/2.
That sounds like different views about what probability is then. For me probability is supposed to be useful for prediction, and betting shows you exactly how you should predict in the suggested situation.
Now it's absolutely the case that people with different information and in different situations should bet differently, and I take this to be an example of that case. P(Heads) without any condition is of course 1/2. P(Heads | I've just been woken up in this scenario) is 1/3.
I still don't understand why Beauty always experiencing Monday before Tuesday has any relevance at all given that she can't remember them. Given that Beauty knows nothing about the time and is allowed no memory of previous states, I don't see why this is different to the fact that experimentee B is always woken at the same time as experimentee C. Perhaps understanding this would help me understand why this situation is regarded as complex.
> That sounds like different views about what probability is then.
Probability is a formally specified mathematical entity. There can't be any disagreements here.
> For me probability is supposed to be useful for prediction
It is. But probability isn't the only thing that affects betting odds. When the betting scheme rewards you twice as much on Tails than on Heads you are better of betting Tails even when the coin is fair.
>I still don't understand why Beauty always experiencing Monday before Tuesday has any relevance at all given that she can't remember them.
Because outcome space has to consist of mutually independent outcomes. And ordered outcomes can't be mutually independent. It's just a fact of probability theory.
> Given that Beauty knows nothing about the time and is allowed no memory of previous states
The Beauty still has information about the setting of experiment, how her awakening routine is determined and that Tuesday awakening will not happen independent of Monday, even if she doesn't know which of the awakening is she experiencing right now. This information can be crucial in some betting schemes, which I'm going to show in the next post.
Here is an intuition, though. Suppose you have three balls: Green, Yellow and Red. There are 6 possible combinations to place them randomly:
GYR, GRY, YGR, YRG, RGY, RYG
But only 3 possible combinations if Green has to always go before Red:
GYR, GRY, YGR
And only 2 combinations if Green has to be exactly before Red:
GRY, YGR
If you can't tell the difference between green and red then the first one and the second one look and behave identically.
Sounds like I need to wait for your next post.
Suppose, the balls are to be organised in some way and then you are to get the first one. If you do not know anything about the rules according which the balls are organized you expect random placement for them, which gives you 6 possible combinations and 1/3 chance to get any ball.
But if you know that only combinations where Green has to be exactly before Red are valid, then there are only two possible combinations and no possibility to get Red ball, you have 50% for either Green or Yellow.
This stays true even if you are color blind and can't tell the difference between the balls you get. Or if your memory is erased after you got the ball, so you can't remember what color it was. Your knowledge of the setting of the experiment affects your credence, anyway.
OK, but you're overthinking it. The experimenters know whether they awake her on Monday or Tuesday, so there are really 4 states:
Monday + Wake, Monday+notWake, Tuesday+ Wake, and Tuesday+unsampled
As to what she should guess, that depends on the evaluation function. And the 4 states are exclusive. Throwing out one of them is just wrong, and of course will yield the wrong answer.
Now clearly all the Tuesday cases are preceded by a corresponding Monday case. If she's rewarded for a correct answer, she should guess Tails, because that CAN occur twice, so she'd get two rewards.
> The experimenters know
The question is not about the experimenters. It's about Beauty's knowledge on awakening.
>Monday + Wake, Monday+notWake, Tuesday+ Wake, and Tuesday+unsampled
Not sure what you mean by Tuesday+unsampled here. Also regardless of the coin outcome the Beauty is awakened on Monday, so not sure what you mean by Monday+notAwake as well.
> Throwing out one of them is just wrong
Including non awakened states doesn't make sense when we are talking specifically about awakened ones. Now this would be overthinking it.
> And the 4 states are exclusive.
> Now clearly all the Tuesday cases are preceded by a corresponding Monday case
You can't have it both ways. Sequentional events are not mutually exclusive. I'm formally proving a lemma about it in the comments of the post.
> If she's rewarded
The question of betting strategy is a separate thing from the question of Beauty's probability estimate. I'll probably post about it next week.
Is the Beauty told what day it is?
Not necessarily. A good model for the problem should be able to deal with either case.
So, let's say I'm not told the day. By the experimental design, I'll be interviewed twice in the "tails" branch and once in the "heads" branch, branches being equally likely. By betting 66:34 on "tails" I should on average lose 33 guineas and win 34.
If I'm told it's Tuesday, I know I'm in the tails branch. If I'm told it's Monday, the chances are equal.
Philosophers can probably come up with the arguments why this is wrong, but one can simply run a computer simulation of the experiment a million times and see if the Beauty always betting 3:2 on tails wins or loses.
Edit: Yep, seems like you're doing about the same? But since we can run this simulation since 50+ years ago (and if we're okay with mere N=10000, since the time we could mint a balanced coin), why is that a philosophical question at all?
The problem with betting arguments is that they do not directly adress the question of probability, instead they are talking about the product of probability and utility. And in Sleeping Beauty case, it sidesteps the disagreement.
Thirders believe that extra awakening on tails should be treated as a modification of probabilities, while halfers believe that it should be treated as modification of utilities. When reasoning correctly they arrive to the same betting odds but for different reasons.
It is still possible to make a betting argument, to distinguish between thirdism and halfism, which I'm doing in the next post, but it's much trickier than may initially seem. Addressing the question of probability directly is much more convinient.
I don't understand the part about utility. Suppose the bet is "I pay x bitcoins and get back exactly 1 if the toss was tails". How much should I agree to pay? Obviously any x below 2/3 (in the "don't know the date" case). So there is the supremum of the set of x's where I accept the bet expecting to win, call it X. Isn't X the same as probability?
Are there any academic researchers or grad students who would like to pick up a little side gig here?
I am, and have been, curious what the academic literature has to say about "how to parent so that your adult children actually want to spend time around you". Not so shockingly this is for the personal reason of wanting my child to grow up to actually want to spend time around me. I'm particularly interested in variations between cultures and countries of origin.
I would love to hire someone to either do a quick survey, or to fund someone actually doing a deep dive and producing a literature review for publication, or something in between.
I might chip in to sponsor this. Email me. garymm at garymm.org
Ronald Reagan's daughter recently published a book regarding her relationship with her father. Her discussion of it in interviews makes it sounds promising.
People in the biz who write about this stuff usually have axes to grind. I'm sure there are plenty of woke-infected articles and books now advising parents to be alert to any signs that their kindergartener is transgender or gay, and to never display a bit of skepticism or dismay about the idea. I think the best kind of study to look for would be one where the researchers looked at actual families in the here and now for how well they got along together, or interviewed adults at length and in a fairly unstructured way about their relationship with their parents. There used to be, and probably still are, studies done where a couple or family is videotaped doing something together, maybe a puzzle, or discussing a somewhat difficult topic, and researchers later coded the interactions for how much responsiveness, frankness, kindness, coerciveness, etc. was on display. That's a lot of work, but it's the way you get good information.
Elizabeth does this exact kind of thing as a business: https://acesounderglass.com/hire-me/
Some observations based on what my grandparents did:
* Don't be an asshole
* Raise your kids in a culture where you don't move >50km away for a job, in a city where they can find a job with this constraint.
* Have enough room at home for family gatherings (a garden is great for the grandkids)
* Organize and cook for family gatherings
* Help them out with their kids (buy them stuff, lend them your car or pick them up)
> Raise your kids in a culture where you don't move >50km away for a job, in a city where they can find a job with this constraint.
This seems to be rather cynically privileging your own interests over those of your children, and it could backfire if they realize that you're deliberately clipping their wings.
I'm not sure what you're reading into my comment, it would help if you could expand further. I assume you're thinking I mean "move to some busy city in Namibia". I'm just saying, my family was in a city where you could live a good life and didn't need to move for work because it was the capital. People who grew up in smaller towns/cities invariably moved to the capital for work and study.
Regarding the culture, I don't really think you can or want do anything about this. If you're (say) American[1] and your values are that moving away from friends and family for work is OK, then those are your values, there's presumably nothing to fix (you want your kids to earn more money more than you want them to stay near). What you *can* do is avoid moving to America if you come from somewhere else.[2]
1. Please let me know to what degree my picture of American culture is inaccurate
2. Not bashing any stance here. Everyone has his setpoint in the relations vs money tradeoff, and there's always someone further to one side or the other who can say "you're making your children poor" or "you're making them grow up without a culture/family/belonging"
Check, check, check, check, help yes, but I'm hoping the kids will have grandkids. (They're young still.) Cooking for family is one of life's great joys. My son and his girlfriend (of many years) are living with me now, and Sunday morning breakfast already seems like a tradition. I think there is something about shared meals that is important.
Hmm I use to like spending time with my mom or dad. My kids like spending time with me. I don't think it has anything to do with how good or bad a parent they or I was. I think it just has to do with being a person that people like to be around.
So we should look into what's involved with being a person who people like to be around.
I don't think there is anything special there... just being a good friend. I guess with parents (family) there is a deeper sense of trust. Family: when they need a place to stay you have to let them in.
I suspect there's something about liking people involved.
Oh sure. I definitely tend to like people. Don't judge them, don't be critical. The Herold dictum I learned on my grandmothers knee was, "If you can't say something nice, it's often better to say nothing at all."
I *may* be quick-survey-capable here, but I'm very cautious about whether it would produce "any actionable useful advice" rather than "have a high Polygenic Score™️for nonabusiveness and fun-to-be-around-ness" (and then, of course, you have to pretend PRS tells you much either). Is there a narrower question in the big question? For instance, is there a particular metric for "desire to spend time" you're thinking of?
Hi @vat
I haven't heard back from you, what's the best way for me to get in touch with you?
Oh, sorry -- I thought I'd emailed, but it might've been caught by a filter. I've sent another one now, which hopefully should be there?
I suspect that one factor is liking your kids, but how would you get people to tell the truth about that?
I would love to chat it out in detail with you.
Can you drop me an email at giblfiz at gmail and we could explore what kind of questions and answers might actually be well formed for what is there. We could set up a quick call, though I'm in Asia for a few more weeks so timezones might be a pain.
Whatever you do, don't divide your kingdom into three parts, one for each of your three daughters, to be bestowed only after they have gushingly professed their love for you. That doesn't tend to go so well.
Instead, let them know ahead of time that your kingdom will be divided between the two who love you most...
Yeah, I'd be leery of that.
iswydt
Hahahaha, seconded.
Do you, as an adult child, enjoy spending time with your parents (or did when they were alive)?
Good question. The short answer is "not really" but I do love them deeply and go out of my way to spend time with them. It's one of those "it's complicated" sort of relationships.
An admirable goal, and I hope you will find someone willing to help, but I must say I'm really sceptical about academic literature being of any use in such matters.
You might find something in Brené Brown's work. I think besides the obvious "be likeable" stuff, you have to thread the needle between too-lax parenting that doesn't give your children what they need to develop, and too-strict parenting that makes them hate you and have all sorts of psychological issues. Brown's research says that a lot of this comes down to the difference between shame (which is individual-based, telling someone that they're bad or not good enough), and guilt (which is behavior-based, saying that a decision or an action was bad). It seems like a minor difference but shame-based discipline is strongly correlated with alcoholism, bullying, eating disorders, depression, suicide, and all sorts of other bad outcomes, and guilt-based discipline is negatively correlated with all that those same outcomes.
Obviously you still need to have a reasonably similar basic worldview - if you are constantly telling your gay children that being gay is a bad decision they still won't want to hang out with you - but it seems like the two extreme failure modes of parenting are either "give your kid absolutely no discipline and be surprised that they end up in jail" and "drive your kid so hard to succeed that they end up hating your guts even though they succeed" - so anything that helps strike that balance might be helpful.
You forget "drive your kid so hard to succeed but have no idea what success actually requires" and "drive your kid hard in pursuit of something other than success, such as being totally obedient to the parent."
I do share your skepticism at some level, but I think I would at least like to see what is out there. I'm expecting a lot of the advice to be either obvious (Don't be a raging alcoholic), not actionable (Have Gene RX372), or Dubious (Live next to the ocean) but I'm also hoping that something novel shows up.
You never know if you don't look.
or well, I suppose pay someone to look
"Live next to the ocean" is not that dubious if it's generalized to "live somewhere where the kids will want to be for reasons besides interacting with you, and don't live someone where visiting you means they have to pay much (be it their time, money, or unpleasant emotions)."
I mean, sure, we can come up with all sorts of good ideas.
In this case "live next to the ocean" was something I literally made up as an example of something random.
I'm hoping for ideas with a little bit of data behind them, as opposed to ones that sound good (I have a lot of those already)
How would an academic analyze this question with any sort of rigor? We can't do RCTs. I think you'd get a lot of opinions masquerading as science.
I mean, I would probably start by using "time spent with parents", and a survey with questions like "is going home for the holidays stressful?" as a proxy for outcome. Then you also tag a bunch of questions into the same survey along the lines of "how were you raised"
It's far from perfect or an RCT, but with a little statistical analysis it's definitely not just opinions masquerading as science.
Sure, it's easy to show all kinds of correlations. But is that useful?
If you see that coaching your kid's baseball team is correlated with your kid wanting to spend time around you, does that mean you should go sign up to coach your kid's baseball team? Or is that just because people who are interested in coaching their kid's baseball team already have a strong bond with their kid?
I feel like I have the potential to be the worst candidate for the Effective Altruism position, which feels appropriate to 2024. Should I apply?
Perhaps the worst candidate who's not currently in prison...
They said it was a remote position, so you never know.
Martin Shkreli would bring EA right into the limelight, engagement would be off the charts
Has the fear of nuclear war dissipated somewhat, particularly amongst gen Z? Recently Macron said he didn’t rule out ground troops in Ukraine. That’s the kind of rhetoric that would frighten, and still does frighten Gen X or older. Yet, after he said it I noticed that Reddit was full of support. Nobody seems to realise the strength of the Russian nuclear armaments.
For a generation that is scared of the future, of solvable issues like climate change, this is a strange reaction.
I personally rather suspect that the event of ground troops in Ukraine by the West would be less "going to war against Russia to take back the pre-2014 (or even pre-2022) territories" and more like "formalizing a line of partition". Of course it would be a maneuver containing huge risks in any case.
(I'm gen Z, this is my gut reaction) Climate change is new and scary. Winters aren't as cold as they were when I was a child. Climate change is literally tangible for me.
Nuclear weapons and mutually assured destruction have been around my whole life, and nothing bad has ever happened. Pictures of the cold war from my history textbooks were in black and white, so it feels like ancient history.
Definitely not like, a defensible position! But it is what my intuition throws at me.
Well, I don't really see many people talking about climate change either lately. Maybe people just stopped caring? It's possible that people have increasingly stopped believing that there's any future worth fighting for. Everything's going to shit. What's the point of humanity continuing to exist if living is this miserable?
Those people are silly, though, and they're going to feel pretty dumb when they get old and realize the world is just continuing to tick along the way it always has, good and bad.
That assumes that the world continuing to tick along the way it always has is worth fighting for. Or that there's any coherent notion of "the way it always has", as historical constants are quite rare.
What makes you think Macron's rhetoric is reflective of gen Z preferences? A quick google says that Gen Z are currently ages 12-27 - doesn't seem like that's any kind of puppet master the President of France would have his power base built around. I'm the first to admit I know next to nothing about French politics, but I thought Macron's base of support was center business types - hence the attempt at things like pension reform.
Quick google yielded https://www.politico.eu/article/now-emmanuel-macron-france-really-is-the-president-of-the-rich/, which is hardly authoritative (I mean, it's 5 years old), but included this snippet:
"[Macron's] highest score in last week’s election — 33 percent — was among people over 70, as younger, metropolitan ex-Macron voters moved to the Greens in droves. He lost 6 percentage points among 18- to 24-year-olds and 11 points among voters aged 25 to 34."
Im not sure where you read into my post anything about macron and Gen Z in general.
My bad – skimming. I misread “Why isn’t Gen-Z more scared of Nukes? Emmanual Macron just did this thing in France, and Reddit didn’t seem very afraid to me” as simply “Why isn’t Gen-Z more scared of nukes? Emmanual Macron just did this thing in France.”
That being said, I still think you are misreading a universal trend as Gen-Z specific. Of the foreign policy/Russia watchers podcasts I listen to (Mark Galeotti, RFE/RL’s the Week Ahead in Russia, CSIS’ the Truth of the Matter), but all have presented similar threat assessments to the effect that Putin’s nuclear threats are more sabre rattling – a low-cost way to try to prod at Western unity – than they are represented of a genuine danger of their use. You could call these sources a lot of things, but none is particularly Gen-Z in its makeup.
Take that along with our former US president (likewise not exactly a magnet for support among the youth) who would casually play “my button is bigger thank yours” with North Korea – it seems to me that we’ve all lowered our temperature since the Cold War on the odds of a nuclear exchange, both young and old alike.
Edit:
Frankly, Macron's troop comments strike me as an analog to Putin's occasional nuclear ones. Vanishingly unlikely that they would ever actually be put to practice, but nevertheless stated due to being a low-cost way to throw little rocks at your adversary's base of support and see if it shakes a little.
Question: Why do you assume that France deploying ground troops moves us closer to a nuclear war? There were countless proxy ground wars in the Cold War, not all of them had people scared at the time that they were closer to nuclear exchange. In particular, the actions that made people most scared are those that specifically involved nuclear warheads, like deploying nuclear-warhead-armed submarines or bombers near a nuclear power or putting nuclear ground launchers in Turkey.
Anecdote: I was born after the Cold War ended, and I don't instinctually understand the panic that I see in 1950s and 1960s literature and material about Nuclear. I know on an intellectual detached level why people were so panicked, but it doesn't terrify me as much as - say - the prospect of millions of refugees from a worst-case Climate Change trajectory.
France going into Ukraine is not a proxy fight. It’s a direct engagement between one NATO force and the Russians.
TBH, It’s not understanding the panic is what I don’t get. By and large climate change is a solvable problem and one that is in the process of being solved. The worst case scenarios are clearly exaggerated, and we aren’t following business as usual.
However the Russians have 1,200 warheads and I don’t believe that missile defense is all that capable. One day you might wake up to find your city is glass.
And while the Cold War is over, and while there are fewer nukes, the nuclear threat is still there. Imagine these things were being built up from zero in the last ten years, do you not think that we would be somewhat hysterical?
Turkuye shot down a Russian jet fighter in 2015. That's about as a direct an engagement between NATO and Russia as one could imagine. The world is still here, the strong Russian reaction was to ban imports of Turkish tomatoes.
When a thug tells you about how scarily he will beat you up if you don't quietly suffer him pissing on your face, and you do accept the pissing, you will get the pissing, and then the beating. The only thing Putin understands and is afraid of is the actual fight with and actual enemy who is stronger.
Ukraine broke every "red line" the Russians put forth so far. Attacking Russian territory, attacking Crimea, attacking the bridge, attacking Kremlin.
At some point you have to stand up and fight, because otherwise the bully will just do what he wants to you anyway.
Hmm. Yeh that was the reddit consensus. It’s not much of an argument that nuclear war hasn’t happened yet and therefore won’t. Putin is rational only some of the time.
Funny, I am much older than average for that Reddit cohort.
It's not even whether Putin is "rational" - the worldview prevalent in that culture is radically different from ours. This guy has the best write-up on it I've seen so far: https://pragueplot.substack.com/p/hyperbolea
I didn't notice that France being dragged into a war will possibly also drag all of Nato due to article 5, I can see why this is unprecedented.
My anecdote about not being afraid of Nuclear is not meant to argue that Climate Change is worse than Nuclear, I don't believe such thing (even though I think you're overestimating how solved Climate Change really is). I'm making a point that fears are not rational. Being born after the Cold War in a state that isn't nuclear, all the nuclear fears are vague echos at best. I can see why they're rational and why people would feel them, but I don't feel them viscerally.
As a note of reassurance, Article 5 would not cover forward-deployed French forces.
Article 6 defines the 'armed attacks' that trigger art 5 as occuring "on the territory" of the parties, or in the Med sea, or the north Atlantic.
The real risk would be the same one as Europe faces now - that the 'secure rear' of NATO countries for repair and resupply would need to be pressured by Russia.
Well that's good, but the Black Sea saw active combat, didn't it? If French troops got attacked on some Ukrainian vessel there, an (admittedly tenuous) argument could be made that the Black Sea is part of the Mediterranean.
Yes. I’d worry about that in the long term if it escalated. Or that Russia will preemptively attack French ships anywhere. After all France will be at war with Russia.
Whether article 5 is invoked then or not is up to debate.
I'm not sure how much credit you can give to opinions on Reddit at this point, especially when it's a political topic and the thread is on the frontpage.
I have a suspicion that there's a lot of straight up propaganda that mostly just trying to push the right vibes with no substance, and a lot of factually wrong information, all met with uncritical praise.
I'm not sure that represent actual opinions real people have all that well, and I'd expect most of gen Z to not give a damn about militarly conflict on the other side of the world one way or the other.
I'd also don't understand why anyone would see these statements by Macron as anything other than bluff.
You might be right in the former and possibly the latter.
I thought of this not just after watching the reddit thread , but also I was watching a Netflix series called one day which tracked people’s lives on the same day over about 25 years.
In the very first episode set in the 80s, the protagonist were talking about what they would do or be when they were 40, and the female said “who are we kidding, the world will be blown up by the time we are 40”, which was fairly common sentiment at the time amongst young people. The threat is still there (although the world will survive but not the northern hemisphere) but the angst has gone.
Conventional wisdom on forums says this because Russia already specified several "red lines", most of which were crossed without any retaliation, so ground troops probably won't trigger nuclear response, too. It might even be right, because French, or worse yet multi-national ground troops probably won't make situation much better for Ukraine (I imagine the chaos of multi-language miscommunication, crazy logistics, and probable unreadiness and unwillingness of EU soldiers to die under Russian bombs might even make the expedition a net negative).
Also, recently Russian officials reiterated that the nuclear response will only be triggered by a direct attack on Russia. Putin, after all, is a boomer, and HE is properly afraid of a nuclear war.
You do realize that they currently assert various pieces of what we call 'Ukraine' as part of 'Russia'? Including even some bits that they do not currenty control. So this is not necessarily reassuring.
My general sense of the problem is that the number of troops you can send without any risk of nuclear escalation is low enough not to make a big difference. And dribbling in a few thousand troops at a time is not a great strategy - it amounts to aiming for a bloody stalemate and hoping that Russia gets tired first.
And on that front, I think one of the reasons people have different ideas about how well that could work is that there is shockingly wide disagreement about what the casualty or KIA ratio is in this war. I've seen sensible people whose opinion I respect on other matters assert that the ratio is 12:1 in Ukraine's favor. Well indeed, if that were the case, every few thousand soldiers sent to the front is a big problem for Russia! But my own estimate is that the ratio is probably closer to 6:1 in Russia's favor - and with such a spectacularly wide disagreement about the facts on the ground, it's no wonder I'd come to a different conclusion about the merits of sending small numbers of reinforcements.
12:1 is a preposterous ratio, this would imply that Russia lost 1.2 million soldiers if Ukraine lost only 100K (and the Wikipedia article on the matter says Ukraine lost an estimated 500K).
Any Western strategy in Ukraine short of deploying a few US carrier groups with full complement of F-35s and flying in stealth bombers from bases in Europe amounts to "aiming for a bloody stalemate". If anyone imagines even 100K of European troops can just triumphantly march to Russian borders, they are full of hot air. Inexperienced troops without air superiority will just get slaughtered against prepared defences. EU doesn't even have armour to send along - they already given most of their working tanks to Ukraine.
As for loss ratio, I find 12:1 figure utterly ridiculous, and 1:6 unlikely. Russian advantage in artillery and advantage in air almost guarantees loss ratio that is favourable for Russia, but probably not by THAT much, since Russia is attacking (with the exception of last summer, which cost Ukraine dearly). Tales of "enemy meat waves" persist from both sides, but I believe they're either propaganda, or a more-or-less real tactic used by both sides in positional warfare.
Really there’s no good sources on the KIA that I rely on either.
I'd prefer to think that new generations just understand decision theory better.
Decision theory says that there won't be a nuclear war?
It says that you shouldn't react to threats that people are making only because they expect you to react to them.
How would Gen Z be better in that that older generations? I think you are giving them a bit too much credit, or perhaps projecting your own beliefs onto a generation.
Well, alternatives to causal decision theory are quite new so there is that.
But yes, as I said, "I prefer to think" not that I actually strongly believe that it's true.
I'm not sure it has in general, but over Ukraine specifically it's become pretty clear that Putin isn't going to start a nuclear war.
I do not think that anyone thinks "Macron sends the foreign legion into Ukraine, Putin nukes Paris" is a likely escalation scenario.
More like "Some Eastern European country decides to send troops to Ukraine, Putin responds by bombing some of their military supporting infrastructure on their soil, this leads to NATO triggering article 5 and a conventional war between Russia and NATO, which later turns nuclear."
How is it clear that Putin won't start a nuclear war? Sure, Putin isn't stupid or suicidal, so he wants to avoid a nuclear war if at all possible. As long as there are avenues for Putin to achieve some sort of victory In Ukraine, I certainly expect he will avoid the nuclear option. But why think there are no such events that could occur within Ukraine that won't lead to Putin going nuclear?
This idea that there's no way Putin will use nukes in Ukraine, therefore we can and should drive them out of Ukraine with NATO troops is just tragically misguided. If Putin genuinely believes some victory in Ukraine is critical to Russia's security future (say, shoring up defense of Crimea by controlling the Donbas), he would be rational to go nuclear. Not necessarily nuking NATO territory, but raising the stakes with a nuclear strike within Ukraine and wagering that he cares more about Ukraine than the west does. Of course this may lead to a runaway escalation that ends in a nuclear exchange between NATO and Russian territory.
The follow-up at this point in these discussions is usually that there's no way that Putin genuinely believes Ukraine is critical to Russian security. That there's no way anyone would risk the world for control of Ukraine. (This is also where they wave away America's response to potential Soviet missiles in Cuba.) Those in the West have a really hard time understanding how non-westerners think and can't avoid projecting western knowledge and beliefs onto their enemies. It's the hegemonic version of 'it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it'.
There's also the possibility that Putin thinks victory in Ukraine is crucial for his personal security.
Main argument would be that he hasn't started one so far despite being pushed out of large parts of Ukraine, so so long as Russia isn't getting directly invaded he seems unlikely to be pushed past the line.
How much evidence does "he hasn't started a nuclear war yet" have for the claim "he will never start a nuclear war (over Ukraine territory losses)" if the expected value of a nuclear war is massively negative? Rationally, nearly zero it seems. The question we need to wrestle with is when does his evaluation of the utility of a nuclear war reach parity to his current circumstance? His behavior far from this parity has zero predictive value for his behavior at parity.
Maybe, but otoh you also raise the risk of nuclear war if you take threats from nuclear powers too seriously (since you incentivise maybe-callable nuclear threats).
Imagine if some of the countries of Europe (or NATO) get in there and the Russians start to lose heavily. The triumphant allied armies reach the border with Russia…
Under international law the Ukrainians and allies have the right to cross that border, but it’s clearly a red line for Russia. So we have to hope for a victory but not too much of a victory.
I don't think anyone would likely invade Russia with the goal of conquering a slice of it (even if they could win militarily, the idea of having to occupy such a slice in the face of a hostile population which gets covered aid by a superpower should not appeal to anyone).
However, I can think of plenty of reasons why you would want to send troops over the border while Russia is still holding part of Ukraine:
* Having control of some Russian territory will give you a stronger negotiation position in eventual peace talks
* Propaganda considerations
* Russia might need to redeploy troops currently occupying Ukraine to defend their territory
* Denying Russia a safe staging ground
I can also see some motivation for aerial attacks on Russian soil:
* Attacking their logistics trail
* Responding tit-for-tat to attacks on civilian (or dual-use) infrastructure like the power grid
If the war escalates, I think that these pathways are much more likely than Ukraine getting to 100% and wanting to continue for 120%.
I'm guessing neither Ukraine nor its allies would be willing to cross that border, yeah (partly because of the nukes, partly because actually invading Russia is a hopeless quagmire with no good end goal)
Ukrainians have crossed the border and engaged in direct firefights on the Russian territory more than once at this point. So that's water under the bridge (ha! that was attacked multiple times too!).
That’s really not the same as a full scale invasion.
Sure. But it serves as a conditioning. Ukrainians are slowly escalating the attacks, making it hard to pin a red line.
Call me weirdly optimistic but I don't see French or most other European troops crossing that border.
Polish, maybe!
Yeh. Or Ukrainians.
Hello! A bit off topic, but I am running a anonymous 3-min salary survey in Berlin/Munich with a small team of volunteers. It's for Tech/Startups & corporate space. If you can participate or help me spread the word I would much appreciate:
https://forms.gle/wwLfMyaFS9rwNdVaA
This comment section once included a fellow whose depression went away after he began applying traction to his neck.
I've recently been reading about how a deranged ratio between ω3 and ω6 fatty acids can cause depression. (There's a fascinating book "Omega Balance" written by a biologist, not a nutritionist.)
As can lack of sunlight and exercise.
Saunas and red light therapy help some. Cold plunges and tummo breathing help others.
Have you tried CBT? If not, I recommend it. But do it with someone who does full-blown CBT, not the dilute version.
You probably need to find a doctor who’s got some experience and training in that, which is pretty rare.
My friend uses CBD gummies, I think they're pretty accessible now! I'm sorry for your predicament, and best of luck!
Good luck!
I (a not particularly knowledgeable American) suspect that Canada's medical system probably incentivizes against finding medical providers who will help with the lengthy and experimental process of trying out extralegal therapies. The US medical system has criminal shortcomings, but does make it relatively easier for determined middle class people to find sympathetic providers.
In the interim, I suspect your best bets may be DIY solutions. You might take a look at /r/unclebens or /r/therapeuticketamine for some starting inspiration. Waiting on government-provided healthcare to catch up with these trends sounds like a frustrating experience. (Although, if any Canadians with differing experiences want to share theirs, I would love to be wrong about this)
It never even occurred to me that someone could interpret it as "150k" before. It's clearly 500k, or at least more like 400.
While I agree that is odd, I personally would assume that low 6 figures means likely $100-$150k and not $300-400k.
Meanwhile I would call a score of 30-40 out of 100 a low mark.
This I realise doesn’t make much sense, but there you have it.
Hot take: "mid-six-figures" means 10^5.5, so around $316k.
Yeah, came here to say that.
Or $101101 if you are using binary. Which is some $45 in decimal.
I say $200k-$500k, which is about 10^5.3 to 10^5.7. Matches my sense that any number starting with a 1 is low and any number above $500k is high.
That's what I would expect, also
News to me and quite bizarre that anyone would use the term to mean "around 150k"- what is the logic behind that? To me it obviously means 500k (although the ~316k idea has some merit too).
The logic is probably something like "median among six-figure salaries".
I am in the ~316 camp, obviously ("figures" means exponential scale means geometric averages).
Yes, there's a certain Benford's-law logic to it, but I also think there's a not-strictly literal logic going on about how salaries are described. I think the typical use of "six-figure salary" is for a 100K-200K range (and therefore 150K is mid), because "six-figure" puts it in the best possible light. Clearly a salary of 999K is also in a literal-sense "six-figure", but it would probably be described as a "near-million-dollar" salary or something.
Hmm, yes, it could be that too.