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What was the effect of the camera on art?
Many people say that it caused impressionism or modernism to avoid competing with the camera. It certainly destroyed the business of portrait painting. While a large shock, why did that have the effects it did?
I recently came across a somewhat different claim. Interviewed by Bret Easton Ellis, Peter Bogdanovich says at 1:13 (heavily edited)
Have you seen this before? Do you have the original source? When did he say it? “The old man” suggests late in life, but the film director Bogdanovich might just be distinguishing him from the director Jean Renoir. Renoir died in 1919, which is fairly early to talk about modernism. I don’t know if he was talking about the evolution of painting, or just complaining about the kids these days. But it should be relevant to the evolution of painting. And he is certainly denying that impressionism was a response to the camera.
I don’t have much to add except to link to this Quora answer, arguing that photography has distorted what people perceive as “realistic.” While cameras are very realistic, they do have biases and introduce unique distortions, but people are so used to these that other realistic media that are also very realistic start to feel strange. (Another example that occurs to me: lens flare in first-person video games)
Awesome read at that link, thanks.
Ok, I would like to comment on the Competition Cooperation Paradigm and the way it has changed game theory and current understanding of the Selfish Gene.
And answer any questions anyone has.
Faceless Craven said that of course, a mix of cooperation and competition is the optimal strategy, and hes partly correct. The thing about complexity science is that these obvious truths are first level accessible– a “commonsense” model. Complexity science is all about modelling Nature, and two good introductory books are Per Bak– How Nature Works and Yaneer Bar-Yam — why Things Work.
So Dawkin’s model in the Selfish Gene is what is described as a gene-centered model– that is
So in Dawkins POV we humans are just vectors for hosts of quasi-parasitic DNA codon sets.
Here is Dr. Bar-Yam’s non-technical explanation. Bar-Yam wrote the textbook I used in school for Complex Systems.
I will break this up so I dont use too many links.
Farnam Street blog–
Dr. Baranger–
So this has led to research efforts on the nature of altruistic behavior in animal populations, like why do grey wolf packs restrict breeding to the dominant male and female pack-leaders? Or why some species quit breeding altogether in a shared environment with other species?
http://me.necsi.edu/cooperation/4.html
And here is a link to Dr. Bar-Yam mathematical proof by mean-field-approximation for the mathematically inclined.
So like Haidt’s openness/conscientiousness? model, or Dr. Alexander’s Thrive/Survive model, I have my own model based on the CCP.
In the EEA (environment of evolutionary advantage) I think there were two peer phenotypes– lets call them soldiers and explorers. Soldiers were brave, loyal, scrupulous about following orders, inclined to obey authority, good providers. Explorers were intellectually curious, sensitive, empathetic, feckless wanderers and rebellious against authority. These phenotypes had fitness parity and a within species beneficial interplay between cooperating and competing– they took care of different environmental niches.
Fast forward to the 21st century– in a high-tech, globalized, connected world the traits of the soldier phenotype just arent as beneficial anymore. Our current environment places higher status on explorer traits, especially intellectual curiousity (education ) but also on empathy and sensitivity (entertainment and the arts).
So I think polarization is the breakdown of the US CCP because of relative fitness disparity– we need more explorers and fewer soldiers going forward.
Are other advanced countries also as polarized as America? Your theory predicts that the same sort of polarization should occur everywhere there’s a phenotype imbalance, and since every country on Earth has drastically changed over these past hundred years (they’ve all been pulled towards the so-called explorer-favored environment) there should be similar problems everywhere. But it seems like America is a lot worse off than other countries.
This couldn’t be because America is the most advanced country. There are other more advanced countries like Sweden, Denmark, Israel, and Japan, all of which have their local problems, but none of which seem to be experiencing anything like America’s current turmoil. At least, as far as I can tell.
This could be because America has an extreme imbalance in explorers/warriors, but that begs the question of, why? Canada was populated in much the same way as America was, but Canada does not seem as troubled. There don’t seem to be any obvious reasons why America should be different from other countries in this regard, so it seems like an unlikely explanation.
If we accept your theory as true, it also says that not only should warriors be unfit for modern society, but explorers should be as well. As both of them exist on a continuum, and since the shift in environmental exigencies has been absolutely catastrophic over these past centuries, all parts of the continuum except those at the left-most extreme should now be obsolete (and maybe even them, as well). Not only our warriors are unfit for modern society, but our best explorers probably are as well, because our modern environment is utterly unlike our historical one. It is so different, that a whole other species is practically required for it.
Should not explorers be horrified by their expected obsolescence, as well?
Canada never had plantation slavery anywhere remotely near the scale the US did, and the legacy of plantation slavery is a big driving factor in America’s problems. Further, Canada seems less confrontational in general – not just in terms of “is there political bad news going down.”
@dndnrsn
Canada also never had a successful revolution or a civil war.
My understanding of bintchaos’ theory is that it contends the warrior/explorer traits are ingrained in genetics and that it is the genetic legacy of the past evolutionary environment which forged the present disposition. So to understand my own contentions, you must take cognizance that I am not suggesting there aren’t any reasons why America is different from Canada, but questioning what differences in America’s migratory or evolutionary pasts, specifically, could have caused it to gain greater amounts of ‘warriors’ locally (this being what the argument vis-a-vis ‘America’s exceptional social problems’ is contingent upon).
Can we please say “soldiers” instead of “warriors”?
I think warriors implies some sort of crazed aggression.
@johan_larson
We weren’t created by revolution like the US was, and we don’t have a “heroic little guy fighting the power” narrative. However, we have had stuff that, while never on the scale of the US’ civil war, certainly exhibited some level of internal unrest.
Also, the more I think about it, the more I realize that the dichotomy between explorers and warriors is false. Historically, the folk going out and exploring places were very often the warriors as well! The social conservatives of history would have been the parochial farmers and artisans casting a wary eye at any foreigner who came to intrude on their communal life. Picking up the spear and galavanting off to foreign lands wouldn’t have been characteristic of them.
The main purpose of terming what you describe as warriors and explorers seems to be to provide a romantic air to the latter while depicting the former as violent blood-crazed killers.
A better pair of terms for what those traits describe would probably be individualists and communalists, which avoids the partiality of the former terms while also depicting a dichotomy relevant to nature.
That would be fine…I was just trying to think of descriptives that conformed to the principles of the CCP. I didnt think of soldiers as blood-crazed killers…it was more like soldiers would guard the community and be police or troops or rulers and governors while explorers were inventors or teachers or authors or artists.
And certainly our legacy wiring from the EEA is persistant– like our deadly love of fats and sugars.
@Bintchaos – Thanks much for the more detailed writeup! A few questions:
“So I think polarization is the breakdown of the US CCP because of relative fitness disparity– we need more explorers and fewer soldiers going forward.”
If you don’t mind, I’d like to try to expand this out to be a little more explicit. As I understand it, you’re saying something along the lines of the following:
A. The current environment has fewer opportunities for Soldiers, and more for Explorers.
B. As a result of fewer available opportunities, Explorers do less well than Soldiers. Make less money, have less successful careers, etc. Explorer-type solutions and policies work better than soldier-type alternatives.
C. The current explorer-friendly/soldier-unfriendly environment is a natural result of impersonal historical/technological forces, not social group/class/caste bias. It’s not anyone’s fault that soldiers aren’t needed, it’s just the way things are. Trying to change things would be massively inefficient and probably wouldn’t work well anyway.
D. Soldiers respond to the above with resentment and bitterness toward explorers, who they see as oppressing them. This bitterness expresses itself as attacks on Explorers, their institutions and policies. These attacks are motivated by some mixture of ignorance of reality and outright spite. This hostility is the major driver of polarization.
Do the above four points generally match your views?
[EDIT] – …And your argument is the Explorer/Soldier split is genetic in origin also, correct?
Yes, but not just genetic– remember the 4 paths of inheritance (Jablonka 2006)– genetic, epigentic, behavioral and symbolic. eg, an individual inherits their environment and their parents and their parents/ancestors environment.
I think you mean Soldiers do less well than than Explorers.
Yes, its just evolution of the environment. America is the richest most tech advanced country in the world so the effects are exaggerated here, and US has the highest proportion of non-native immigrants– we are all descended from immigrants unless we are native americans, right? The puritans were probably mostly soldier-type– at least the ones that survived the crossing and the travails of settlement. Both phenotypes are historically successful– at times in history the environment was much better for soldiers– like frontier america for example. And the stoics were likely soldier type in the Ancient World.
But the Internet changed everything– we aren’t going back.
Now a fifth point might be…hereditary soldier types can learn to be explorers–at least up through early 20s– this is happening in universities and colleges. Like Dr. Alexander’s valedictorian in Eternal Struggle. And yes, in-group selection for memetic kin is likely partly responsible for the skewed ratio of professors in academe, but that is a small part of what is happening.
Of course if we had a radical change in the global environment like a nuclear war or collapse of ecology due to climate change or alien invasion then Soldier-phenotype would become instantly more successful. Its how the species is antifragile.
Canada is pretty similar, I think.
Even they are, if you go back to prehistoric times.
I would have thought explorer-type, since they broke away from the dominant culture and set off to create their own society. Their descendants seem to be blue tribe, I think.
Isn’t the better model one where people will fill whichever social role is necessary, and in which the group is the level on which selection mainly occurs? People adapt to social circumstance.
Defectors are killed and individualists don’t exist. There are no explorers, because the main “authority” is a love of the family/in-group.
You only oppose authority when there is a higher one at play.
Kinship-selection doesnt explain what is happening– thats the whole problem with gene-centric view of evolution, eg the Dawkins model from The Selfish Gene.
So, it is cultural, and the soldier culture is unfit.
I don’t think the soldier culture is unfit. I think it’s more the case that resource rich elites will tend towards cultural degeneracy. Cultural mutational load.
Your model has culture as both the test and the unit of selection.
Roughly speaking, Ibn Khaldun’s model. Leading to a cycle of takeover, corruption, takeover by a new and not-corrupt tribe, which in its turn gets corrupted.
What does that mean? Kinship selection, extended reproductive success, is an explanation of genetic evolution. Are you claiming something is happening in genetic evolution that it doesn’t explain? Nobody proposes that it explains everything that happens in the world.
Kinship selection alone doesnt explain the results of evolution — it is the principal tool of the gene-centric (Selfish Gene) view of evolution.
http://necsi.edu/research/evoeco/multilevelkin.html
Kin selection can happen theoretically, but when you actually work through the math (for animals with a mammalian reproductive scheme) it turns out that the bar’s set really high: as a toy example, if you’ve got an SNP conferring a disadvantage to the individual and an advantage to his siblings, the sum of the latter needs to have twice the magnitude for it to work out, because the siblings only have a 50% chance of carrying the SNP. And then it exponentially decays from there.
There are probably places where you can find it, but I’d expect them to be rare (again, in mammals).
Check out Robin Hanson on famers and foragers, as well: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/05/forager-vs-farmer-morality.html
Thankx, good data, Forager/Farmer is part of the dichotomy too. Thing is, going forward, cognitive genomics and social physics will be able to refine my gross approximations of Soldier/Explorer phenotypes and genotypes. Those are sort of arbitrary name conventions– I was just trying to capture complementary and yet competitive traits that would play in a CCP.
But again, short term solution for now is education of soldier types for explorer type jobs.
This is actually happening.
Interesting theory. Can you suggest some predictions that we could investigate in order to have more data on whether it’s correct?
Cognitive genomics and social physics.
Slight tangent: What is it about “complexity science” that makes it a science, as opposed to a field of mathematics? (Contrast: game theory, not game science) What sort of lab/field work is there?
The math isnt there yet…this is all really new, leading edge of the waveform stuff.
For the last half century we have been smoothing the sh** out of everything with integration in the science of the really, really small (q-physics).
Dr. Baranger–
Nature is the field lab for complexity science.
Anecdata on metabolic set points: I’ve had depression on and off my whole life, recently it’s been pretty bad, very lethargic. Also been trying to lose a little weight for a while (just a few pounds above optimal on BMI), but my body likes to stay right where it’s at. Noticed that I seemed to be eating almost nothing, added it up and got around 1000 calories per day (maintenance should be ~2000 for me). Made myself eat a bunch more, and immediately have been way more motivated and energetic. So apparently my metabolism doesn’t even bother to make me hungry, and would rather leave me staring at the walls in a stupor all day than burn fat.
Some people have found that a low-carb diet helps with this problem. I am not a doctor, this is not medical advice, your mileage may vary, etc.
Have you ever confirmed that 2000 is actually maintenance for you? In my experience, those online calculators can be off by quite a bit compared to the number of calories that actually maintains a given person at a constant weight.
My own personal experience is similar to yours in terms of the ‘staring at the walls in a stupor’ aspect, but I do usually manage to lose weight while I’m doing that. How long did you try that for?
It creeps up slowly when I’m over 2000, so maybe 1800 or something is ideal, but apparently my metabolism just takes whatever I give it and adjusts my energy level accordingly. For about 3 years I’ve fluctuated within about a ten pound range.
Thanks for sharing, I’m glad you did. Forcing oneself to eat a bunch of food is certainly not as bad as some depression treatments.
The housing market in San Francisco (and more generally the Bay Area) gets increasingly dire. No one seems to be able to agree on what to do about it.
https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/metropolis/2017/06/yimbys_and_the_dsa_can_t_get_along_despite_their_common_enemy_high_rent.html
https://techcrunch.com/gallery/actual-rooms-for-rent-in-sf-that-are-more-than-your-midwestern-mortgage/
I’m surprised some of the major employers like Apple and Google haven’t started saying, loudly, that if this mess isn’t cleared up they will start migrating more of those sweet, sweet six-figure jobs to cheaper places.
It would be a meaningless bluff. They won’t, and everyone knows they won’t. The principals of the tech companies are too rich to care, and the employees are willing to live in small shared spaces and have hellish commutes in order to work for the tech companies. Most of the employees would shudder at the idea of moving to the Midwest; while they’d like cheaper housing and a better commute, they want it in distinctly rich Blue Tribe territory.
Don’t be scared. I’m a Northern Californian who fled to the Midwest and I think it’s pretty great. The horizons are unnervingly flat, but software companies everywhere seem to be at least bluish, and you can still find areas that have all the obvious “rich people live here” qualities.
Don’t listen to that nonsense.
The midwest is terrible, terrible I tell you, the people are terrible, the food is terrible, the weather miserable, the open spaces unbearable. Nobody in their right mind would ever want to live anywhere but the coasts.
I’ll give you the people and the open spaces. But who doesn’t feel like they should do more of their own cooking? Wisconsin food will force your hand. And once you’ve decided that your tolerance for the conditions outdoors makes you superior to everybody in a temperate climate, it sort of balances out CA’s year-round good weather.
Meh. As soon as you’re near any significant university, you’re in the Distributed Republic of Berkeley. The quaint customs of the natives in the surrounding countryside are just local color.
@genisage
What’s wrong with Wisconsin food? What are you, some sort of pinko-commie who hates beer and cheese?
Shh…
I’m trying to get them to stay away.
As someone who grew up in Oregon, I very much recognize hlynkacg’s line of reasoning here 🙂
@AnarchyDice
Pretty much. Cheese is good, but it’s supposed to be a topping, not the majority of the meal. And they could stand to include some vegetables (other than potatoes) and fruits every once in a while.
It’s quite easy to find good Thai food in Minneapolis (and good food of other varieties, Thai is just a particular strong point), and many of the people are lovely. And while that’s the Midwestern city I’m most familiar with, it is not my impression that the others are nearly as awful as you suggest; as Johan says, there are pockets of livability all over the place. Though you have a point about the weather.
I’m gonna borrow this phrase.
The IQpelago.
Well… for any reasonably sized we, “we” haven’t decided that it’s a problem. A decrease (or even a cessation in the increase) of property values would wipe out a big chunk of a lot of the middle class’ savings in the Bay Area.
AmaGooFaceSoft don’t care because those companies have achieved de-facto monopolies in various market segments. They have never been very price sensitive. All that matters is whether they can maintain their control of the market segments or not. Saving a few bucks by hiring Karthik in India instead of Chad in Mountain View doesn’t move the needle on that. The companies that compete on squeezing labor cost to the bone are not going to be competitive in the US Midwest, let alone on the West Coast.
I wonder, would loosening the development rules really cause existing property owners to lose money?
Suppose you own a house of 2000 square feet worth a cool million, which is $500 per square feet. Suddenly the rules change so you and others like you are allowed to build quadruplexes. So if you tore down and rebuilt, you could own (or sell or rent out) maybe 4*1500 square feet. Even if rates per square foot were cut in half, you’d still come out ahead, financially at least.
It seems like there is a lot of room for both sides to benefit here.
Maybe the only people who lose are the ones who really really want their neighbourhoods to stay exactly as they are.
The cost of the house is substantial. You have to increase density a lot to make it worthwhile to tear down a house and exploit the new rules. And even if they do make it possible to build apartment buildings in place of your house, what usually happens is that a few people do it, saturate the market, and the option value isn’t worth much anymore. In most places, increasing density doesn’t help the property values of the median home owner.
But Silicon Valley may be an exception. If every town doubles allowable density, it hurts property values, but if one town decides to become much higher density, they can probably make a lot of money, even for the lots that keep the single family house.
Your example seems a bit odd to me, since you’re assuming that the price per square foot of housing will stay the same when more of it becomes available. Also, renovation is a very capital-intensive business which most people are not in a position to do, even if their house is worth a million on paper. The gains would probably go mostly to big developers who have the capital to invest, not to the average homeowner. And… probably about a dozen other objections that I haven’t thought of yet 🙂
I think the best thing we could do at this point is get better transit. Give up on the high-speed rail boondoggle and make CalTrain and light rail work well. Extend BART.
You missed a sentence. This one: “Even if rates per square foot were cut in half, you’d still come out ahead, financially at least.”
Of course rates would drop if the supply were dramatically expanded. That’s the point of doing so. But the property owner may still come out ahead because they could have a lot more space to rent out.
Would it work out that way? Not sure. It depends on the shape of the supply and demand curves in that range. And tear-down and build-out costs, I suppose. Is there an economist in the house?
Sorry, you’re right, I did miss that sentence. Looks like my original reply got lost as well?
Anyway… tl;dr is that rezoning favors big property developers with capital to burn on improvements. Not the average family.
I live in a condo in Mountain View that I’ve owned for nearly 20 years, and am fine with lots more housing. I don’t think it’s much of a threat to my property values. Whenever given the opportunity (voting box, community surveys from the City, town halls) I’ve always made that opinion known. And I think mine is a fairly common opinion; voters have made the City Council here much more pro-growth since the latest economic boom started.
The reality of why housing is expensive in the Bay Area is multifaceted and complex. Unfortunately many people seem to have glommed onto the notion that it’s all caused by existing property owners trying to restrict supply so as to drive up the value of their holdings. Probably because that turns a complex economic situation into a simple morality tale of greedy NIMBYs vs young folks just trying to find a place to live. This isn’t to say such NIMBYs can’t exist, but I don’t see any evidence that they play even a minor role in the discussion around housing here in Mountain View.
What in your opinion are some of the clearer facets to that complex, multifaceted situation?
Why is the discussion complex at all? Just allow people to build? What’s the complexity?
If you want to understand the issues in the SF Bay area specifically, this article is an excellent place to start:
https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/
If you are asking more generally why we have building codes and zoning laws and such, that would require a different and more theoretical answer.
@pontifex
How would flat property prices wipe out savings? And what do you mean by middle class?
If you plan to stay in the house you are living in and leave it to the kids, as many do, a drop in property values doesn’t wipe out anything–the house still provides the same services it did before the drop. It’s only if you are planning to sell and move somewhere else, or move into some much smaller home locally, that you lose from a drop.
If you or your kids are planning to e.g. borrow against the value of the home to finance their university education and then pay it back with their professional earnings, a decrease in property values could well force them to use unsecured student loans at a substantially higher interest rate.
Maybe “wiped out” is the wrong word. But certainly, if you have 1 million dollars invested in a house, and it’s worth only 1 million ten years later, you have lost out. Firstly, because inflation happened and 1 million dollars is now worth less than before. Secondly, because you could have had that money in another asset class like stocks that would have earned you a better return. Thirdly because you pay yearly property taxes, and transaction costs for buying the house that can be as high as 5%. In any case, you’re not going to be happy with the politicians that caused the situation.
An abstract statement like “cessation in the increase of property values” can reasonably be read as applying to the real values (adjusted for whatever metric of inflation you like) rather than the dollar amount, so your first point doesn’t really fit.
To really benefit from the house – if it is owner occupied, as the “middle class” statement implies – then to treat it as “savings” that may have been wiped out or failed to earn a return or whatever, you have to sell it and buy a different house or rent. So what’s really important is whether it has lost value relative to the rest of the housing market.
You, in effect, gain the ability to profit from moving if and when everyone else’s houses drop in value more than yours. Which makes the whole thing zero-sum for people who own or rent a single residence. And I would like to hear the definition of “middle class” that includes people who own a second property in the Bay Area.
If they worked together they could get an amazing deal from whatever place they moved to. Imagine how much a city/state would be willing to pay to get, say, 50k high tech jobs. Plus, if lots of people moved at the same time, much of the culture and networking opportunities would move with them.
They wouldn’t even need to do anything so dramatic. They could just hire more in their satellite offices, and less at HQ. Those offices are in some cases in nice respectably blue-tribe locations like Denver and Portland.
As a Google employee (don’t speak for them, yadda yadda yadda) here’s my belief for why this hasn’t happened (and yes, we’re aware of the idea; it’s constantly floated by low level people internally): it’s all about feudal power dynamics.
Sometimes it’s floated that the high level execs are too rich to care about bay area living costs, and that is in fact true, but that doesn’t explain why they want to be in the Bay. The reason they want to be there is that Larry and Sundar (and Zuckerberg, etc) are there. If you’re a SVP at Google, your job is to sit there playing politics with Sundar and his clique, and that requires face to face contact on a regular basis.
The rest follows from that. The SVPs need to be in the Bay to play power games. They want their fiefdoms to be around them physically (and the next layer down of PMs and directors want to be around the SVP for the same reason the SVP wants to be near Sundar.)
Even where AmaGooFaceSoft have satellite offices, they are forced to be as big and uniform as possible, because that’s how the executive who made the decision about the office existing get power: a huge fiefdom in one campus making him look good–and someone is willing to win the Seattle Power Broker Game at the cost of conceding the Bay Power Broker Game.
Conclusion: if Larry and Sundar randomly decided to move to Cleveland and stay there for a year, Google would follow in rapid succession. Short of telepresence good enough to play politics at no disadvantage to a local (and also somehow good enough to convey the same status to an exec as having 10,000 drones in his building!) nothing else will.
So why doesn’t Larry at least pretend to consider moving to Cleveland to get more political leverage in the Bay area?
The bay doesn’t care about us and won’t subsidize us usefully. They think we’re dirty pathetic losers.
But don’t the rich property owners in the Bay realize how much they would lose if lots of you left?
Google (and the other majors) want to hire people who they think will let them dominate more industries the way they dominate search and mobile phone OSes. They want monopolies or semi-monopolies, like any good capitalists. Labor costs aren’t the limiting factor on Google’s growth. If they were, Google would already be in India or Vietnam. There are rumors that the Google has even gone as far as opening entire new satellite offices just to get one artificial intelligence professor. (This rumor was swirling around the Pittsburgh office, not sure if it’s true.)
As someone similarily situated, I’ve frequently pointed out that if we can find a way to get the whole remote office/remote working thing to actually work, we have a work-around and possibly a solution to a huge amount of the geographic issues in the US. It would then be just as easy for a qualified applicant to work from a half-dead coal mining town as from Silicon Valley.
This issue also occurs in other areas of life. You’ll note that a large amount of the Federal Government’s employees are located in Washington DC. The exceptions are either military bases which are distributed for various reasons, or because they provide services to where the people are. Just about everything that involves policy-making is centrally-located.
Find a way to make that not-a-problem and a lot of these problems become much more tractable.
I’m a little more leery of telework because anything that can be done from a dead mining town can be done cheaper from India.
Why doesn’t all manufacturing activity for export take place in low wage nations?
@James Miller
If the proportion of programming jobs located in the US changed to match the corresponding proportion of manufacturing jobs, I think a lot of SSC commenters would swiftly become unemployed.
@James Miller, That’s an extremely complicated question, but one doesn’t need to go into detail to note that the needs of manufacturing and the needs of telework are fairly different, so while it might be the case that the latter shares the feature of sometimes being advantageous to do in high labor cost areas (because of other offsetting factors), it is not automatic that it will. But if all you’re saying is that Corey also hasn’t shown that it won’t, fair enough.
The usual solution to the macro puzzle James Miller brings up is that grouping people together generates positive externalities. This applies both geographically (you put your factory in Shenzhen because lots of other people already have, so that’s where the suppliers, toolers, experienced workers and supervisors, etc. are), and within an office (ease of collaboration, hallway conversations, smoother politics, etc.)
Individual remote workers push against those factors. On the third hand, that makes a barrier to having any individual remote workers – they have to save enough money and/or add enough productivity to compensate for those lost externalities.
I’ve worked in technology for a pretty long time at this point. I’ve been a full-time remote employee, had a full-time remote boss, even worked in groups where everyone was remote. But most of my jobs are still with people who are right here.
I can’t remember a company I’ve been at ever hiring a remote worker because they were cheaper. In fact, in many cases, remote workers were located in very high-cost locations like London, New York City, or Los Angeles. The main reason to hire a remote person was because you felt that person was the best possible applicant. In general, companies almost never hire remote workers who are junior. The perception is that remote workers are hard to manage, so you have to hire people who can manage themselves. Time zones were a huge problem that inevitably required everyone to make big sacrifices.
If you are a remote worker, you have to be very careful about what you say. All electronic communication is monitored and logged. If you say someone is a bozo in the cafeteria, probably nobody will ever know. If you send an email saying that, it’s very likely to get out at some point. Courts can force companies to literally print out all of their emails, so that prosecutors can comb through it to look for incriminating clues. Executives have more at risk, so they tend to be even more guarded and fake-cheerful in online communications.
So to a certain extent, being remote means being out of the loop. In most cases, you can’t really get promoted unless you are local. And people will also (correctly) believe that your commitment to the company is less. This is especially a big deal at the major technology companies that highly value loyalty and want to promote people like themselves (who are “googley” or “amazon-y”).
So basically… telecommuting is no panacea for inequality or inefficiency. At most it gives a few more options to the high end of the labor market.
Well yeah, a worker is quite unlikely to be replaced one-for-one with someone in India. It happens an entire division at a time via outsourcing. And I think the general point does in fact stand. If you don’t need [functional group X] to be located in one of your main offices, then you probably don’t need them to be located in a western country at all.
I got into country music kinda late but even before then I’d heard lots of people say they liked Hank Sr and Hank III, but not Hank Jr. Now that I’m somewhat familiar with all three, I still hear it from people, and I don’t really understand. I think Hank Jr.’s voice is incredible. What is it about him–and not his father or son–that so many people object to?
Broken Things in Human Biology
I first started thinking about this topic when I read this excellent article about the discovery of Vitamin C. Apparently Vitamin C was a very hard discovery for scientists to make, for the simple reason that it is not a vitamin for most animals! Dogs, cats, chickens, etc. can all produce their own vitamin C– they don’t need to consume it.
So naturally whenever scientists tried to reproduce vitamin C deficiency (also known as scurvy) in animals, they failed. When they finally did figure it out, it was because they stumbled across an animal that had the same genetic problem (inability to synthesize vitamin C) as humans. And that enshrined the guinea pig as the archetype of all scientific test subjects.
There’s a lot of things in evolution that are tradeoffs or non-obvious adaptations. But then there are things that are just straight-up broken. It’s hard to see how the non-functional vitamin C synthesis genes humans have could ever be helpful to us.
Another example where things seem broken is kidney stones. Kidney stones don’t help. They only hurt. God, do they hurt! The reason they happen is because human blood has uric acid in it. The uric acid occassionally drops out of solution and forms crystals. In most other mammals, the uric acid gets converted to allantoin to prevent this from happening. But not in humans. This is another example of where what’s normal in humans is considered a genetic disease in dogs.
You know how you can only go 2 days without water before dying? Yeah. That’s because you have inefficient kidneys that use a lot of water.
Don’t get me wrong… there’s a lot of wonderful ingenuity in human biology. But there’s also a lot of systems that don’t work very well that we never think about because it’s “normal”…
I feel like you’re not fully taking into account the cost-benefit issue. The evolutionary past is a time of extreme calorie scarcity. Therefore, anything the body can get away without doing will be a calorie saver.
I don’t know how many calories it takes to make one’s own vitamin C; maybe not much? But sometimes even a tiny advantage is enough if vitamin C can be taken for granted in the environment the evolution happened in. I’ve also heard it described: “whatever is unavoidable becomes indispensable.” (Think about gravity and your musculoskeletal system).
You can definitely go longer than 2 days without water, though not nearly as long as a bear, it’s true. But are there no costs associated with the bear’s ability to do this? I doubt it.
I think the cases where you can point to real “design flaws” tend to be a result of path dependence/needing to fix the airplane while flying it. There might be some radically different spine design which would have been better for humans to develop once they started walking upright, say, but small changes that work well enough for survival and reproduction are much more likely to happen and achieve fixation than a radical departure from all that came before.
All of the explanations of vitamin C loss that I’ve read describe it as a “neutral mutation”– i.e. a mutation that results from genetic drift, rather than being selected for. For example, see here.
In general, it’s considered very bad in evolutionary biology to assume that a change is adaptive without investigating it thoroughly. There is a huge role for randomness, founder effects, and genetic drift that we’ve come to understand in recent years.
The link I posted earlier basically said, we’re screwed, because birds and reptiles did it better.
Have you ever seen a bird peeing? No, because they don’t need to.
I feel like there’s a difference between “not being a chimera combining all the best features of every existing animal” and “broken.”
I, for one, am glad not to have a cloaca.
Sounds like you need more of a growth mindset.
In a sense, even broken things result from trade-offs. Because of new harmful mutations new things keep breaking. Evolution selects against the worst new mutations, and occasionally for new beneficial ones. If a mutation is just a little bit harmful evolution might “choose” to use its selection powers on something more important and allow this harmful mutation to spread. It’s kind of like with children where you are supposed to pick your battles and ignore the minor irritations.
To a certain extent I was being deliberately provocative. There are clearly tradeoffs to every evolutionary decision… sometimes very non-obvious ones. My point was mainly that we shouldn’t assume that humans have the best of everything, evolutionarily speaking. For example, mice don’t get diabetes (there have been attempts to artificially create diabetic mice, with varying success).
Mencken commented on this point. His example was comparing the lovely design of the human hand with the very poor design of the human knee. His conclusion was that the world was designed not by a god but by a committee of gods. Once one of them got something right, the others had to improve it.
Following up on the discussion of the Western canon in the prior open thread,starting here.
I think of the Western Canon as a combination of two things: a set of stories (the Bible, Homer, Plutarch, maybe a few others) and a set of interpretive tools from Greek philosophy, primarily Plato and Aristotle (definition of perfection, form/substance/accident distinction, principle of non-contradiction). The Western Canon is the application of those tools to those stories, and of both to people’s lives, over time.
Just the stories doesn’t get you there; just the tools don’t get you there. Both are awesome, but the Western Canon is the interaction.
Thoughts and comments?
Surely we’ve come up with a few things in the past two thousand years that were important enough to make it into the Canon but couldn’t be readily traced to the ancient Greeks and ancient Jews? The works of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, for example.
I would count those–along with the whole Alien Machinery of liberalism, most of Shakespeare and Goethe, modern mathematics and physics, and a lot of other things–as important, something everyone should know, but not part of the Western Canon.
It seems roughly accurate, but would you say it’s fundamentally different from e.g. the Chinese canon, which also consists of major philosophical texts frequently used as a lens to interpret famous stories and historical events?
I’d say it’s the same kind of thing, but not the same thing: the Chinese canon has different foundational stories, and as I understand it a different set of philosophical tools. It’s a canon, but a different canon.
Does anyone have any resources on how to handle a delusional, paranoid parent (pre-diagnosis)?
Perhaps this is the wrong place to ask considering this is an area where logic fails, but it’s also a place where people are interested in cognitive phenomena, so whatcha got SSC?
When the city of Ur was founded, there were already cities old beyond living memory, like Uruk, Eridu and Kush. Do you think their citizens were haughty and said “lol Ur noobs”?
No, because Nub was a foreign name for Nebo. (And that is somewhat related to newb…)
They obviously called people Nimrods instead.
They called a tiny urban minority “mighty hunter”?
No, because they could reply that they’re living in the ur-example.
Their leaders were the uber-ur.
That would distract from the more important business of killin Ur d00dz.
As I prepare for an upcoming trip to Los Angeles, where as a non-driver I will partake of its rapidly growing transit system, I would like to dispel a myth. There’s a story that up until the ’40s, every city in America had an efficient, functional streetcar system, but then General Motors bought them all up and shut them down in order to sell more cars, thereby dooming America to decades of traffic jams, unwalkable cities and suburban sprawl. The truth is that GM was in fact involved in the shutdown of most American streetcar systems, but it wasn’t in order to sell more cars. It was in order to sell more buses.
Streetcars are expensive to build and maintain, and even in the ’30s many lines no longer had the ridership to justify the expense. The owners of National City Lines realized that buses were going to replace streetcars in most of the country, and wanted to be the company to do it. They managed to secure investments from GM, Firestone, and Chevron (among others) in exchange for giving them exclusive contracts to supply buses, tires, and fuel (etc.) to the growing national transit conglomerate. This worked out well for all involved, until the government caught wind of what was going on and brought an antitrust complaint, on which NCL and its investors were eventually found guilty.
But nowhere in the antitrust ruling is it suggested that there was something wrong with killing the streetcars, or that it had anything to do suburbanization or GM selling America on driving to work or anything like that. Those were much bigger trends than any one company, even a behemoth like GM at its peak, could create.
Somehow this story mutated into the one you’ll hear from transit buffs and urbanists and environmentalists, that this was all a nefarious capitalist plot hatched in Detroit. I like streetcars plenty, and I love that the old Pacific Electric line out to Santa Monica is running again, but that narrative simply isn’t true.
(Despite falling for this myth, Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a good movie anyway.)
There’s other countries in the world , you know #467/oo.
If streetcars/trams are inherently awful, why do they still exist in some places (eg Brussels) and why have they been re introduced in others (eg Manchester UK)?
My city (Cincinnati) reintroduced a streetcar system recently, but it was very controversial. The argument for it over buses was that a streetcar line is permanent and thus businesses would be able to rely on it better than a bus line which might get taken out of service. So it would encourage businesses to come back to the downtown area.
I’m skeptical of this explanation, but don’t have any data to prove it one way or the other.
Non-permanent seems like a feature, not a bug. The fact that you can take an unnecessary/unprofitable bus line out of service (or, more precisely, move or modify its route to adjust to changes in local traffic patterns) is a GOOD thing. This is like saying “Having a desktop PC is better than a laptop because if you have a laptop someone might pick it up and move it around.”
Flexibility is better in some ways, but not in all ways. If you want me to adapt my life to your public transit system (buy a house based on the existence of good public transit from my house to the places I want to go, like my job), then having it be expensive for you to change or cancel routes is a win.
Cities are slow-moving bureaucracies. If anything, they are too slow, not too quick, to modify infrastructure to suit changing population needs.
In other words, your job is likely to move before the bus route does. If the city decides to move the bus route near you, it’s because nobody is taking that route anymore (and hasn’t been for awhile), which means you probably have bigger problems than the bus route…
@Matt M
Your faith in the wisdom of local government decision-making is touching, but does not match my experience.
As I understand it, there has been some research on this, and establishing a rail line has been shown to sometimes have benefits for local business growth, while adding bus lines never seems to.
I would want to see the research. It sounds like the sort of thing that gets produced to order when there is a political controversy about whether to spend money doing something.
Right up there with “building sports stadiums is good for the economy?” eh, David?
I don’t know enough of the technical details, but one hypothesis regarding the recent revival of the (electric) streetcar / trams: technology has improved and/or there has been other changes in the urban environments, so the tram is again competitive.
This does not explain why many cities in Europe never got rid of them in the first place, though.
This is pretty speculative, but Europe has historically shown different patterns of urbanization than the US did. More medium-density creep, less suburban sprawl and on the other hand less ultra-dense highrise construction. I don’t think it showed the population movements in and out of the suburbs that the US has over the 20th century, either. Either one could make streetcars more attractive.
Could it be that much of America (and some of England) followed urbanization -> suburbanization -> recentralization trends? And perhaps in older cities in Europe, the central city population has been more stable, so streetcars/trams have remained useful and efficient.
Just a entirely spurious guess.
This is also legit. So long as the streetcar is both:
a) Properly utilized (not empty all the time)
b) Sufficient to meet the demands of its route (not 110% full all the time either)
There’s really no particular gain to be had in replacing it. And my impression from older European cities is that, with a few occasional exceptions, the city center has always been the city center. The financial district has always been the financial district. The ritzy suburb has always been the ritzy suburb, etc. Within areas where streetcars have already existed, population and traffic patterns haven’t changed much.
Streetcars can be forced to run along evenly-spaced rectangular grids. Bus systems really can’t; people will notice that the buses aren’t actually going where people want to go, people will complain about the unnecessary transfers, etc, and no politician can resist the pressure to tweak the system into some godawful non-rectilinear mapping. With streetcars – and even more so subways – the rectilinear grid can be literally carved in stone before anyone has a chance to object. Much more fun to be a city planner that way, as any recovering Sim City addict can attest.
Except, I am not sure if this is true at all. The trams tend to go where the roads go (because that was the only space available when the tracks were first laid out), and in European older cities, the road configuration can be quite non-rectangular. And the busses will run along the exactly similarly rectangular urban configuration as the trams, if the road configuration is rectangular in the first place.
And to be frankly, things are similar with metro trains. The schematic maps sure look rectangular, but I believe most of them still look like this in the reality. Here are the Brussels tram network in 2009, Paris / Ile-de-France.
edit.
I apologize not realizing the “rectangular grids” link was different that the “evenly-spaced” that did link to the Seeing like a State review (and thus I read it after the writing the comment above). However, I don’t understand what the Bloomberg article has to do with rectangular grids; it’s about signaling.
I think you are reading “rectangular grids” more literally than even Scott intended when he introduced the term. The issue isn’t the relative willingness to adapt to preexisting geography. The issue is the insistence on imposing a grand master plan a priori on (in this case) your transportation infrastructure, and using the planned transportation infrastructure to impose a grand master plan on the rest of urban society.
With streetcars, subways, and light rail, city governments do approximately get to be Sim City players, saying “There will be commercial hubs here, here, and here, this is where the rich people who do business will live, and over here are the poor people who will stock the shelves and mop the floors, etc. Dissenters will face two-hour commutes.”
With bus systems, you’re pretty much telling people, “Here’s where there’s City Infrastructure; figure out where you want to set up shop and where you want to work, when you get around to petitioning City Hall we’ll pretty much have to reroute the bus lines to accommodate you as best we can.” Setting up car-friendly roads, even more so.
These are two very different things even if, because of the riverfront and the legacy main street and boulevard, the Grand Master Plan isn’t literally rectilinear.
I’ll push back a little on the “rails = high modernism” angle. The apotheosis of high modernism was the planned city of Brasilia. Niemeyer & co. filled their perfect city with wide, car-friendly streets and didn’t include any kind of rail transit at all, operating under the assumption that everyone who counts would drive everywhere. Likewise for practically everything Robert Moses ever built.
Granted, there is a good deal more central planning needed for a rail line than a road, but even the sort of planners who loved power for power’s sake didn’t just put trains everywhere.
I probably did. (There’s also a point that there are rectangular grids and rectangular grids. The cities with approximately grid-like layout of independent blocks with an inner courtyard and the roads in-between, emergent structure arising from the need to impose fire breaks, are generally considered quite pleasant, at least compared to the 1960s urban plans often involving brutalist architecture that were main target of “rectangular grids” bashing.)
However, back to the argument. I believe your thesis that there is a drastic difference between “roads for cars = authorities serving individualistic wills of the people” and “rails = imposing their will on the public” is still false.
1. Most of the functioning public transit systems tend to be centrally planned, no matter the vehicle. Stupidly built rail lines will be as disused as stupidly routed bus lines. I believe examples can be readily found.
2. The bus lines are restricted by the road system, which as far as I’m aware, also tends to be centrally planned. If the local authorities are prone to execute grand master plans taking minimal or no input from the reality on the ground, a couple of tram lines are insignificant in comparison to the effects of their decisions on where the highways and roads and parking lots and sidewalks and bike lines [1] go (and of course, zoning and all the other aspects of city planning). The bus line is useless if you can’t walk from the bus stop to place you actually want to be going because everything is designed for cars, not for people when they are not in cars. The “car friendly road” is useless if the network planned in a silly way and you spend lots of time stuck in a traffic jam.
[1] If they make a decision to designate bike lines in the first place.
And of course, the heyday of high modernist urban planning (the one associated with rectangular grids and brutalist architecture) also was the time when the old light rail systems were removed and replaced with a cars-and-buses-based urban plans.
edit. I’ll also add that I’d view successful urban planning is an organic process in itself. Zoning and traffic network plans (both rails and tarmac) will respond to the evolving situation on the ground; the society adapts to the planned framework and if the plan is successfully adaptive to the needs of the people (i.e. resultant state of successful cooperative coordination), the society thrives.
There are two basic reasons why an old-style streetcar wouldn’t be replaced by buses: (1) it ran through a tunnel or somewhere else it’d be impractical to run a bus (as in Boston and Newark – yes, Newark, of all cities!), and (2) Communism (as in Prague
and San Francisco).It took a while to figure out that light rail isn’t inherently awful and can be a fine middle ground – cheaper to build than a metro, higher capacity than a bus – provided that they the trains are running in a separate right-of-way from vehicular traffic. Los Angeles and Portland are among the American cities to reintroduce them successfully, though L.A. is so spread out it’ll never be comprehensively served by any transit system.
If a streetcar is running in traffic, then it’s basically a really expensive bus you can’t reroute. A lot of cities in America are unnecessarily building them anyway because they’re trendy, flashy, and can get federal transit grants. I expect most of them to shut down once the novelty wears off.
In Against Murderism Scott wrote “I don’t want civil war. I want this country to survive long enough to be killed by something awesome, like AI or some kind of genetically engineered superplague. Right now I think going out in a neat way, being killed by a product of our own genius and intellectual progress – rather than a product of our pettiness and mutual hatreds – is the best we can hope for. And I think this is attainable! I think that we, as a nation and as a species, can make it happen.”
Evidence against Scott’s hope.
How would a civil war actually work? In the last one you basically had one contiguous geographical region that formed a government and had a war with another discrete region and government. This made organizing a war, and knowing who to fight, reasonably convenient.
But how does a war of “every city vs. everywhere else” actually even happen in any meaningful sense, even if a bunch of people are mad enough to give it a try?
IMO, the Brazilification of the USA is far more likely.
For there to be proper civil war, you need an organized counter-elite to challenge the powers that be. Plenty of people are discontent. But who, really, will lead them to overthrow the US government? Next to that, the” cities vs everyone” problem is a trivial issue.
This factor also makes peaceful secession unlikely; if we were going to split into “US of Canada” and “Jesusland” we’d have to move most/all of the cities (or city dwellers) from the latter to the former.
But without civil war, peaceful secession, or most people somehow adopting a synthesis of values and realities that are currently mutually incompatible, what’s left? Limping along like this forever-ish is my guess. (I suppose that’s a special case of Scott’s hope, where the AI/tech/whatever apocalypse doesn’t happen).
Maybe this is where theoretical libertarian ideas come into play: we stick a national border around every metro area, confederate them into US of C, leave them embedded in surrounding Jesusland?
Walled cities with walled high speed train tracks stringing them together; little pearls of blue outposts in red territory and vice versa?
Except how do you keep the citizens of the US of C from meddling in “Jesusland” because those awful Jesuslanders are
heathens in need of convertingviolating people’s inalienable human rights?@Kevin C
You don’t.
Libertarian ideas will only have traction in an autarchic society comprised only of libertarian type people. Libertarians are a permanent sliver of the population and can only console themselves with the fact that they have more influence than their dark mirror universe twins, the national bolsheviks, which might be all an elaborate joke anyway, with literally 10 people who think it’s real. Libertarianism is demographically marginal, has always been demographically marginal, and will always be demographically marginal. I gave up the ideology as soon as I realized this. It’s nice to dream.
It’s nice to dream but us alt-neurotypes will always be oppressed by the tyranny of left vs right, the unslayable double headed dragon, the avatar of the vile masses. Libertarians are very weird and are pretty much space aliens, and should just accept that the ideology of libertarianism is only a weird attempt to translate our bizarre terminal values into human moral terms. Give up the ideology, and become who we are; a race, and then maybe at least we can get some pity bucks as a cognitively marginalized group.
The only way libertarians will ever end up with a society they are happy with is if somehow we all turn into robots and escape to the final frontier, but even then it’s far more likely that we are humiliated because a big centralized friendly progressive AI controls everything, or in a cosmic joke, we win the freedom argument for once, and then deregulated autonomous corporations turn us all into paperclips, finally getting what we all secretly wanted all along, which is to literally become private property.
Uh… yeah. It won’t work. Human society has two modes. The part where progressives and conservatives “choose” their candidates under extreme duress, pulling the lever to keep the same muddled mess going, and then the part where the stress becomes too great and they finally flip out and start killing each other. In the first case, libertarians act as a beaten spouse to rightists, and in the second case, they play act as fascists or die, so pretty much the same thing.
I suppose that’s what it’s like for absolutists too. But at least you had a system once.
@MrApophenia
See Northern Ireland. You had republican paramilitaries terrorizing loyalist communities & loyalist paramilitaries terrorizing republican communities.
One can easily imagine a situation where the tribes start attacking each other’s communities, symbols, politicians, etc.
@Corey
Ethnic cleansing and genocide are options too.
In the sci-fi novel (Thirteen/Black Man) Jesusland (aka the Confederated States of America) builds a wall which starts as a border wall to keep people out but winds up as a sort of prison wall keeping people in.
Much like the wall separating East and West Berlin was until it came down.
The Berlin wall was all about keeping people in, right from the beginning.
Sorry…I wasnt there…but I was led to believe that it was about keeping spies and Russian agents out of West Berlin as well.
The Communists built the wall, and claimed that it was to keep western agents and provocateurs out. However, the fact that the fortifications and minefields generally faced east rather than west strongly suggests otherwise.
@bintchaos
East Germany built the Berlin wall to keep East Germans from leaving. People in West Germany could visit East Berlin and travel throughout West Germany and (mostly) the world. West Berliners had some restrictions about visiting East Berlin, but eventually could come and go. People from the East could not visit the West for the most part.
The German wall (note: usually peple mean the inner German border, not just Berlin division) was built from the beginning mainly because the entrepreneurial, the educated, and the well-off were bleeding out to the west after the course of post-war politics became clear in the Soviet occupation zone. E.g., more than one engineer “made over” with one luggage for personal belongings and another full of blueprints, formulas, etc.
The border was, however, sold to the GDR population and trumpeted to the world as the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart (Antifaschistischer Schutzwall), despite the fact that everyone could see that almost all the defense mechanisms were facing inwards.
yes, excellent comment.
Exactly how the Jesusland border wall is framed to the confederation citizens in Thirteen.
Aso, Jesusland only has private, expensive education, while the Rim has free college for everyone.
Thanks for the compliment!
[For the interested who like to watch desasters live, I may add that a GDR-like drain (of those valuing rule of law, of educated who predict the economy going down, of more secular/liberal/nonideologiclly oriented) is in an early phase in Turkey right now, and there are few developments conceivable that will not eventually lead to similar measures as taken by GDR.]
In the real Civil War, support for the Union/Confederacy didn’t break down cleanly, which is why you had events like the Draft Riots, the secession of West Virginia, the Kentucky situation, and more generally Copperheads and Scalawags aplenty. What happened was that the CSA was able to take physical control of some areas, and unable to take physical control of other areas, and the feelings of the inhabitants had something to do with that, but not everything (consider Maryland, for instance). If, heaven forfend, the US has another civil war, it might go the same.
But Americans seem to assume that another Civil War would look much like the last one –
it ain’t necessarily so. Another model of a civil war would be the Vendee, which basically was every city vs everywhere else. It was still pretty obvious who to fight. Sure, there were plenty of people in Republican-controlled areas who hated the Montagnards (probably the vast majority, in fact) but if they can’t organise into military forces then they aren’t much of a threat. They didn’t have to be defeated, just terrorised.
What do you mean by “the last one”, when Wikipedia lists four going on simultaneously right now?
If you mean “the last one fought in the United States”, the US is not obligated to do things in the future in the particular highly idiosyncratic way we’ve done things in the past. We can learn new ways of doing things by observing foreign nations, maybe even letting some of them immigrate and teach us in person. We can, for example, do civil wars in that style previously seen only abroad, where basically everybody looks across the street, notes that at least one of their neighbors is of the wrong tribe, and takes their gun off the wall and shoots them.
Well, except for the fact that only half of us still have guns on the wall. But as much as I generally prefer America’s archaic and geographically organized style of revolutionary and civil warfighting, much as I distrust the “we must do things the foreign way, foreigners know so much more than us parochial Americans” argument, I have to admit that if we fight another civil war we probably will do it in their way.
After the first round of neighbor-killing, the survivors do tend to segregate themselves pretty rapidly, which in the US probably means Blue coastal enclaves and a Red hinterland, with a few Blue cities in the interior being able to hold out at least for a while.
The Balkans in the ’90es are an example. Overarching national identity and security architecture breaks down, everybody resorts to smaller-scale units of social cohesion in a spirit of “we must protect us against the others” and … the US would not end with Red vs. Blue but with a much finer grained hostility of many more factions.
I very much doubt that. Wars, more than anything else in human experience, motivate people to join the largest possible “Us” with the strongest possible level of commitment so as to survive against the monolithic “Them”. What, other than a war, could convince Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin to join Team Allies?
The likely scenario here will not include a war in the WWII sense, where pre-existing blocks (nations) shifted positions until they were locked in alliances.
In a breakdown of superstructures, the largest possible “Us” still is a proxy for what promises the most security (promised/expected victory being a proxy for that), expecially immediate security. People cling to what is near and gives protection, not what is far away but strong. They band do defend the ‘hood against the neighbours, and don’t strategize about whose ideology/world view/lifestyle/religion will finally come out on top.
Study the Balkans. [catastrophism on] They provide material much more likely to be relelevant to the looming intra-US turmoil than any classical war, civil or inter-national. Add a little fire accelerant from outside parties, a militarized police, a homeland security that can get away with an essentially free reign in 100 miles of any border including coasts (covering ~60% of the population IIRC), the coal-and-iron culture in its death throes, the eternally smouldering racial and native problems, and you have more ingredients for dark soc-fi than you’d like. [catastrophism off]
Reason for EDIT: HTML-like tags for ‘catastrophism’ were swallowed by the system. And so it begins..
Granted, John Doe doesn’t think beyond joining his local Block Militia or whatever. In anything remotely resembling even a Balkan-style civil war, the block militia captain is going to be looking for allies, and is not going to be applying fine-grained political litmus tests or making specific demands. Whoever isn’t “Them” and can provide the greatest number of Us-battalions at need, is the ally of choice.
In anything resembling the contemporary United States, I don’t see how that adds up to anything other than one alliance composed of pretty much everybody who normally votes Republican and one alliance composed of pretty much everybody who normally votes Democratic. Anybody proposing to not be one of those two alliances, doesn’t get any allies worth mentioning – because who’d want to ally with such a tiny obvious loser when Team GOP and Team Democrat are looking for members?
In anything resembling the contemporary United States, I don’t see how that adds up to anything other than one alliance composed of pretty much everybody who normally votes Republican and one alliance composed of pretty much everybody who normally votes Democratic.
Yup. That’s where we disagree. I guess you are approaching the speculations more in a top-down way of thinking, and assume the local militia leader does the same, going to plead allegiance to the biggest blocks. And that the developments allow for enough time to add up to what you say.
I consider this bottom-up, going from the immediate shocks and the resulting tunnel-view (first the immediate threats! Secure bare survival necessities!) that can pit neighbours against each other, to its consequences. If a society collapses fast enough, the situation is extremely dynamic, intransparent, and volatile, so there will be little concern for long-range alliancing at first, and then the damage is done because small groups are in close combat or pose a near-field threat already.
This happening in a population that is not just red-blue divided, but afro-hispanic-native-asian-x-y-z, and rich-middle-poor, while the ghosts of old stereotypes (Irish? Italien? Chinese? Catholic? Jews?) are bound to appear and old grievances promise to get revenged. Nah, that won’t sort into a nice and clear two-faction war, even the word ‘war’ will have to receive more re-definition than through the ‘asymmetric’ and recently ‘hybrid’ ‘wars’ of the last decades. Only after a long bleed-out, maybe there will emerge clear fronts between a small number of leaders or groups.
May we never see who had the better guess.
@John Schilling
I could be wrong, but isn’t the Syrian civil war pretty multipolar? At least in the sense that the various rebel groups don’t really get along? It seems not-inconceivable to me that more extreme elements of Team Red or Team Blue would use the chaos as opportunity to purge the
traitorsinsufficiently orthodox.@Gobbobobble
As far as I can see, the Syrian War seems to have these factions:
1: Regime loyalists/Syrian Army
2: Free Syrian Army/subsidiaries
3: Al Qaeda aligned Jihadists, Tahrir al-Sham etc
4: ISIS and affiliates
5: Kurdish separatists
6: Foreign meddlers who meddle so haphazardly and randomly that it’s hard to split apart who they intend to be allied with and who they are de facto allied with
So, it’s at least a 5 or 6 sided war in the long run. In the short run, alliances form and then split. The FSA allied with Al Nusra (now Tahrir al-Sham) IIRC, but then stopped after 2014. The USA alternates between assisting the regime in disarray (more recently under Trump before moving back to confused opposition), the FSA, AQ alligned Jihadists, and the Kurds.
I think one of the main reasons everything hasn’t cohered into two really well defined factions is because of the foreign meddling from the USA (which doesn’t know what it’s doing) and Russia (which knows exactly what it’s doing), stirring the pot and separating the particles. In theory, things could settle down into three factions, the loyalists, the non-jihadist “democratic” opposition (perhaps the FSA comes to terms with the Kurds and other separatists), and the jihadist opposition (perhaps AQ jihadists reconcile with ISIS jihadists), with the USA backing the dems, the Russians backing the regime as usual, and the Saudis backing the jihadists to the USA’s chagrin.
Syrian society (and many other societies in the region) seem split by three mutually incompatible divisions (authoritarian semi-secular pseudo-fascism vs “democrats”/liberals vs tradcons/jihadists)
Western society is much more bipolar, so it should naturally cohere into two large factions as already exist. However, if foreign actors stir the pot then that may break down.
Since Russia and to a much more cautious and limited extent, China, have supported the Western far-right, outside powers will likely influence more fracturing on the left. The right will be encouraged to cohere, and will come behind some general figure. I expect the American Civil War 2 to look more like the Spanish Civil War than either the first Civil War or the Syrian War/balkans conflicts. With the exception that this is happening in the seat of world power and will represent something more final and apocalyptic than the stabilizing effect of Franco rule.
I expect the right to win because they’ve been preparing for actual physical war for longer, and have the military for their main institutions instead of cultural institutions like Universities and Hollywood, and have foreign backers interested in their unity and oppositional to left unity. Even looking on twitter, leftists are still arguing about their divisions, whereas rightists are pushing fusionist memes like “National Libertarians”. Obviously that’s a fringe few, but it’s the fringe few, and subcultural celebrities that eventually rise up to become world changing figures. Those outside of the establishment destroy it. The war would be like the Spanish Civil War, but the resulting regime would be more racialist and Nazi like (if economically faux-libertarian) than the “National Catholicism” outcome in Spain.
I expect the right to win this conflict and form a dictatorship (possibly led by a general, I can’t see Trump being the guy) that institutes protectionist policies, impoverishing itself, while cutting taxes and social programs to keep its big business backers happy, creating a double whammy of high prices and no safety net, leading to greater poverty and various post-war revolts, eventually creating a slight move towards the National Socialist side of the natlib/natsoc fusion.
The REAL Nazis who will be by this point part of the regime inner circle will attempt to resolve this tension with their allies by selling their social darwinist and racialist policies as a way to lower costs, thereby making their classical conservative/natlib ideological allies, and economic business class allies happy. This will lead to ethnic cleasing policies to lower food stamp rolls, and also to eugenics policies being instituted. The other thing that will happen is that foreign war will continue to be a balm for domestic trouble, only on a far greater, truly imperialistic scale, with “freedom and democracy” being replaced with a new crusade to crush Islamic countries utterly.
The USA, Russia, (and quite possibly Britain) will become the main opponents of a beleaguered Europe, with China acting in more of opportunist and temporal manner towards the rival blocks. Gradually, liberalism will be pushed off the world stage as the European Union is defeated, perhaps only to re-appear as part of a new Berlin Wall moment many decades of imperial decline later.
Or at least that’s how this crystal ball I bought in the junk store tells it!
@Forward Synthesis
As a counterpoint to that, let me point you to David Hines’s review of Bryan Burrough’s Days of Rage, and his more recent essay at Jacobite: “Political Violence is a Game the Right Can’t Win“. To sum them up, organization is key, and since at least the 70’s the Left has held the advantage there. From the start of the second link:
And later:
If you haven’t read at least the latter essay, please do so.
While that might be true at the “rank and file” level, I’d dispute that at the level of the officer ranks. And you underestimate the power of “cultural institutions like Universities and Hollywood”.
Really? Who?
As for the rest of your crystal-ball-gazing, I’ll have to disagree; it’s far too unrealisticly optimistic about the Right’s chances.
@Forward Synthesis
Western society is much more bipolar, so it should naturally cohere into two large factions as already exist.
I doubt that is bipolar enough for that, given internet and filter bubbles and the general value shift of the last half dozen decades, but lack data to back that up.
As an aside:
Or at least that’s how this crystal ball I bought in the junk store tells it!
Please, write a dystopic novel or a treatment for an HBO series, (maybe in the Occupied style). Or Blog posts. Srsly.
As others have noted. I think the most likely scenario is some mix of Ireland during the troubles and the “Brazilification” of the US (though I would have picked Columbia or Mexico as better examples) where the federales don’t venture too far from the cities if they can help it, and signifigant portions of the interior fall under de facto control of local authorities, religious groups, or warlords as a result.
Brian Wood explores this scenario in DMZ and while I found parts of the comic overwrought, I feel that the core premise is sound and setting fascinating. Sadly the story goes a bit off the rails in later volumes, a victim of continuous sequel escalation.
Wasn’t that also to some extent the general set-up in Snow Crash?
Snow Crash had tiny territories that were franchises of business companies, the mafia, or nations. They were mostly not in wars against each other.
They were in perpetual war against the Raft-Warriors, Asherah, and general socio-entropic decay.
Snow Crash was more of an anarcho-capitalist thing – private corporations providing law enforcement, jails, and so on, and providers of violence transforming into legitimate businesses, such as the Mafia pizza delivery service. The US government is pretty much a non-entity in the story.
You could argue that the line between “regions falling under de facto control of local authorities or warlords” and “anarcho-capitalism” is pretty slim, but Snow Crash’s system is several degrees weirder than a state undergoing civil war.
Well… it doesn’t have much control over much territory. As I recall, what’s left of it does manage to hold its own in terms of story relevance, and I won’t say more in order to avoid providing spoilers.
@Beleester
I have indeed argued that. There’s this quote I’ve seen in various places, with various attributions, about how anarchy is the least stable form of society because it collapses into government at the slightest disturbance. This is why I feel favorably toward AnCap, despite considering it unworkable; because when an attempt to put it into practice “collapses into government”, the likely result would be best described as feudal.
It’s been a few years since I read it, but wasn’t there a bit early on where Hiro takes a detour to avoid sniper fire between the McDonalds and the Pizza Hut or something like that?
Unlikely. We’re pretty familiar with feudalism because of its role in th European Middle Ages, but it’s not a common form of organization from a broader perspective; the only places that have come up with anything much like it are Europe, Japan, and arguably Ethiopia. The exact criteria that give you it are controversial, but likely to include weak central authority, a particular type of honor culture, and a state of military technology that gives big force multipliers to people with the resources of e.g. knights or samurai, without requiring national-level infrastructure for arms production.
We aren’t likely to get any of that except maybe the weak central authority.
My impression is that anarchocapitalism mostly looks like feudalism before it collapses (i.e. before it runs out of the pixie dust that makes
serfstenants and laborers obey property owners without the latter having access to overwhelming force), rather than after.I think it’d have to start by getting back to a ’70s level of political violence first; shootings, bombings, assassinations as part of the normal backdrop of life. That’s an environment where it could start to make sense for non-fringe people to organize themselves for mutual defense, leading to pre-emptive (or “pre-emptive”) attacks, etc.
The good news is that the ’70s level of political violence took place in an atmosphere of much higher lead exposure. For that reason alone I’d put money down against things getting to that level anytime soon.
We went from punching “Nazis” to shooting Congressmen in a matter of months. Growth mindset.
Steve Scalise is hardly the first Congressman to be shot. There’s not much of a trend line there.
Evolution of gameplay.
Humans learn what is successful.
Its what we do.
Humans are also very beeg on reciprocity.
Sure, and fortunately, shooting Congressmen resulted in death by cop and no appreciable political gain.
Question, if any of the assassinations had succeeded, does that trigger a special election or a gubernatorial appointment?
The replacement of Representatives must be by special election. (Article I, Section II, Clause 4)
For Senators, a state can choose to allow for temporary appointments until a special election can be held (17th Amendment, clause II).
What would worry me most if things turned to open conflict between urban and rural groups is that cities are dense enough to allow for easy but significant attacks in a way that the countryside isn’t.
One thing I’ve noticed over the last year working in remote country areas, is that country folk absolutely love drones. They seem to be filling a similar toy niche to quads, sleds, etc, and I see them all the time when I’m in the field. At one point I made friends with a farmer whose property I was stationed near, who was bored one day and we used one of his (several) drones to herd sheep.
Combine ubiquitous unmanned air delivery with enough of an explosive or chemical payload to disrupt a street or two in the downtown core, and you’ve got a method of attack that’s cheap, allows the attacker to stay at a safe distance, is relatively low effort, and hard to counter symmetrically. I think modern technology would make a repeat of the Troubles a lot worse this time around for urban and suburbanites.
I hear similar arguments in my circles vis-a-vis Los Angeles and SoCal in general (often with reference to “CalExit” proposals), in regards to their dependence upon water from, and moving through, more “Red-state” areas, and the possibility of a “shut-off” or sabotage. Food is another such item discussed. Add in the spectacular power-grid vulnerabilities, NYC’s bridges and tunnels, etc. Plenty of folks here on the “rural” side of the divide seem to have put a good deal of thought (and some research) into exactly those sorts of “unequal vulnerabilities”.
This is a likely sub-scenario. Consequence of seriously damaging the functioning of a city would be that the US loses most of the city-concentrated economic, scientific, entrepreneurial, social, cultural activity fast. More breakdown of overarching structures. Balkanization (I should make this a text module, on F7 maybe?).
Rural insurgencies are really common, especially in postcolonial contexts; the usual pattern is that you’ve got an more Westernized, more urbanized elite that’s got all the formal power, and then you’ve got a more rural, less Westernized population, often of a different ethnicity or tribal group, that isn’t happy about any of that. Common exacerbating factors include Communism, religious differences, resource politics, and mismatches between populations and political divisions that came about because the United Nations mandate or whatever wanted to get its evenly-spaced rectangular grids in.
The first example that comes to mind is the Tuareg insurgencies in and around Algeria, but there have been many more.
Didn’t ISIS start out as a “rural insurgency”?
ISIS is complicated. They developed in the late Iraq War out of a mixture of Sunni militias (“rural insurgency”, to a first approximation), Al-Qaeda affiliates (who have a lot of rural support, but have too many international aspirations to really fit the pattern), and ex-Ba’athists (who were the urbanized elite if anything, but an urbanized elite that had developed after one round of postcolonial chaos, and had lots of ties to rural Sunnis). Then their actual ideology came into its own and now they’re their own weird thing.
They remind me of the Taiping Rebellion in 19th-century China, or maybe the White Lotus Rebellion fifty years earlier (both millennarian sects with political ambitions systematically taking apart a clunky and overextended nation-state), but either one would be a pretty loose analogy.
Can you provide a summary of the video?
Transcript
“They use their media to assassinate real news. They use their schools to teach children that their president is another Hitler. They use their movie stars and singers and award shows to repeat their narrative over and over again. And then they use their ex-president to endorse the resistance. All to make them march, make them protest, make them scream racism and sexism and xenophobia and homophobia and smash windows, burn cars, shut down interstates and airports, bully and terrorize the law abiding — until the only option left is for police to do their jobs and stop the madness.
And when that happens, they’ll use it as an excuse for their outrage. The only way we stop this, the only way we save our country and our freedom is to fight this violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth. I’m the National Rifle Association of America and I’m freedom’s safest place.”
The video has 2.8 million Facebook views.
I like how ‘they’ doesn’t even need a predicate. It is just assumed that the audience will know who she means.
Is there a name for the opposite of gaslighting where someone deliberately reinforces another’s delusions?
Social media?
They is usefully vague. If the speaker had to actually say who “they” are, the story would start getting messier and eventually would come apart. (Or it would become some big structural/sociological explanation in which nobody was exactly to blame, but those are emotionally unsatisfying.)
Unrelated aside: I highly recommend to anyone Jon Ronson’s book Them, about his experience conversing with conspiracy theorists who believe that “they” are controlling the world and forming a new world order and whatnot. Particularly the audiobook which he recorded, since Ronson has a soft smooth voice that’s a pleasure to listen to.
@MrApophenia
You win one internet
They are the “cultural elite” named by Dan Quayle.
Them is great. A lot of it is hilarious – the Alex Jones/Bohemian Grove stuff is comedy gold. Also David Icke trying desperately to convince people the shape shifting lizard people aren’t code for jews, he really is just crazy.
But it also has some legitimately fascinating stuff. Particularly the section about Ruby Ridge.
1. Don’t blame the NRA for coming out and saying what everybody is already thinking [privately] anyways. Even The New Yorker when chronicling what the blue tribe rich were worried about – outside an asteroid strike or nuclear war type catastrophe – and building contingency plans for, was basically BLM or OWS gaining more traction. You’ll note the ascendancy of Gilead isn’t a thing people actually pay money to protect themselves against. Without the Identitarian Left and EatTheRich Left, there doesn’t seem to be a plausible reason for Americans to fight each other. If there were, I think it would resemble WWI with opposing sides coming out during a cease fire to drink together and play soccer.
2. The big question in any civil conflict in the U.S. is: is it still the richest country, the reserve currency, and the safest place for foreigners to park long term capital? If no Chinese students, no Saudi Private Equity, etc, no cheap credit available to Federal Gov’t, I wonder how economically appealing moving to these cities and university towns would be? Seems like it would look like Wall St. in Sept 2008, and the cities would see huge net outflows.
I don’t much care about the NRA one way or the other, but damn, that’s ballsy. It also feels like it’s worth mentioning that the NRA is the only right wing political movement in recent decades to achieve a meaningful degree of success. It will be interesting to see if this sort of thing spreads.
Re. the recent CNN sting operation (guy catches CNN execs on camera saying the Trump-Russia connection is mostly BS for ratings), a bigger question I’ve been thinking about recently:
As a free market fundamentalist libertarian, I’m usually unimpressed by arguments taking the form “leaving x to the private sector produces terrible results, so government has to do it,” because there are often very good reasons the private sector could handle the objections.
One I have more trouble with is news media: there seems to be an obvious market incentive to provide people with fear-mongering, sensationalist, partisan news about trivial matters and which flatters the ego of the target audience rather than nuanced, careful, challenging, measured consideration of issues that matter.
Presumably in a real free market there would be more sources of news, and we see that, to some extent, happening with the internet. Yet it seems the kind of news almost everyone can agree would be good to have more of seems likely to be chronically underfunded on a free market. Ditto broadcasts of e.g. opera.
Is there any way to deal with this without government? Or even with government? Nationalize the networks? But then they’ll just produce news obviously biased in favor of their source of funding, that is, whichever government coalition is holding the purse strings (that is, I think letting the consumer hold his own purse strings almost always produces the best results; I’m less sure that is the case here, but also doubt government solutions could do any better).
Keep them private, but censor them. This maintains their for-profit incentives, but hopefully gets rid of 90+% of the shit-stirring. Norway is an example of a moderate-leftist country which has a state-capitalism media – they’re normal companies, but the government owns majority stock. Predictably, the media shows the moderate-leftist viewpoint on everything, and keeps out both the right and the extreme left. Not to mention material that would be destabilizing to the powers that be.
Free news media is generally a luxury. Homogeneous states can handle it without a problem. Diverse places probably can’t afford having people who make money via stirring the pot of sectarian animosity.
You could, alternatively, ban news media in general. And firewall away foreign internet while you’re at it, so only the really interested can get at it via trivial inconvenience.
This is untrue. Where did you get that idea? The Norwegian government subsidises any newspaper with X circulation, but does not own any of them, either majority or minority. You may be thinking of the state TV channel, NRK, which however is not a normal company, it is 100% state-owned and run by the Department of Culture. It is however one channel among many, though when I was growing up that wasn’t true.
As for the center-left editorial viewpoint, Norwegian newspapers are generally rather to the left of both the government and the people, but there exist far-right exceptions with tiny circulations that get the same subsidies as anyone else.
Extrapolating from the general way they do things. I stand corrected.
No more paying via advertisements; you either secure subscriptions or come away empty.
This is far from perfect, but does get rid of at least some of the bullshit. At the very least, you’ve got to go whole hog (like Fox) and then you get discredited (like Fox). You either have to get a totally devoted following which will subscribe for your subpar garbage, or you have to provide quality.
I don’t know how this would work w.r.t. incentivizing better media, but the online advertising ecosystem is basically pure evil. Finding alternatives is a win even if mainstream news sources remain crap.
Best part being we won’t have to listen to busybodies crowing about how adblockers are theft anymore
Is there any way to deal with this without government? Or even with government? Nationalize the networks? But then they’ll just produce news obviously biased in favor of their source of funding
The Germans have an interesting approach in their “öffentlich-rechtlich” media. Funded with a per-household (including workplaces) tax-oid and staffed in the upper echelons with people from the most important societal bodies (parties, churches, etc.) in proportion to their predominance. There seems to be a permanent wrestling from these groups for more influence and sometimes ugly shenanigans to put a party-puppet in top positions, but the basic reporting and the work ethos appear pretty decent. Having stations from left-ish and right-ish countries compete nationwide under identical constraints seems to enhance quality for objective reporting, but still allows to tend for local identity and local preferences.
Even more interesting is the French-German cooperation ARTE. High quality, cherished by the educated but not very popular with the masses. Here you could say they are biased in favor of their source of funding if that doesn’t mean a political party but the general more empowered class.
You are buying uncritically something James O’Keefe is selling? Why on earth?
I mean, I keep saying that the media is, job #1, trying to get consumers, so the very top level idea that you should look to the media with a jaundiced eye is something I’m sympathetic to.
NPR seems to have some kind answer for you, which is that it is possible to generate a funding strea, dedicated to the idea of nuanced, longer form coverage not dedicated to merely hyping the spetacle of the day, that is de-linked from day to day advertising numbers.
If a source tells you what you want to hear, why examine it critically? The highest rationalism is applying critical thinking selectively and thus reshaping reality to your liking.
Yeah, I rolled my eyes at that but luckily the rest of the post can stand up without it.
What are the issues with James O’Keefe? Skimming Wikipedia, the main criticism of his videos seems to be lack of context. But then, the individuals featured in several of the videos wind up getting expelled from the orgs they belonged to, so clearly the orgs didn’t think the videos were being uncharitable, or misleading.
That doesn’t necessarily follow. If the interviews are being conducted clandestinely or under false pretenses, then heads roll for violating policy or lack of proper diligence. An org doesn’t need to actually be at fault for a hit piece to land them with a bunch of bad PR. And in corporate, Someone (Disposable) Must Be Held Accountable.
And allegedly selectively / misleadingly edited.
So basically O’Keefe is attempting to replicate the Michael Moore and John Stewart path to media stardom.
Same reason we bought what 60 Minutes was selling, back in the day?
What is your critical interpretation of what O’Keefe is selling here? The videos exist, neither CNN nor the principals in the videos seem to be in a hurry to deny their authenticity, or provide additional context to neutralize what was said.
Now, O’Keefe is probably pushing the narrative way too hard, neither Van Jones nor the other guy speak for all of CNN, and Van Jones in particular has previously more publicly stated that he doubts there are any serious smoking guns in the Trump-Russia investigation.
But the videos themselves are apparently authentic, and O’Keefe is O’Keefe – then again CNN is CNN, do you really doubt they are flogging the Russia-Trump investigation for all (and more than) it’s worth? The only question is whether it’s a naked ploy for ratings, or a motivated effort to hurt the GOP (of course those are not necessarily mutually exclusive). Van Jones probably would say it’s all the former, O’Keefe the latter – but they seem to agree that CNN is pushing Trump-Russia harder than the bare facts can support?
I haven’t looked at the videos. Based on what I know of his previous work, my prior that anything he produces is as useful as a used Kleenex. “Deceptive editing” is far too kind.
then maybe you should look past your priors
yes, he is a liar. That doesn’t mean nothing he says is true. Fair enough to you for not wanting to dig deeper, but that doesn’t give you the right to talk shit to those who don’t share this outlook.
Yet it seems the kind of news almost everyone can agree would be good to have more of seems likely to be chronically underfunded on a free market.
I think it’s just one of those cases of us not really wanting what we think we want. Or, put another way, our notion of “news” itself is fundamentally flawed/ incoherent.
This. Revealed preferences matter. People SAY they want neutral, factual, rational, unbiased news. And when such a thing is offered, literally nobody watches it. Expressing a preference for “real” news is quite different from actually preferring real news. Signaling that you don’t want bias is quite valuable. But in the end, most people do, in fact, want bias.
The market is providing the exact amount and distribution of goods that people actually want, rather than what they claim they want. You sort of see this same dynamic play out with say, healthy food vs McDonalds.
If anything, the fact that most government-funded sources ARE the boring, dry sort of news people claim to want but don’t actually want suggests the opposite problem is happening. We might have too much real news. If people actually want C-SPAN, why does the state need to fund it?
While there’s definitely a lot of that going on, I think that part of it is an issue of externalities. When people say that they want more high quality news, part of what they mean is that they want other people to watch more high quality news, not necessarily that they want to watch it themselves.
I think that I am better off if other people consume more quality information than they would choose to do so on their own, so I’d be happy for (a tiny portion) of my tax dollars to go towards subsidizing quality information.
Having my tax dollars go to NPR does not fulfill your goal of “more people listen to NPR” unless people actually want to listen to NPR (or unless we have some sort of law requiring them to do so)
As I said with C-SPAN, if people actually wanted to listen to NPR, they wouldn’t need your tax dollars. Ever stop to ask yourself why Rupert Murdoch isn’t out there conducting pledge drives to ensure the continuity of FOX News?
Not literally nobody, just not very many people. High quality sources of information have a market, but they’re not really entertainment for most people.
I think the dynamic for food is a bit more complicated. For example, when I lived with my family, there was unhealthy snack food around on a regular basis, and I ate that unhealthy food. Now that I live alone, I don’t really buy that kind of food, and I don’t eat it. Based on that, I think it’s overly simplistic to say that “I want to eat unhealthy snack food”. A more complete description would be that “I don’t want unhealthy snack food to be available for me to eat, but I do want to eat it if it’s available.”
I think many people have the same preference when it comes to McDonalds. They don’t want McDonalds to be available for them to eat, but they do want to eat it if it’s available. Whether it’s reasonable to ask society to conform to that preference is a different question, but I don’t think people are lying about their preferences.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to burden the rest of society with one’s lack of individual willpower.
If you don’t want McDonalds to be available to you, then simply decide to never go to McDonalds.
The whole “I don’t like X, therefore nobody should be allowed to have X” is one of the most offensive and terrible attitudes we generally accept in society, imho.
@Matt M
The problem I see with a society run on that sort of principle (yet another of my criticisms of Libertarianism) is that, in my experience, the bulk of humanity simply don’t have the necessary level of willpower. We all pretty much are “burdened with their lack of individual willpower” if we don’t want spectacular collapse. Most people simply don’t have the self-control, future-time-orientation, rational assessment of self-interests, etc., to thrive in Libertopia (there are reasons “libertarian” attitudes are both very rare, and very skewed WEIRD, white, male, and high IQ).
@Matt M
I’m not making a value judgment on how we should organize society; I’m just objecting to your claim that people are lying about their preferences.
However, I do think that there’s a difference between “I don’t like X, therefore nobody should be allowed to have X” and “Having X causes widely recognized harm to a huge portion of the population, therefore nobody should be allowed to have X”. I still don’t agree with banning unhealthy food, but I think there’s a plausible utilitarian case for that sort of thing.
I recall a big part of Scott’s recent post on obesity being about how willpower is an easily depleted resource that can’t be counted on for withstanding long-term temptations. So criticizing people for lacking ‘individual willpower’ makes no sense, as, in this case, no one has sufficient individual willpower to withstand temptations over long periods of time. As Kevin C. points out, humanity as a whole is basically flawed in this regard. All you can do is rearrange things so people’s willpowers aren’t constantly tested (and inevitably depleted).
If you refuse to style society around human nature, then you are basically ignoring a profitable means for improvement. If you do so only out of sheer disdain, then you are foolishly damning yourself to a negative outcome. There is just no point in not taking it into account.
The common form of this is “Choice X is dangerous and destructive, and a large fraction of people offered it will end up worse off and will damage the surrounding society in taking it.” This is the argument against legalizing heroin, for example. It may be right or wrong, but I don’t think it’s crazy.
And how does this get resolved outside of libertopia
“lets vote on what foods to ban” Ok
“lets vote on how much money to give to our grandparents, but don’t forget to properly weight how much will eventually come out of your paycheck, and to structure the system properly”….. ummm, ok, sounds pretty iffy
“lets vote in person X and have them make the decisions, and hope that he has the willpower not to abuse his position” Ah crap.
@baconbacon
Remember, I’m a guy who is also opposed to “let’s vote on X”. I want propertization of authority.
@baconbacon
In a democracy people are supposed to kick out the people who do that. Of course, politicians can and do ‘hack’ people, which they are susceptible to for many reasons. However, we seem to be doing relatively well compared to most of history.
You have to keep in mind that Utopia is not on the table here. You get to pick your poison.
Do they, in significant numbers? Or is that the sort of SSC sampling bias that would lead one to expect a much larger proportion of libertarians out in meatspace?
I think they do. But as has been pointed out elsewhere, to them, their tribal propaganda piece counts as neutral and unbiased.
Red says “We need more neutral sources like FOX News and less propaganda like MSNBC”
Blue says the exact opposite.
I think libertarians are unicorns.
Scratch them and they bleed conservative.
You’re saying you think a lot of people here are liars? Perhaps you would like to put that more diplomatically.
@JulieK
How many arguments where the opposing sides can broadly be described as libertarians and conservatives have you seen here? There probably have been a couple (although I can’t think of any), but well over 90% of our political arguments are basically left vs right, where libertarians fall in the latter category.
All of the discussions about immigration?
I’m more concerned by the claims about unicorn blood. Unicorns bleed conservative?
Before that: Who would hurt a unicorn in?
They are old, white, have a thing for virginal women, and open carry…
@Iain
In most lores, unicorns only hang out with virgins, right? Sounds more church-conservative than hippie-liberal to me 😉
ETA: Damn, AnarchyDice beat me to it
@Randy M
No, we have more than one self declared libertarian that support immigration restrictions. In fact, other than David Friendman I’m hard pressed to think of anyone that has ever argued in these comments for open borders in anything approaching the here and now (as opposed to arguing for it only after the melting away of the state).
You know what I said earlier about not treating the commentariat as a thousand-headed conservative monster?
Yeah, this would be the kind of thing I was talking about.
Really? I remember there was Vox Imperatorix, but he left awhile ago. (Did I chase him off? Didn’t mean to). I thought more.
Let me try to put that belief to an empirical test.
You pretty clearly, from your comments, think I am a conservative, possibly one masquerading as a libertarian. So predict my views on the following issues:
Immigration
The War on Drugs
Abortion
Gun control
The death penalty
Gay marriage
No fair cheating by googling for my published writings.
@Gobbo Yeah, mythologies and monsters are my thing. Although I can now imagine the buzzfeed quiz “what mythological creature are you based on your politics”…
Like what David said, the types of issues that are discussed here are, by selection effects, the ones where conservatives and libertarians agree more often. Start offering up arguments for the drug war, led prayer in schools, flag-burning laws, or farm subsidies and you might think “scratch a libertarian and find a liberal”.
Even the cases where conservatives and libertarians agree, it is often coming from different values and reasoning, meaning that if you model, say, David Friedman as a conservative, your predictions of what he might support elsewhere will tend to be wrong or “not-even-wrong”.
Only to the extent that, e.g., the Democratic Party and all of its candidates support immigration restrictions, that all of the various judges who voted to strike down Trump’s “travel ban” nonetheless support immigration restrictions.
Outside of literal anarchists(*), pretty much everybody on the American political spectrum supports immigration restrictions. Unless you can pin down which immigration restrictions they support, that’s not terribly useful for placing people on the Liberal Conservative political axis.
* Of whom we have several on the libertarian side, not just David Friedman. But also not all of the libertarians.
@Iain
Sorry.
Libertarian unicorns bleed conservative.
@DavidFriedman
I mistakenly thought you were a christian triumphalist and die-hard western civ fan-boy and I apologized. I’m not claiming that I know anything about you at this point…except that you are seemingly obsessed with the artificial society “toy problem” of the iPD as a model for the Complex Adaptive System dynamics of US polarization.
@Randy M
I seem to recall that VI and I didn’t overlap for all that much time.
@AnarchyDice
What selection effects are you thinking of? I agree with your description of the dynamic, but I’m unsure of why it’s the dynamic.
@Brad
Pretty sure I’ve stated my support for open borders here before, but even if I haven’t you can count me as an additional libertarian open border advocate.
My impression is that out of the libertarian and libertarian-leaning right-wing commenters listed in the link here, the majority hold views on immigration closer to the conservative average than the liberal one. Although David Friedman mentions his support for open borders relatively frequently, I don’t recall any libertarian-conservative arguments about it. My memory of arguments about the Muslim ban is that they were largely liberal vs conservative/libertarian.
@IrishDude, what’s your reasoning for supporting open borders?
I’m curious because I don’t have a strong opinion on it one way or another.
I’m somewhat libertarian and I more or less support open borders. Of course, I already have mostly open borders, so I guess it’d count as a conservative view for me.
@Brad If I’m guessing (rampant speculation), I’d chalk it up to the blue-greyness of Dr. Alexander attracting people in that neighborhood, the norms of politeness/conscientiousness being a fence to the “taxation is theft, you statist!” red-grey idiots and edgelords that would shitpost on a blue-grey site to troll(which thankfully generally keeps out the “checkmate atheist”, “property is theft”, and other related internet idiots too), and some combination of the near-far group dynamics. Libertarians on a blue-ish site will tend to disagree more over the near disagreements over blue-related issues, rather than the far group red related issues that few here are vocally advocating. I mean, even the Catholics here promote religion more as an intellectual endeavor than to proselytize.
@schazjmd
I don’t believe in political authority, so I consider it improper coercion to prevent individuals from living and working with people that willingly provide them housing or jobs. Also, I think open borders would greatly improve the standard of living for most people, especially for the globally least well-off (as people moving from 3rd world nations to 1st world nations become an order of magnitude more productive). I think it unjust to prevent poor people from improving their lives if other people are willing to assist them.
So I support open borders for political, economic, and moral reasons.
Reminds me of those political compass memes that’ve been floating around on RatTumblr.
BBC’s government-funded and generally considered high-quality news. Don’t know enough about either UK politics or BBC to know if they have a serious pro-government bias.
BBC was my first thought, too, as the obvious first thing to do is to see if anybody is getting better results and try to figure out what they’re doing right. American public broadcasting, while not nearly as well funded as British, also doesn’t have the worst reputation, and in particular one thing it isn’t commonly accused of is massive pro-government bias. So there seems to be some evidence that it’s possible to build in protections against government funding just turning something into a propaganda service.
In both cases it’s not a pro-government bias, no, but it’s a pro-the-sort-of-left-wing-luvvies-who-control-intellectual-culture bias. I’m not sure that’s better.
So then the best thing would be to keep the government right-wing. The media will hold them accountable, they’ll enjoy doing it, and they’ll get great ratings doing so.
Everyone, or just everyone here?
I would wager that approximately 50% of “everyone” want there to be less market-based news media, in that someone should shut down Fox and Breitbart and Right-Wing Talk Radio so that the deplorables will have to turn to responsible media outlets like CNN, NPR, and the New York Times and thus be properly instructed in the Truth. The other approximately 50% of everyone wants the same thing except that it is CNN, NPR, and the New York Times that they’d like to see go away.
Pardon…the SSC commentariat accepts James O’Keefe style stings as empirical data?
We are so doomed…
There is no SSC commentariat hive mind.
We are the Borg. You will be assimilated. Your blue tribe will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.
Or. as they’re known to those of us with longer memories, 60 Minutes-style stings.
Same sh-t, different a–hole. O’Keefe is about as reliable a source of information as the Weekly World News.
@albatross11
Nobody disagrees that the interviews are real, right? I mean, no one argues that O”Keefe hires voice actors to overdub different words, or an actual actor to pose as a CNN reporter.
As I understand it, the main criticisms of O’Keefe are that (1) he allegedly omits context that his critics think he should include, and (2) he often lies to get access to the people he interviews.
Are those it, or do you have other concerns?
Disclaimer: I haven’t seen the vid in question, so this is secondhand.
It has a shitton of cuts, from what I’ve heard. It’s not so much omitting context as destroying it and repackaging the soundbites to create a new implied context engineered to convey what you want it to demonstrate.
Previous O’Keefe videos have been heavily and misleadingly edited. I expect this one is, too. My impression is that this was also typically true of 60 minutes ambush interviews.
Yes. In 1979, 60 Minutes set out to do a hatchet job on a nuclear power plant in Illinois, but didn’t think to object when Illinois Power Company made as a condition of access that they could run their own cameras side-by-side with the alleged journalists. When the 60 minutes segment aired, IPC released their own version. This was literally a textbook case in deceptive journalistic practices for several decades, though it seems to have faded from view in recent years.
@John – didn’t right wingers start doing a similar thing (demanding their own recordings) to The Daily Show or similar at the GOP convention?
Did that end up hurting 60 minutes, or were they able to ride out any trouble by having the bigger microphone?
I believe their reputation took an enduring but not terribly severe hit, mostly among political conservatives. 60 Minutes came on the air at a time when the perception of mainstream journalistic integrity was at its highest, and became one of the first mainstream outlets to effectively give viewers permission to say, “I don’t have to believe this or to justify not believing this except to say that these guys are partisan hacks”. But most people, even most Republicans, didn’t yet want to do that, and 60 Minutes maintained strong ratings for decades thereafter.
Bintchaos, do you deny that they’re empirical, that they’re data, or both, and why?
I think that you and I might understand at least one of those words differently, and would be interested to know which – thanks!
Y’all think I’m a “leftist”.
I’m Science Tribe all the way down.
A-priori data is that O’Keefe is a scam artist.
quant. suff.
I didn’t understand the poem so I ran it through a universal translator and this is what I got
“I’m science tribe so I don’t acknowledge my fault in culture wars
A-priori means I round up and don’t investigate
so I can ignore that my truth has error bars”
@baconbacon
Bad translation.
The culture wars are natural and antifragile because of How Nature Works.
@Bintchaos – Thanks for the response, but I don’t think you have answered my question.
I’m not judging – I’m just actually curious what you understand “empirical” and “data” to mean in the context of your post. Thanks!
As opposed to the rest of us who just hate science and think all knowledge should be based on feelings.
Your Markov generator is slipping; it’s only working to zeroth order now. You still have the buzzwords but now they aren’t being combined meaningfully. Neither “Science Tribe” (except as a sneer at the “I Fucking Love Science” types) nor “A-priori data” makes sense.
Leftist isn’t a tribe and there is certainly no Science Tribe. (Re-)Read “I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup” to get a better understanding of how ‘tribe’ is being used.
@ baconbacon
Less of this sort of thing please.
@J Mann
Let A and B_j be sets. Conditional probability requires that
P(A intersection B_j)=P(A)P(B_j|A),
(1)
where intersection denotes intersection (“and”), and also that
P(A intersection B_j)=P(B_j intersection A)=P(B_j)P(A|B_j).
(2)
Therefore,
P(B_j|A)=(P(B_j)P(A|B_j))/(P(A)).
(3)
Now, let
S= union _(i=1)^NA_i,
(4)
so A_i is an event in S and A_i intersection A_j=emptyset for i!=j, then
A=A intersection S=A intersection ( union _(i=1)^NA_i)= union _(i=1)^N(A intersection A_i)
(5)
P(A)=P( union _(i=1)^N(A intersection A_i))=sum_(i=1)^NP(A intersection A_i).
(6)
But this can be written
P(A)=sum_(i=1)^NP(A_i)P(A|A_i),
(7)
so
P(A_i|A)=(P(A_i)P(A|A_i))/(sum_(j=1)^NP(A_j)P(A|A_j))
(8)
(Papoulis 1984, pp. 38-39).
Buzzwords and assertions without nuance. Yep, definitely science tribe.
@bintchaos
How does that in any way answer J Mann’s question?
You can’t just throw naked references at a wall and expect it to constitute knowledge, unless I suppose if your brand of Chaos is Tzeentchian.
My brand of chaos is Gleikian (James Gleick).
I guess that means mathematical chaos.
Here is a text book.
I paid ~120$ for it I think…because that is how much textbooks cost unless you want to just rent them.
Then why don’t you care about whether things you say are true? I keep pointing to your claim some time back that a graphic you linked to showed the Republican median moving right from 1994. Those of us who looked at the graphic noticed that it was moving left for the first ten years of that period, then right. We pointed it out. You never either offered some argument that we were wrong or admitted you were mistaken–just kept repeating the conclusion (polarization increasing from the mid-nineties) without ever conceding that the evidence you had offered in its support was inconsistent with it.
If you don’t already know that what you claimed was false and can’t find the graphic to check, here is another one from Pew, presumably from the same data, showing the situation in 1994, 2004, and 2014.
The same pattern shows in your references to game theory. You use the jargon at the level someone who had taken an undergraduate social science course by someone who used the jargon might use it, but you show no evidence of understanding the subject at the level that someone who had taken a good math course on game theory would–for instance, you repeatedly confuse games with strategies.
I’m science tribe. You pretend, probably to yourself as well as others, to be.
Also, you are fond of “a priori” but don’t seem to know what it means. That O’Keefe is a scam artist is a conclusion from past evidence, not a priori knowledge. I think you are confusing a priori with prior probability in Bayesian statistics.
The Pew gif is subject to subjective interpretation. My opinion is also informed by other data I have assimilated on asymmetrical polarization.
Is that your professional opinion as a teacher?
Are you saying that Axelrod’s tournament WASN’T based on the concept of artificial societies?
This is one of the textbooks used for my class– what books do you use?
We also used JMS Evolution and the Theory of Games. Would you like me to demonstrate that I can do the math in the appendices?
If I may, can I suggest that my course work is much more focused on theoretical population genetics, sociobiology/evolutionary biology, and Complex Adaptive Systems Dynamics than on economics.
No, both of you are wrong. It is I, in fact, who’s Science Tribe… whatever that’s supposed to mean.
I am Spartatribe!
Also, @bintchaos, this Coursework Defense is exactly the sort of sophomoric stunt that David Friedman’s talking about.
What is up with all of the references to Daily Show? It’s always been clear those interviews were edited to within an inch of their lives for comedic purposes. If anyone is mistaking those as journalistic endeavors that’s more on them.
@Aapje
@HBC
@J Mann
It was pretty disengenuous of the original commenter to not mention O’Keefe’s name wasnt it? He mentioned CNN.
I think it was deliberate because, O’Keefe is actually a criminal.
@Gobboble
so I’m not allowed to “punch back” ?
How do I defend myself against the constant ad hom attacks here?
Was it?
Aside from not knowing if onyomi is familiar with the name he doesn’t even want to discuss the video. He wants to discuss solutions to the failure of media that dissolves into fearmongering. He could easily have discussed this with a different introduction.
Do you have a specific objection, or is it just “James O’Keefe icky”? What is your proposal on how he falsified the video, or placed it in a false light?
Not OP, but given O’Keefe’s history, it seems best to give him a similar level of credibility as Michael Moore, for similar reasons.
I don’t yet know what context is omitted from this one, other than that the producer shown isn’t involved with any Russia coverage.
I’d give O’Keefe a similar level of credibility as Daily Show interviews (in that they both are credibly accused of selective editing), but put Michael Moore at a different level. Moore creates both misleading footage and misleading narrative, IMHO.
A-priori data.
dude, you guys Do. Not. Get. Me.
Polarization is healthy and natural.
Racism is antifragile.
Rachets work.
This is a non-argument and you should stop saying that all the time.
Or maybe find some other place to post where they. do. get. you.
@bintchaos
This is basically how every conversation goes with you:
Bintchaos: (Insert buzzword), therefore I’m right.
Anyone else: You can’t just say (buzzword), you have to explain what it means.
Bintchaos: God, I said Buzzword. Why do you guys not get this?
Do you not get that you have to explain how your words fit in to the discussion rather than being conversation stoppers? We’re not going to bow to your mighty intellect just because you said a word.
I just devoted significant expense of energy to explain the CCP.
What else would you like me to explain?
I’m taking requests.
@J Mann:
If anything, this is even more true of O’Keefe.
@bintchaos
You could start by explaining how O’Keefe, a priori data, and your model are connected in any way.
@Heelbearcub: Reasonable point – I’ll check it out.
@HBC
that is a thing I do not understand about SSC… It it never about about if this is a wrong thing to do or a right thing to do…its always about the other guy did it first.
Like, sure, O’Keefe BUT 60 minutes and Micheal Moore.
Isnt that a playground argument?
@Bintchaos – I read the recent discussion as answering the question “how much confidence should we put in a James O’Keefe tape?”
In that context, “about as much as 60 Minutes / a Michael Moore interview / a Daily Show interview” is informative.
You could also use the same process for “how much of a scumbag is James O’Keefe – “about as much as Michael Moore” would be a level set, but I don’t think anyone has said he’s morally equivalent, just that he’s about as reliable/unreliable as those comparison points.
@bintchaos
People did not argue what you think they argued.
This kind of false reading seems very common with you. Combined with the issues with your debating style that Wrong Species explained, the debates between you and others appear to me to be extremely unproductive.
@Aapje
I guess the problem is that I’m not debating. I dont think I can change anyone’s mind. I just get shocked at the things people here say sometimes, like Dr. Cochran and his “Jews are allergic to IQ studies” comment. I guess people can say anything they want but how is that being a rationalist?
James O’Keefe is famous for his contrived “gotcha videos” and has been arrested and charged for attempting a sting operation to illegally wiretap a congress person’s office and place listening devices. His Acorn video was heavily edited and featured actors and costuming. The judge in the case dismissed it as a product of extreme bias.
I’m just still trying to adjust to the concept of a “rationalist” community that apparently has a unitary focus on “punching back” against “SJWs” and “leftists”.
@J Mann @DavidFriedman
Is the fact that O’Keefe is an actual criminal a-priori data?
Fixed that for ya.
@bintchaos – I think it’s empirical data, not a-priori data. We could have gotten to this point earlier if you had addressed my questions.
Yes of course.
Its all my fault.
Got it.
I guess I must have imagined the torrent of false equivalencies between OKeefe and Michael Moore/ Jon Stewart/ 60 minutes, and the sensation that I was, once more, under attack.
I’m sure that was onyomi’s secret point about fearmongering in media too.
Here is my take-away.
Red Tribers are willing to tolerate extreme behavior in their standard bearers as long its perceived as punching back at the Blue Tribe. Like Trump’s incessant lying and Milo’s “soft pedophilia”.
@bintchaos: I brought up Moore originally and I’m liberal. I did it to provide an example that conservatives would universally agree is agenda-driven and spin-heavy. (I admit this about Moore even though I agree with him on lots of things). I couldn’t give an example of a conservative documentarian who’s similarly agenda-driven and spin-heavy for two reasons:
1) I don’t actually know of any except O’Keefe
2) If I did, some fraction of conservatives might think the person is actually fair and balanced, and take my point as “O’Keefe is impartial, like X” which was the opposite of my point.
TDS interviews are a little different; rather than spun for political reasons it’s usually spun to make the subject look silly (not that there’s not politics in who they select to pick on). They also don’t have to spin nearly as hard because they get to pick subjects that are silly to begin with.
It makes me feel bad to write this, because I find myself agreeing with it and don’t want to.
Here’s a possible free market response to onyomi’s concern:
If people prefer scare mongering partisan news to sober analysis, who are we to judge? Should we really deny them the ability to select their own information filters just because we think we’re smarter then them? There’s a lot of reason to believe that people don’t use their understanding of world events much in their daily life anyway, including in their voting decisions, so if they get a lot of enjoyment from believing that Republicans are assholes who enjoy killing the poor and who are bought and paid for by the Kochs, who are we to decide they shouldn’t consume crappy information, any more that we feel comfortable telling them they shouldn’t consume crappy food?
There are two sides to this:
a. I want high-quality sources of information for myself.
b. I would like a higher-quality information environment in general, so that voters had more of a clue what was going on in the world.
As fa as (a) goes: My sense is that I have better sources of information on most things I care about today than I did 20 years ago. Blogs, podcasts, raw data, papers, lectures–all are routinely available online for free, and include some really high-quality information. I have pretty-much opted out of MSM coverage of science these days, because it’s generally pretty low-quality, and because I can find and use much better sources of information. There is some information that’s just not being collected anymore, though–local newspapers have been dying off for decades now, leaving nobody whose job it is to, say, keep track of what the county council is up to.
As far as (b) goes: I’m not entirely clear on whether the new media environment is actually making people more wrong than they used to be about questions of fact. (Is there good data on this somewhere? Pew has survey data about how much current affairs stuff people know; maybe that’s a place to start.) What I think *is* pretty clear is that there used to be more of a shared worldview enforced by the big three networks and the major newspapers and such. That worldview was often 100% dead wrong[1], but it was a shared view of the world, which made it possible for most people to discuss politics from a shared based of assumed facts. Losing that shared set of beliefs probably makes politics a lot uglier.
[1] Who lost China? The missile gap! Gulf of Tonklin! Iraqis dumping Kuwaiti babies out of incubators! Iraqi WMDs!
Yeah, as much as everyone wants to pretend that [banned term] is some new problem that just started last year, I definitely recall being taught in high school US history that “yellow journalism” falsely led us straight into the Spanish-American war. So yeah…
Another point. The consumers of the media are also consumers in the rest of the economy, and often also a political force (in countries with Western-style elections). There is obvious incentive to run a news media as an elaborate form of advertising [1] for one’s economical / political benefit. Especially if the news are not profitable business.
[1] the old word is “propaganda”.
It is difficult to disentangle what parts of the modern media market would have evolved under a free market system and what are artifacts of legal monopolies (or cartels) that were created and supported through legislation.
The other note is that most of the BS news that is out there relates to politics, and much of it would fade either in volume or importance if the government’s power were greatly reduced.
It would also fade if the government were more openly independent of what the masses think.
I would argue that good journalism is a public good, in the formal sense. The case for being non-rivalrous is pretty clear — the marginal cost of allowing one more person to read a well-researched news story is irrelevant next to the cost of producing that story. The case for non-exclusivity is a bit more subtle, but I think still compelling. It is obviously possible to put up a paywall and prevent any given person from consuming your journalism. However:
a) it is quite difficult to prevent the content of that journalism from leaking. You might have to pay to access the latest long-form article at ReliableNewsMedia.com directly, but if you just want to know what it says, there will be innumerable alternative sources who are discussing and summarizing it.
b) The value of good journalism is not solely in being personally informed. There is also value in a generally more informed society. To the extent that the news media is a necessary part of, say, holding politicians to account, the fact that people out there are able to better hold politicians to account benefits me, even if I do not personally consume any of the same journalism.
That pushes towards some form of publicly funded news media. Unfortunately, there are all sorts of obvious problems with giving politicians control of the purse strings for their own watchdogs. You plausibly want multiple news organizations, and you want them at arm’s length from the people on whom they will be reporting. I don’t know what the best answer is, but I suspect that it is easier to solve the problem of keeping media and government separate than it is to construct free-market incentives that push news media away from “fear-mongering, sensationalist, partisan news about trivial matters”.
Exclusivity comes down to value to the consumer. If consumers only care about a summery of the facts then you are saying that the majority of the production cost was wasted. If you admit that there are some who want the full story, and some who want some portion of the story then you have eliminated the case for non-exclusivity. Those who want the full story will be willing to pay some amount to access it, those who are happy with a portion are consuming a different product and so non-exclusivity fails.
This would be true if the relevant cost for the consumer was the price of the article, the relevant margin for most consumers is the combination of opportunity cost of not following another news source and the value of getting timely news. If all the value came from simply reading an article then there never would have been a golden age of print, most people would have been free riders picking up old newspapers and reading the articles or listening to second hand recounts from friends/neighbors/coworkers. The fact that private news organizations have ever existed is a strong argument against your position.
This does not follow. Compare: the original proof for the four-colour theorem was hundreds of pages long. It was certainly necessary for some number of people to actually read through the proof and verify it. Now, however, you can easily get away with just reading the abstract and trusting the descriptions of others. That doesn’t mean that the proof itself was wasted effort. Similarly, you can get most of the knowledge in a fraction of the time by reading a summary of a Supreme Court decision, instead of reading the whole thing yourself.
In general, there are many situations where it is reasonable to care that details have been provided and evaluated, without requiring direct personal access to those details.
You appear to be confused. I’m talking about the marginal cost to the media of allowing one extra customer to consume the news. Take broadcast television, for example: once I am broadcasting the six o’clock news over the local airwaves, additional viewers have zero marginal cost. (Indeed, broadcast television is the go-to example in the Wikipedia article on rivalry.)
If an approximation of the proof is good enough for everyone, then yes the pages of the proof were wasted. This isn’t the case for proofs, or for news stories.
You are only presenting half the equation. The marginal cost of production has to coincide with the marginal cost of consumption. If news paper prints a story it cannot control how many people read one copy of the paper, so it appears as if a newspaper is non rivalrous. However there is an unstated assumption here that being the first person to read the paper provides exactly the same value as it does to the 2nd -> nth persons. This is part of the definition of a rivalrous good, and it cannot be established without considering both curves.
From the Wikipedia article
To come up with this definition (or the interpretation of the definition) you have to have homogeneous preferences for your consumers. Take the bolded portion, and think about news. If someone produces a news story about the dangers of backyard swimming pools to small children this will be of different value to groups based on how many children (and nieces and nephews, and friends with children), how old those children are, how prevalent swimming pools are in their immediate area and if they have heard the information before from another source. The story is now inherently rivalrous (to a degree), attempts to grab the attention of people with small children will come at the cost of producing a show that would be watched by people without small children.
To qualify as a public good people must choose to consume them that their marginal cost of consumption, which is not identical to the marginal cost of production.
You are not reading what I am writing.
An approximation of the proof is not “good enough for everyone”. The fact that the entire proof is written out in full detail is critical. If you do not include all the detail, it is not a proof — it’s just oddly notated handwaving. You need all the details to make the proof. In the same way, good journalism will involve many details about the situation being reported, including information about the provenance of those details and why the journalism should be trusted.
Given a sufficient number of trustworthy eyeballs on the proof, it is rational for an individual to make an 80/20 tradeoff, and get most of the valuable information — in our running example, the knowledge that the four-colour theorem is true — with significantly less effort. This is only possible because those details exist, and other people you trust have checked them for you. This is basic division of labour.
The rest of your post appears to be disagreeing with economics in general, and not me in particular. The key phrase from the wiki article that you seem to be missing is: “Non-rivalry does not imply that the total production costs are low, but that the marginal production costs are zero.” Yes, it costs money and time to produce a segment on drowning children. It similarly costs money and time to “produce” national defense and clean air. That’s irrelevant to rivalry. A good is non-rivalrous if, once you are producing it, it does not cost you anything to extend the use of that good to others.
I’m with Iain on this one.
While most people are content to read a summary, that doesn’t mean that they’d be just as content if the summary was the only thing that existed. They still need to be reasonably confident the longer and more thorough proof does exist and was read by the person offering the summary.
You can’t write a book review of a book that doesn’t exist. Or, if you tried, nobody would derive any particular value from reading it.
Hmm. Pretty sure that if all that existed of e.g. Piketty’s “Capital in the 21st Century” was the collection of reviews that were written of it, and some bindings with nice dust jackets but blank pages, most people would get the same value out of that as they do from the version with actual text inside. But in practice I expect at least a few of the reviewers would feel obligated to call out the absence of the Emperor’s New Book.
You can’t write a book review of a book that doesn’t exist. Or, if you tried, nobody would derive any particular value from reading it.
Stanislaw Lem wrote a whole book as a collection of fictional reviews, and it was tremendous fun to read.
(I pride myself in not being a nobody.)
Sounds like the kind of thing Jorge Luis Borges would write. Actually, I’m not sure he didn’t.
I did read what you read. I said “ifan approximation of the proof is good enough for everyone, then yes the pages of the proof were wasted”
I made a conditional statement in an attempt to clarify how your analogy would have to be altered to fit the conversation.
Let me reply to what I think is the spirit of your comment, and the direction of the conversation in general.
If you watch the news and give me a summary this does not make the news a non rivalrous good, because the summary is not the same product as the actual news. You are producing an entirely new good and providing it to me, non rivalrous goods only occur when the consumers are getting identical* goods, which is not satisfied by this example, so lets go to the broadcast TV example which is much closer to the definition.
Lets look at the underlying assumptions of broadcast TV as a rivalrous/non excludable good. First you need a receiver. If owning a TV is a state of nature, or if everyone has identical preferences and income then it makes sense to consider the margin of adding a new viewer to be near zero. Once you include differences in consumer preferences to reach a new user you have to convince them to buy a TV, and also convince them to watch your program vs another program aired at the same time.
*perhaps a better phrase is “have access to identical”
You should read “Three Versions of Judas”, if you haven’t yet.
@baconbacon:
Sure, let’s grant your claim. Good journalism is not excludable; instead, after you successfully exclude people from good journalism, a very close substitute will pop up at zero cost, and most people will choose the substitute instead. Is that meaningfully different?
The point of establishing non-excludability is to show that good journalism is vulnerable to the free rider problem. It is hard to limit access to good journalism; meanwhile, once good journalism has been produced, it is extremely cheap to share it with additional people. Those are the classic requirements for a public good. Like other public goods, we should expect that the market equilibrium will be socially suboptimal. This is Econ 101.
All of your quibbles about consumer-side requirements (like TV receivers) are irrelevant. There are plenty of factors that affect demand, but none of them make it any easier for creators of good journalism to extract the actual value of their work from consumers. Adding a new viewer doesn’t get you anything unless that viewer is going to give you money.
One option is to flip the equation around; instead of selling journalism to viewers, you can sell viewers to advertisers. At that point, though, the incentive structure leads you straight downhill. Before you know it, you’re no longer in the business of journalism. You’re just an entertainment company with a funny hat.
Lem’s book, which I was too late to be the first to mention, is A Perfect Vacuum; concur with TheEternallyPerplexed on its being quite wonderful.
@Iain
Isn’t a huge part of the problem that many/most people absolutely cannot distinguish a good summary from a bad summary or even a completely made up story from a story which offers decent evidence for its claims?
Imagine having three stories:
1. The full one: New New York Jets owner Gentile McGentileson traded player Jew McJewson for Christian McChristianson because he wants to change to strategy X to which McJewson is not well suited because his skills are A and B.
2. The summary: New York Jets traded player Jew McJewson for Christian McChristianson because they want to play a different strategy
3. The summary which appeals to prejudice: Gentile McGentileson traded Jew McJewson for Christian McChristianson because McGentileson is an antisemite.
It seems to me that many people prefer a story that caters to their prejudice/preconceived notions over a story that matches the evidence. So if they already believe that antisemitism is on the rise or if they see McGentileson as an antisemite (perhaps he spoke out against Israeli settler policies), they would much prefer 3 over 2.
@Aapje: That is completely orthogonal to my point. I’m talking about the production of good journalism (think: long form investigative journalism); you’re talking about the market for entertainment.
I claim that the market will under-supply the former, because the latter is much easier to sell (in the sense that click-bait attracts click-fish who can be sold to advertisers).
I think the ultimate answer doesn’t have to do with the media at all, but with the listeners.
A voter has no good reason to care whether the beliefs on which he votes are true, since his vote has a near zero probability of affecting the outcome of the election. So he can choose to believe whatever is most emotionally satisfying, fun, simple, flattering to himself. A consumer can make the same mistakes but he pays for them and, in most cases, gets fairly immediate evidence that they are mistakes when the flashy product he bought stops working or turns out to be gathering dust because he has no real use for it.
So the solution, insofar as there is one, is to change the society to that more decisions are made on the market, fewer in the voting booth.
This does not follow, if the voter believes that his vote does matter, which many clearly do.
If Alice votes for Trump and he chooses a policy that harms her, then she has evidence that she was mistaken.
The problem with the news media is not that it’s biased; it’s that the news media is effectively an unaccountable center of power. It’s staffed with wealthy and privileged elites who graduate from the right colleges and travel in narrow aristocratic bubbles, it has extensive influence over government and effective immunity from laws that your ordinary shmoe does not, it can punish arbitrary citizens by directing the ire of its readers at them, and it is responsible to no one since it doesn’t turn a profit anyway. It’s too big to fail, and so failure is its only mode of operation.
If the media was considered a profession like, say, auto repair, a lot of our problems would go away. Return to the era of hard-drinking ink-stained wretches who barely graduated from high school and are regarded by the powers that be as pests instead of fellow aristos. They’ll still provide sensationalist and inaccurate news, mind you, but at least we will be aware of the quality of the product. And if we as a populace regain the ability to identify sensationalist and inaccurate news, that implies we can identify news that is not sensationalist and inaccurate, and afford respect to either group as is appropriate.
Except that I don’t think you can really do this, not on a long-term basis. Because, as you note, under a democracy, anyone who can shape or shift the opinions of a large number of citizens has power, and I don’t see how institutions with that much power don’t end up enmeshed with the other power centers. Because, to the extent that the media really can influence how the masses vote, then they simply already are “fellow aristos,” and I’m not sure how you prevent that.
(Besides ending democracy, of course.)
This is ostensibly what an elective republic is supposed to be a step away from. Elections are supposed to periodically shake up the power centers. Now one can argue that it doesn’t go too far enough, but that’s what I look to as the driving principle.
Except that this implies that the electorate and their opinions are endogenous, or at least independent of the power centers. But if the bulk of what occurs in the voting booths is a downstream product of the Mass Media Megaphone, and thus controlled to no small degree by the power center that is control of said megaphone, then how are elections anything more than a “rubber stamp” for the elite via the “manufactured consent” of the manipulated masses?
I did say you can argue it doesn’t go too far enough. And heavily implied that it’s not really achieving those goals. “Worst form of government except all the others that have been tried” and all that jazz.
That doesn’t mean “ending democracy”, presumably in favor of some regressive fedualistic power fantasy, is a tenable solution for the problems you describe.
@ThirteenthLetter
You are treating the media as a single entity, which is wrong. It’s pretty clear that historically, we can point at many cases where one part of the media has lost out to other parts of the media, which shows that some accountability exists.
You could make your same argument to declare that businesses are unaccountable.
Nice piece on a racism taxonomy. But the definition by consequences has a little bit more to say for itself, at least in terms of whether an injustice is intended to be redressed or whether the status quo will stay unchallenged.
The term of art for the def by consequences is usually “structural racism’ or “institutional racism.” Because there were bad schools for blacks, less blacks get enough STEM training and the pipeline for black stem workers keeps getting narrower and narrower, but there are plenty of indians who can come here since there is a big pipeline of them. So Google is affected by structural racism. They can choose to do something about it, or they can ignore it. Once they decide to ignore it THEN the racism-by-motive definitions start getting deployed.
That said, I notice that its hard for people to describe the “structures” of “structural racism” at any specified level of detail. If Castilles killer gets off it indights “the structures enabling the perpetrators to avoid prosecution” Like what? Juries? Blackstone’s maxim? Defense attorneys?
Anyway, the problem is that correcting injustices usually doesn’t require killing ten million rich white people and taking their stuff. But it doesn’t involve zero disruption either, at least as imagined. And so white folks say “sure, racism and slavery and segregation and FDRs redlining HURT black people and they have less money now” but don’t take any money from me to even the score. And so the ‘structure’ of america, which had racist-by-motive actions in it (let white people live by themselves in whitopias) will remain racist. If you don’t care about fixing it, then you have to ask what your “motive” is. Do you like the status quo because you benefit?
When you define structural racism or institutional bias by consequences, it seems like you smuggle in an assumption (by words like “racism” or “bias”)–that the observed differences in outcomes are the result of some external force which can be blamed for them and also can be changed to get rid of those differences in outcomes. That’s a lot more plausible for some differences in outcomes (higher unemployment) than for others (higher rates of unwed birth).
Of course, it’s possible to define these terms in such a way that all differences in outcomes which can’t be ascribed to purposeful discrimination/racism are explained by structural racism, by definition. But then those terms don’t seem to have a whole lot of explanatory power, since they apply as much to externally-imposed stuff (employers not calling you in for an interview if your name is DeShawn Jones, whereas they’ll call Sean Jones in for that interview) as to internally-imposed stuff (unwed pregnancies).
@p duggie
There’s multiple justice systems acting in parallel. If you were to shoot someone you would not face the same justice system Yanez did. Not even close.
For just one example, look at the number of grand juries that have returned no true bill in homicide cases involving police officers. That is completely unheard of in cases not involving police officers. The presentations that were made to those grand juries was fundamentally different from what happens in a normal case.
I’m not sure I would call this structural racism, but that’s how it works.
I wasn’t aware Yanez was tried by a jury that differed in any substantive way from other criminal juries. Cite? Did the prosecutor not try hard enough?
That’s what you got out of my reply? Did you really think I was claiming the jury was made up of of Yanez’s friends and family?
I couldn’t make sense of it. The jury made the call. Can you tell me what about the justice system differed for Yanez? Is it because he had a good lawyer? Is that the structural diff? public vs private defense?
How does the difference in treatment by the nonjury parts of the justice system (which parts) cause the *outcome* of the case to differ so much?
@p duggie
People in general seem to give cops more leeway to make the argument “I felt threatened so I shot.” This affects how they are treated by the justice system when they shoot someone in what they present as self-defence.
Most cases never end up before a jury. More than 90% of cases are plead out. Do you think it is just a coincidence that this one did?
The differential treatment starts from the very beginning. Normally, when one person shoots and kills another, the police arrive and immediately start trying to build a case. While the shooter is still in shock they start to question him to try to elicit incriminating evidence. Yanez wasn’t questioned until the next day, and then only in the presence of two attorneys. Of course everyone has the right to remain silent and ask for an attorney, but in most cases the police try to manipulate suspects to get them to waive their rights. Do you think that happened here?
On the other end of things, juries aren’t the only actors in criminal trials. Judges, their rulings, their demeanor, and how they charge the jury play a big role too.
The prosecutor can’t go all out against a police officer because he has to work with other police officers that are sympathetic to the defendant every day to build cases. In the Yanez case one of the defense’s chief witnesses was the St. Anthony Police Chief. How can a local prosecutor that will have to work with that chief cross examine such a witness to the full extent he ought to?
There are factors like police officers getting mandated minimum amounts of time following a use of force incident before they can be questioned per the police union (I believe three days), which is a significant amount of time to collect ones thoughts, and get a consistent story on the incident whereas civilians are forced to give a testimony immediately or are at least arrested/detained in order to extract such. A seemingly small factor like this can allow use of force cases in the courtroom, which hinge on the officer or civilian credibly depicting true fear or threat as a case of self-defense, to turn on the fact that the officer gets three days to order their thoughts before giving their statement while civilians have to generally do with the scrambled thoughts right after an incident.
Police generally get solid representation from their police union due to the incidents occurring on the job, while civilians get what they can afford or the available public defender. Experienced and competent defense can maximize the wording of any statements or situation to key directly to the state’s self-defense statutes, especially compared to over-worked or underprepared private attorneys a non-officer is likely to have.
Neither of those factors require any malfeasance on anyone part either, so there could also be factors of prosecutors pushing for overreach against police knowing a jury will reject those charges, or fellow officers providing the accused officer with information about the suspect that they can provide during their initial statement that a civilian would not have access to. Evidence tampering by the officer’s buddies (“lost” phone footage or mysteriously appearing weaponry on bodies) is another possibility.
There can be plain old bias in the minds of juries that police are in general upstanding people, which means their is a higher bar to clear before convicting one, and since use of force often hinges on adversarial testimonies, having the officer get a de-facto trust bonus swings things quite unfairly compared to a similarly accused civilian.
Edit: Lots of states have varying minimums before police can be questioned. Wisconsin for example is 2 days, while places like Dallas are 72 hours, and Baltimore had as much as 10 days. Also, it isn’t illegal for them to view the evidence collected before making that statement, as I suggested, and is a common practice to let the officer view transcripts and video before making a statement. This is part of the non or less adversarial position they take to investigating a fellow police officer that Brad mentioned.
Right. The non-crazy reason for this is that we expect policemen to go into dangerous situations sometimes, where we’d expect civilians to avoid them. However, I strongly suspect that (as others have said) everyone in the chain from police to jurors tends to treat policemen rather differently than other people in these cases.
I think for police in particular the effects of different law dominates any effect of disparity in the justice system. If I understand correctly, the black-letter law and judicial precedents are such that there are approximately no situations where it’s illegal for a police officer to kill a civilian.
No, that’s not true. The black letter criminal law with respect to deadly physical force is pretty similar.
There are some differences, mostly having to do with dangerous felons fleeing from the scene of a crime or escaping custody, but those clauses rarely come into play.
In the vast majority of cases the affirmative defense used by police officers that commit homicides is self defense–that the officer thought his life or occasionally the life of his partner was in imminent danger. The standard for that is generally the same for officers as it is for civilians.
What is vastly different is how every actor in the criminal justice system from investigating officers all the way through to appeals courts treat police officers that have committed a homicide as compared to how they treat civilians that have done the same.
I generally agree that cops get away with far too much – the chance that any civilian would get away with shooting a guy (not to mention nearly hitting his kid and girlfriend) in public in broad daylight because “his hand was near his pockets and maybe a gun was there, not that I could definitely see it” is basically null. Maybe if there were no other witnesses and the shooter could get away with claiming a more definitive threat.
So that’s structural. But is it structural racism or is it structural unfairness that happens to fall more heavily on one race? Because police interact with African Americans more often, and it is at least partially justified by increased rates of criminal activity. But cops seem to get away with an awful lot regardless of who their victims are.
I’m very confident that Yanez would be going to jail if he were not a cop. I’m much less confident that he would be going to jail if Castille were white, which is what BLM and the strong version of the “structural racism” theory wants me to believe. In other words, I agree Yanez got away with a crime. I don’t agree that the race of his victim played a significant role in the verdict.
@gbdub:
Yanez would probably have gotten off if Castile had been white, but Castile would have been significantly less likely to get shot if he had been white. So, bit of column A, bit of column B. I think it’s more column B than a lot of people do – the police in the US shoot plenty of whites – but you cannot deny that column A is at play.
The biggest way it manifests is that the police seem to treat most black people as though they were dealing with obvious lowlifes, whereas the existence of white lowlifes does not mean the cops treat all white people as though they were lowlifes. I have zero chance of getting hassled by a cop unless I blow a stop sign or something like that – whereas black friends of mine who talk, dress, act like I do (basically, educated middle class people)
do have stories about getting hassled by cops for no apparent reason.
EDIT: I believe there was a post here a long time ago that showed that, while stats for police shootings are much less conclusive, there definitely is more police harassment of black people, proportionally speaking.
dndnsrn said:
… but Castile would have been significantly less likely to get shot if he had been white.
I don’t think this is obviously true. It contradicts the best available information I’ve seen, which is available on that Washington Post page I linked to a few open threads ago. Basically, blacks and whites get shot in proportion to their fraction of arrests. Once you’re being arrested, you’re about equally likely to be shot whether your skin is black or white.
Also Fryer had a paper that analyzed data from (iirc) three big city police departments. Stops of blacks were no more likely to lead to shootings than stops of whites, though they were much more likely to lead to all other kinds of unpleasant interactions (handcuffing, shoving to the ground, arresting, etc.).
Now, it may very well be that someone in Castille’s situation was more likely to be shot with black skin than with white skin. But I don’t know of any actual evidence that says that. There’s a lot of implication along those lines in media coverage of police shootings of blacks, but it’s not what the data that I’ve seen says.
If blacks are more likely to be arrested or stopped than whites then I don’t think the evidence you are offering refutes the underlying claim.
The claim was about the probability of being shot based only on skin color, not conditional on already have been pulled over or arrested.
@albatross11
What Brad said. If he’d been white he would have probably not been pulled over in the first place. He was pulled over for a busted tail light, and that’s something cops often use as a pretext.
What albatros11 says pretty much matches my understanding of the data, which is basically that black people are more likely to have interactions with cops, but not more likely to get shot. Maybe white Castile doesn’t get pulled over in the first place? I don’t know.
What’s really difficult to suss out is the correlation vs. causation, and it’s also very difficult to determine what level of scrutiny / forceful policing is appropriate in the places that black people tend to live (which really are higher crime on average). Cops backing off does seem to increase crime to some degree.
If I could switch off all racial disparities in crime rates (and instantaneously plant this knowledge in the head of every cop), do the disparities in harsh policing (but not apparently shooting) change? Do they go away? I think that’s a hard question to answer definitively.
Anyway, I agree that police should be trained to escalate more slowly and be held more accountable for their use of force. I suspect that this will disproportionately help minorities, regardless of whether racial animus plays a role in the current numbers. The tricky bit is that such training and accountability will probably result in somewhat more cops getting injured/killed on the job. I believe the tradeoff will be net positive, but it would be a hard sell.
It’s worth noting that Castile had been previously pulled over 52 times for petty traffic offenses. A previous study showed that black drivers were pulled over 310% more frequently than white drivers in the area.
@gbdub
Yeah, white Castile probably doesn’t get pulled over. Black guy with a busted light, cop is far more likely to pull him over. Low-level stuff like drinking in public if you’re being somewhat discreet about it, weed in public if likewise, minor car-related infractions, etc, black people are much more likely to get hassled over it than white people.
After reading the thread, I basically agree with Brad.
If you grant that (1) we have a legal system that for various de facto and de jure reasons, allows police officers a measure of benefit of the doubt when they shoot suspects; and (2) African-Americans disproportionately come into contact with police in situations where shootings are a possibility, then all other things being equal, African-Americans are going to be shot disproportionately more likely than other. You can call that structural racism or disproportionate impact – I won’t argue, but we all agree with those facts.
Putting a finger on the causes and effects lets us discuss possible solutions or areas for possible future investigation.
If you believe Yanez’s story, then he stopped Castile because Castile resembled a suspect in a robbery, and ultimately shot Castile because Castile kept reaching for an unknown object notwithstanding instructions to the contrary.
Assuming that police shoot roughly in proportion to contacts, then you could theoretically fix that problem by adjusting the rules of engagement to reduce risk to suspects and increase risks to officers by some amount (for example, no shooting until you literally see a gun, or obviously too extreme, the suspect gets to take the first shot). These would reduce total shootings, but if African-Americans are still disproportionately coming into contact with the police, then the new smaller number of shootings will still be disproportionate.
Alternately, you could have a race-specific correction – 1 time in 10 or whatever, when you would otherwise stop an African-American driver or respond to a domestic dispute called regarding an African-American, you just don’t. (That’s obviously unsatisfactory, at least in the latter case).
Google suggests that Castile was pulled over for a busted taillight. Yanez’ “ah he looked like a guy I’d been told to watch out for” thing sounded awfully post hoc.
Forget about adjusting the rule of engagement: stop doing things like stopping cars and going up to the window for busted taillights! That would keep everyone safer. Cops would no longer worry about the guys they were pulling over shooting them, and thus, cops would be less likely to shoot the guys they were pulling over. Instead, take a picture of the license plate, and then find some way to communicate “your taillight is busted and you should fix it and if you haven’t in x time you’ll get ticketed” or something.
Remove all laws that are unserious enough that the cops can easily justify not doing something. Either decide that smoking pot is so terrible that you have to bust everybody, or decide it’s no big deal and stop busting anybody. As it is right now, there are a lot of places where you can smoke weed in public, or drink beer in the park, and as long as you are remotely discreet, cops will only give you trouble if they want to. Whether they want to depends on a whole bunch of factors, including your race, your class, etc.
These would also have the huge advantage of making relations with cops less confrontational. If fewer people get hassled by cops, they will be more likely to cooperate when they see an actual real crime happen. Fewer confrontational police-civilian encounters would do a lot of good, and a lot of the confrontational encounters are unnecessary if not counterproductive.
Eventually you’re just going to have to go after them for unpaid tickets. Unless you bite the bullet and
Oh, hey.
Yes, that’s pretty much the key. It’s a hard change to make, since that cuts down on the revenue cities and police forces have at hand.
Also because different people/cultures have different ideas on what is petty and what is serious. Do the cops go in to bust up the party at 1:30 in the residential neighborhood, or is that okay to let pass? Then do the neighbors take matters into their own hands and start brawling? Do you bust the guy selling loose cigarettes, or repeal the vice taxes?
@dndnrsn, I thought the recorded radio calls prior to the stop were clear that Yanez thought Castile resembled the suspect prior to questioning him. I can’t listen to the audio at work, but here’s the link.
http://www.startribune.com/police-audio-officer-stopped-philando-castile-on-robbery-suspicion/386344001/#1
Now it’s entirely possible that Yanez was less good at recognizing similarities in an African-American suspect – IIRC, there are studies that most witnesses aren’t as good at cross-racial recognition as they are within their own group.
This.
Though on the other hand, “but this law (e.g.: speed limits) is an Important Exception” inertia (Chesterton’s Fence, etc.) is a thing, and often a sensible one: the impulse to throw everything out and start from scratch is not always, in fact, a shortcut, even if refactoring looks impossibly complicated.
@Randy M
Yeah, it would be a hard change to make, but it would probably produce better results than the current situation, where some people can get away with raucous parties, and other people might get shot because the cop who shows up to shut the raucous party down thinks someone is going for a gun.
As for selling loosies, I don’t get the prohibition. If someone wants to buy a pack of smokes, paying tax for them, and then sell individual smokes for a buck apiece of whatever, I’m not sure I understand why that is worth killing someone over.
Far as I’m concerned, there’s only about seven things deserve the force of actual criminal law: murder, rape, physically attacking others short of murder or rape, theft (including fraud), trespassing, destruction of property, and threatening others with any of the previous.
If a party’s really gotten raucous, probably some of those rules are getting broken. If it hasn’t, a healthy society can probably deal with it without men with guns.
@dndnrsn
Obviously the goal was not to kill him, so that is a rather biased way to put it. ‘Not worth risking killing someone’ is a more reasonable way to put it.
Anyway, some reasons not to allow that sort of thing:
– There may be rules for selling products that the street salesman is probably not adhering to, like not selling to minors.
– People may dislike being solicited in the street or other inconvenience it causes.
– It can work as a cover for drug selling. If you allow ‘Psst, do you wanna buy a cig’ then you just legalized something that looks very much like a drug transaction from a distance. So it then becomes harder to distinguish the two.
– There may be a very high chance that no (or too little) tax was paid for the cigarettes. Cigarette smuggling and counterfeiting is a huge market. This even works interstate, as NY City has twice the tax as Pennsylvania and almost 10 times more than Virginia. It’s much harder to combat this for street salesman than for shops.
Aajpe makes good points why others may disagree with you (us, really); but I didn’t realize you were so libertarian-ish.
I can see this leading to a situation where fines are levied automatically from your account, so the city/state can punish/extract revenue from you without ever risking escalation, and those without accounts are ignored for such minor offenses. Of course at that point we probably just have fines and fees deducted from our monthly UBI.
@dndnrsn – it turns out that’s a really interesting question.
There are two answers:
(1) Federal law requires that cigarettes be sold with the tax stamp to ensure the tax was paid. (And presumably by licensed dealers to minimize sales to minors).
(2) Until the FDA assumed regulation of tobacco in 2010, ATF allowed sale of single cigarettes in individual tax stamped packages. Once the FDA took over, they forbade the practice, presumably in response to anti-smoking lobbyists, who had argued that single cigarette sales encouraged youth smoking.
http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/need-to-buy-one-last-cigarette-too-bad-singlestick-sales-halted/
I completely disagree. IMHO, the cause of acquittals is that (1) we ask police officers to enter armed into dangerous situations on behalf of the community; and (2) we grant criminal defendants the benefit of the doubt.
I wouldn’t change #2 – it would lead to more wrongful convictions along with more rightful ones, just like if you changed it for other defendants.
I’m open to changing #1 by reducing the number of laws police are required to enforce, or by disarming police, or by changing the rules of engagement.
De facto it already has been changed for other defendants. Only police officers, the very rich, and celebrities (including temporary celebrities) get the justice system they teach you about in grade school.
Whether we should have the cop system for everyone or cops should have the regular system — either way it is entirely unjust to have two separate systems. Far more unjust than it would be to subject cops to the flawed system the rest of us subject to.
Define “disproportionate”. I would argue that this is the crux of much of the issue. The common thing is to assume “proportionate” means “similar to their proportion of the general population”.
But is that the proportion that’s really relevant? Should it be?
Argumentum ad absurdum for a moment, let’s say the “right” function for “probability cop shoots someone and gets away with it” is X * probability that person is a violent felon, where X is exactly the same regardless of any other factor. This is facially race neutral, but even if it is applied perfectly, black people will still get shot “disproportionately” relative to their percentage of the population, because a disproportionate fraction of violent felons are black.
So as long as crime rates have racial disparities, we either have to be okay with “black people” as a whole group, getting shot disproportionately OR we have to be okay with “black violent criminals” being disproportionately unlikely to get shot.
And it’s even more complex than that, because black people are also more likely to be victims of crime. But if we care a lot about that disproportionality, the only readily available policy hammer we’ve got for that nail seems to be “police more harshly”, and that’s going to make the “getting hassled by cops” disproportionality worse.
What is the optimal level of disproportionality, because it seems like “zero, for all disproportionalities” is realistically unachievable?
None of this reduces well to simple moral good / evil distinctions and that’s my problem with applying a racism label – it encourages thinking in simple moral terms about a problem that lends itself poorly to that analysis.
The real question is how “probability that person is a violent felon” is calculated. Are you taking population of violent felons over total population? Or are you restricting the population by race?
I don’t disagree with your reasoning. I do think it’s more helpful to go the other way, which is basically saying “I see why you’re upset that the poor are arrested for sleeping under bridges more than the rich. Now let’s look at what remedies are available, and if any are likely to help without imposing unacceptable costs.”
@gbdub
Suppose African-Americans commit proportionately more violent crimes than White Americans but the result could entirely be explained by correcting for lead exposure. Suppose further that disproportionate lead exposure could in large measure be causally traced back to explicitly racist government policies in the 40s and 50s.
Where along the chain of causality ultimately leading to a series of acquittals of police officers killing black men even though they weren’t objectively in mortal danger do you cut off “structural racism” as a legitimate explanation?
@Brad
If we knew your hypo to be true:
1) Then I as a first point, hooray – we could solve the problem for future generations by clearing up lead exposure.
2) We could decide if a targeted remedy were appropriate now.
a) We could just declare that African-Americans should be given sentences only X% as long as populations not exposed to lead. But this might have negative effects if our goal is to reduce crime. What’s more, if it turns out that the victims of high-lead crime are also disproportionately African-American, it might increase the structural racism inherent in being a victim of crime.
b) We could establish some kind of compensation fund.
c) We could shrug out shoulders and say “sorry – we’ll do better next time.”
3) But in any event, we would know that it doesn’t make any sense in that case to demand that more police officers go to jail – that won’t solve the problem, and seems unfair to the officers.
Brad, if the problem is ongoing effects of explicitly racist policies from 50 years ago, then turning the usual tools of anti-racism to the problem won’t help, because the racism itself isn’t ongoing, just the lasting impact.
Consider the magic race-erasing switch in my comment below – if we flip that, the population formerly know as black will still have been exposed to lead, so how much of the getting-shot-by-cops problem will disappear?
That doesn’t mean the problem shouldn’t be addressed, just that treating it as merely a symptom of irrational dislike of people due to their skin color is not likely to be a complete or efficient solution (for one thing, people get awfully defensive when you accuse them of being closeted Klansmen). I know you can say “that’s not what I mean by structural racism”, but the “racism” part of that phrase was chosen for a reason, precisely because of its emotional impact.
Otherwise I agree with J Mann’s assessment.
More officers should certainly go to prison. Just because I agree they aren’t being acquitted because of racism doesn’t mean that the reasons they are being acquitted are good ones. On the contrary, they are awful reasons and we ought to all be ashamed of having a two (three really) track justice system.
@Brad
Sure, but it also doesn’t mean that the criticism of the acquittals or the solutions to bad acquittals are good.
If the narrative is (structural) racism, where contrary to the steelmanned version of SJ, the blame is put on white police officers specifically, then the goal becomes to get more white officers in prison. If black officers are no less likely to abuse their power and in fact, are more likely to abuse their power against black people (because black officers tend to police black communities more often), then bad acquittals of black officers are ignored. We see in practice that a common BLM demand is more black on black policing, so if that happens in combination with not holding black officers accountable, life will not actually become better for black communities.
@Aapje
There have been several non-prosecutions or acquittals of non-white police officers and they have lead to protests. Jeronimo Yanez was born in Mexico.
Not everything is about the “social justice narrative”. The actual justice system in the United States is broken when it comes to police officers. That’s should be a concern for everyone — including those of us on the left and those of you on the right.
Then maybe you should’ve said that instead of pulling out the “structural racism” bit. Look, I totally agree that, beyond social justice narratives, there are very strong and relevant criticisms of police to be made. But the social justice narratives tend to dominate criticism of police, which creates a clusterfuck. And that’s about that in terms of productive discussion.
I did:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/28/open-thread-78-75/#comment-516926
It sure seems like you went back on that in this section of the thread. Or were you just trying to prove a point?
The term “structural racism” seems to be defined as “whatever causes statistical disparities”. Is there a more specific definition than this?
Concretely, are there any statistical disparities that are NOT caused by “structural racism”? For example, consider the vast underrepresentation of whites (relative to Asians) in technology. Is this caused by “structural racism”? If not, why not?
I fully accept that slavery/racism/etc hurt a set of individual humans X to benefit some alternate set of humans Y.
I also fully accept that many other bad actions were performed which harmed other humans Y who were not in X.
Now, you have chosen one set of humans B (which is a superset of X) and have declared that B^C (everyone outside of B) somehow owes B recompense for these actions. How did you choose the set B?
Concretely speaking, your set B seems to be “black people”. But why can’t I alternately choose B = {anyone individually harmed} U {Irish people} or B = {anyone individually harmed} U {anyone who’s social security # ends in 7}? From what I can tell, my definitions are as morally meaningful as yours.
Clearly you have some unstated principles driving your choice of grouping. It might be worth fleshing those out.
The United States is being treated as an artificial person. That is an entity capable of causing harms and having obligations. You wish to disregard that reification and look behind at all the sets of natural people involved. Of course that is going to get you a conceptual mess. But do you do that consistently or do you just wish to disregard it for this particular case?
In most cases I do this. E.g. I favor punishing bad cops as individuals, not the taxpayers forced to pay their salaries.
But in this case there are two artificial persons in your reasoning – the US government and also “blacks”.
For example, “blacks” includes folks never harmed by the USG, e.g. immigrants and folks born after segregation ended.
And non-black tax payers/citizens/voters who cannot reasonably be said to have caused harm, like immigrants and folks born after segregation ended.
You can treat the United States as an artificial person, but its tax revenue comes from actual non-artificial people.
why are you calling B a superset of X? what does B include besides X? B is Xand X’s descendants, who have less money because X had less money too. (no valuable house in Leavittown to pass on value to the family)
Consider: laws that prohibit “blacks” from doing X which harms the people prohibited from the X. If a black person who gets overlooked and is allowed to do X is never discovered, does it really matter if we redress the harm prohibiting X to blacks caused and we include the overlooked black person?
I dunno who owes the recompense per se. But the harm happened and the harm should be redressed, because it harms social cohesion and the general welfare of all to have unaddressed harms hanging around.
@p duggie
Once you get down to the individual level, all kinds of harms and unfairness happened. One person(‘s forefather) had to serve in the army and suffered harm due to this, the other had ‘pull’ and managed to avoid it.
The concern for some who got shafted and lack of concern for others seems very biased to me. Furthermore, in practice the recompense seems to primarily go to those who were least harmed in the group deemed to need recompense.
Finally, your belief judges some bad luck as just and other bad luck as unfair, in a way that I find morally repugnant. For example, let’s take two people:
– Bob is born poor because his grandparents were drug addicts.
– Jeremiah is born equally poor because his grandparents were prevented from buying a house for racist reasons.
Why it is just for Bob to suffer from his poverty and have less chances in life due to this, but is it unjust for Jeremiah to suffer from his poverty and have less chances in life due to this? Both had similar bad luck to be born to the same level of poverty, with the same effects on their chances in life. That Bob’s grandparents caused their own poverty cannot be blamed on Bob. He never had a choice in this, anymore than Jeremiah had a choice.
Isn’t it much more fair to improve the chances in life for all poor people regardless of the cause?
Everybody has an equal chance of having drug addicts for grandparents. Certain racial groups are much more likely to have grandparents who were denied home ownership. If you are legitimately concerned about both of these injustices, you will end up allocating more resources to disadvantaged racial groups.
There is suffering everywhere, but it isn’t evenly distributed.
This is my question as well.
Let’s see tomorrow I could flick a magic switch and render every single person in the United States racially indistinguishable. Everyone is the same color, speaks the same vernacular, and has names randomly assigned from a pool of the currently most common male and female names. But I maintain a secret database of who came from which race originally, so I can track outcomes for the former groups. 20 years from now, how much better are things for the group formerly recognized as African American and their offspring? Are they doing significantly worse or better than former white people who started the experiment similarly socioeconomically situated?
I’d be comfortable calling problems that disappear under this experiment products of “structural racism”. But I suspect that the outcome would be much less dramatic than people who talk about structural racism would like to think.
To me, lumping “structural racism” with “racism” has two big flaws. First, since we consider racism to be such a bad thing, we privilege disparities caused by racism more than disparities due to other causes, regardless of how bad or how unfair those disparities are. Second, because we ascribe racism to a moral failing, an irrational malice towards other races, we think we can solve it by teaching people to not have irrational malice toward other races. But that won’t work, because it’s not the root cause.
Suppose black Americans are more likely to make choices like becoming single mothers and this causes bad outcomes. Blinding race does not change this individual behavior so the disparity will remain.
Are statistical disparities resulting from individual choices also “structural racism”?
And at this point, I say.. “Wait. You’re telling me Indians — not Indian-Americans, but people from literal third-world India — have had it better than African-Americans since the mid 1990s (when today’s new grads were being born)? Pull the other one, it’s got bells on.
The bias in that case is blatantly obvious; the system protects its own. The main color you need to be looking at it is “blue”, not “black”.
My family wasn’t even in the country when slavery was going on; best I can tell my first US ancestors landed at Ellis Island in 1897. They lived in the North since they got here, and in redlined areas no less. So why are you proposing to take from me again? My skin color?
Yes. I would say that this is true.
With the qualifier that the “better” which matters is not “they had access to nicer schools with fancier computers” but rather “they had two parents who told them that studying hard was very important”
Which calls for a rather different set of remedies; notably, it’s pretty clear that taking stuff from white people won’t help here.
Indians may as a country have had it worse. But it is still the case that the numerical superiority of STEM trained Indians (who can come via immigration, or are already here) is >> STEM trained blacks in america.
If “the system” protects its own, does it make sense that 12 random citizens of Minneapolis are all “blue”. Maybe that works, but that’s a strange system. Describe this system in more detail. If the system is “blue” then are cops calling the shots? Does the rest of Minneapolis exists to support cops?
They aren’t picked at random. They’re not criminals; they’ve probably never been accused of a crime (that was a question on a jury questionnaire I once took), they’ve almost certainly not had negative experiences with the police worse than getting a traffic ticket. There are likely other ways they’ve been chosen to be blue. They’ll be given blue-tinged instructions by the judge and yes, the prosecutor will probably not push too hard.
“And at this point, I say.. “Wait. You’re telling me Indians — not Indian-Americans, but people from literal third-world India — have had it better than African-Americans since the mid 1990s (when today’s new grads were being born)?”
You know that not all Indians grow up in hovels, deprived of all education, right? I don’t think many Indian immigrants in STEM come from the illiterate 25%.
How many African-Americans working in STEM came from the inner city, or the rural south?
From Wikipedia’s list of African-American women in STEM fields, there are quite a few in both categories (most pages have no relevant information beyond a city). But I don’t see how that’s relevant.
If it’s relevant whether the Indians come from Bangalore rather than some backwater rice paddy, then it should be similarly relevant whether the African-Americans we are comparing them to come from San Jose rather than South-Central LA. If you’re arguing about whether some group of foreigners “had it better” than Blacks in America, then it is very relevant whether you mean all Blacks or just middle-class Blacks.
p duggie originally stated that the reason few STEM workers are black is that the population of black Americans they are drawn from has little access to the education necessary to work in STEM (this correlates with poverty). TheNybbler objected that there are plenty of Indian STEM workers, even though poverty in India is much worse than in black America, with the implication that if extreme poverty doesn’t stop Indians, a lesser degree of poverty shouldn’t stop black Americans.
I pointed out that extreme poverty does in fact stop a lot of Indians from becoming STEM workers. It is true that STEM can draw workers from relatively wealthy, well-educated black Americans without poverty and correlates being issues, just as as it can draw from the the corresponding group of Indians, but the population of India is large that even with differing poverty rates it would not be surprising for the pools of potential STEM workers in India and black America to be of similar size. Regardless of how big they are (I don’t know, although I’d be interested to find out), the backgrounds of black Americans in STEM (as opposed to black Americans in general) is irrelevant.
The distribution of backgrounds of black Americans in STEM is relevant if we are discussing whether Indians or black Americans in STEM have it better. As per the previous paragraph, this question isn’t connected to the overall argument, but it might be interesting to answer anyway. Looking at the first 17 women on the list I linked, I make out 6 from inner city, rural Southern, or otherwise deprived backgrounds, 3 from definitely non-deprived backgrounds, 7 that can’t be placed, and 1 from before the 20th century who probably isn’t relevant to the topic.
According to data from Branko Milanovic’s book, 95% of India lives below the bottom 5% of the USA. My experience, living on both India and the US, agrees with this.
https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/within-country-income-percentiles-versus-world-income-percentiles-by-country-milanovic.png
Various consumer-level statistics agree with this. E.g., 75% of poor Americans own a car and 25% own > 2 cars, as compared to 2% of Indians.
So yes, most likely those immigrants did have it materially worse.
I rather enjoyed Scott’s post on racism (Against Murderism), but I think there’s one important point he ignored: racism doesn’t have to mean actively wanting to harm a racial group; in common usage, it can also mean devaluing them. To put this in utilitarian terms, racism doesn’t necessarily mean assigning negative weight to one race’s utilities, it can also mean assigning a lower but still positive weight. When you view it this way, I think that liberals don’t come off as quite so out-of-touch with the world.
This seems to be a common misreading of Scott, and I’m confused by it.
Scott is arguing against the common usage of “racist”. The fact that his preferred definition doesn’t match the common usage is the whole point, not a fatal flaw in his argument.
This is a weird reply.
If Scott is arguing against the common usage of racist, then he should address that common usage. If you want your preferred definition to win out, you should compare it to the definitions that people actually use. If Thomas Redding’s definition is indeed part of the common usage of the term, and it is not adequately discussed in Scott’s post*, that is a weakness in Scott’s post, and it is worthwhile to point that out.
*: You could argue that valuing people of one race less than people another is a milder form of Scott’s definition by motives (“An irrational feeling of hatred toward some race that causes someone to want to hurt or discriminate against them”). If you do, though, that weakens Scott’s argument. It’s hard to believe that a large segment of the population have hatred of a particular race as a terminal goal, but it is depressingly easy to believe that a large segment of the population are willing to (consciously or not) ascribe lesser value to people because of their race.
I guess I read Against Murderism as addressing devaluing (as opposed to negative-valuing) people, but choosing not to call this racism / arguing it should not be. Scott’s examples I think cover the “not really being anti-whoever, just not valuing them quite as highly” e.g. the very first example. Or the last example, both of which are basically “not saying so-and-so are bad, I just want to be around people more like me”.
And I therefore read Thomas Redding’s post to be “Scott, this is commonly called racism, but it’s not included in the definition of racism you propose we use”. If what he really meant was “I don’t think you talk about this at all” then I retract my objection, but would instead object that I think Scott did talk about it, or at least what he did talk about covers the situation.
I confess this is colored by my reaction to HBC’s criticism of Scott’s post, which seemed to be that Scott didn’t talk about structural racism, despite that (in my mind) being exactly what the entire “racism by consequence” part was obviously referencing.
Riffing on The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula LeGuin:
There’s another pseudo-utopia, a few miles down the road from Omelas, called Le Samo.
Le Samo is in a physically beautiful location, nestled in a mountain valley. The town square has nice restaurants and quaint fun stores. Crime is almost unheard of in Le Samo, and the few local police mainly end up hassling an occasional teenager for minor vandalism or underage drinking. There’s a very good hospital in town. Pretty-much all the houses are nice, the yards well-maintained, the quality of life very high. The schools are good, and the kids are all (literally) above average. There are nice parks and libraries, which are safe and pleasant for small children and new moms to use. There are chess games and sparkling conversations happening at the local coffee shop, alongside occasional poetry readings and musical performances. Families are almost always made of two parents raising their kids together.
Le Samo isn’t Heaven, of course. There are local tragedies–the kid who died young in the car wreck, the man whose wife left him for someone else, the old man dying of cancer despite all that modern medicine can do for him. But it’s a really good life, somewhere close to the high end of what humans can get out of life at current technology levels.
And you don’t even have to keep any crying children in a basement. Instead, they’re simply not let in. The poor and the dumb can’t afford to live in Le Samo, or anywhere close to it. Indeed, only pretty successful people can live there, and their kids (with the benefits of both genes and upbringing) end up being generally pretty smart and functional[1], so the schools are pretty good. The local police will run off any homeless people or crazies who come around, and they have a reputation for coming down so hard on criminals that all the criminals in the area wisely give Le Samo a wide berth. By design, there are no services for the poor or crazy or dumb that would attract or retain them.
Now, other places have all those people. They have poor familes and single-parent homes, they have crime and poverty and dysfunction. But not Le Samo. The child crying in the basement lives down the road in some poor village somewhere, never having even seen Le Samo.
My impression is that a lot of the good places to live in the US are more like Le Samo than they are like Omelas. We don’t need to torment any children to keep our near-utopia, we just have to avoid with the people who cost the most (in money and time and social friction) to deal with.
Many of the people who walk away from Omelas seem to end up in Le Samo.
[1] Though thanks to regression to the mean, they usually can’t afford to move back to Le Samo when they graduate college.
Le Samo isn’t a pseudo-utopia, it’s just a nice place to live. There’s nothing wrong with what it’s doing. The inhabitants of Le Samo don’t have any obligation to support all those other people, nor to constantly have to put up with the problems they cause.
Obviously you aren’t a consequentialist utilitarian who thinks there is no meaningful distinction between inaction and action. Likewise myself, but I think that is the point that will be under contention ultimately.
Most of the people in Omelas are only committing inaction as well. They didn’t set up the system, they just live there. Their only participation in the project is not opening the locked basement.
I think the main contention is different – should location matter in whether or not someone has moral weight? Omelas says they won’t let the child out of the basement because it’ll bring down the system. Le Samo says they won’t let the child in because it’ll bring down the system. The only difference is whether the victim already lives in the community or is outside of it.
And on the one hand, Nybbler’s statement that you don’t need to feel obligated to support the whole world seems pretty reasonable. But on the other hand, making location an explicit part of your utility function, in some weird Newtonian Ethics system, seems absurd. So where does that leave us?
I think one difference in how these two cases feel comes down to the Copenhagen interpretation of ethics, where simply by interacting with a problem you’re somehow more responsible for it. Walk by the homeless guy without feeding him, you’re responsible for his plight; live somewhere inaccessible to homeless people so you don’t have to walk by him, you’re guilt-free.
Christian ethics certainly don’t lead you to the conclusion that it’s okay to leave the poor, halt, and lame to their fate and move to a really nice suburb where they’re all kept outside the gates. Though it’s not obvious what is needed there. Suppose there’s a village down the road from Le Samo that has excellent poverty programs, houses the homeless, feeds the hungry, etc. Suppose everyone in Le Samo pays a special surtax to support those programs. Does that change the moral status of people who decide to live in Le Samo?
I think the most extreme version of Le Samo I’ve personally seen is the Yale campus, FWIW.
How so? It doesn’t seem at all absurd to me. (But then, I reject utilitarianism in favor of a sort of duty-based-ethics built around “concentric loyalties” in a Confucian-style “society as network of interpersonal relationships” model.)
Ah, yeah, that’s true, I was oversimplifying and missing an important distinction.
If you do group the whole world into your utility function, you end up having to support each of those 7+ Nigerians being born to each family as Kevin C mentions downthread. Which removes any pressure for them not to continue that cycle. Exponential utility monster situation if having very large families are a terminal value and we don’t move to post scarcity.
The better model is one of an expanding circle of duties outward, with diminishing responsibility as dependence, familiarity, relatedness, and relationship decreases. (ETA) Similar to what Kevin mentions just above me.
I really like this thought experiment – thanks!
One thing I find notable (particularly around here, where risks and caution around possible future technologies comes up frequently) is the general lack of concern for the negative possibilities, as genetic technologies get cheaper, of home/DIY “biohacking” and gene engineering. I was reminded of this, in particular, when over in a political discussion space, someone on my side suggested our best hope for our side/faction/tribe would be some young biohacker doing something based of the results here and here. Now, recall that I’m “Mister Punching Back” here, and even I find that idea rather concerning — metaphorical comparisons to opening Pandora’s pithos come to mind. (I got the same feeling with Nick Land’s comments about secessionist entities defending against hostile existing states with “cheap deterrents” based on “$10000 smallpox” here.)
Such possibilities exist, and have always existed. Technology is enabling, it always carries risks. But we have roughly two centuries of industrial civilization under our belts and life seems to keep getting better, on average, for most people. Will that trend continue inevitably? Perhaps not, but after two centuries of people making the same argument and being proven wrong, that’s how I’d bet.
So, I ran into a friend earlier this week, whom I’ve known since the start of high school, and we got to talking and catching up. And I brought up the whole discussion on here about me having kids (as the best way to fight for my tribe’s survival and to get Hlynkacg, Deiseach and co. to stop calling me a perdiferous traitor). He, laughing, agreed that my becoming a parent is impossible, “because that would require you to talk to girls,” and that I’d fail even if I tried my best, because I am “visibly uncomfortable talking to anyone with an IQ under 130”, and detailed the specific body language I display and how it visibly says “why do I have to bother talking with you?”
Add in that I despair at least a little whenever I contemplate the fact that I’m smarter than something like 99.9% of the population (and most of them, a lot smarter than), despite the fact that I’m really not all that smart. (If I was, would I be such a total unemployable loser?)
So, I ask my fellow 150-range IQ types here, how do you do it? How do you tolerate having to put up with the “normies”? Particularly when they are (comparitively) so, so stupid? Or the fact that there’s just so, so many more of them than us?
See, you say this, but your attitude suggests to me that you don’t really believe it. Particularly when you go on to say stuff like this…
While I’ll admit to being occasionally frustrated with difficulties I have in interacting with most people, I really don’t have this attitude at all. Throwing people into harshly judged categories like “people like me” vs “normies” does not help your life whatsoever. I suggest you stop doing it.
My perception is that you see yourself as obviously superior to most people. Your attempts to reconcile this with some of your personal failures come across as forced and half-hearted, as if you don’t really believe them. Under truth serum, I suspect you would say “I am so much better! It’s everyone else’s fault my life sucks! If only I had been born in a better society which would properly appreciate my obvious genius!” And I concede that this may, in fact, be true. But such an attitude essentially ensures that you will be miserable forever.
I don’t know, perhaps I should ask my wife (IQ in the 145-150 range) why she puts up with me (IQ in the 130-135 range).
Actually I do know, her life doesn’t revolve around her intelligence, between the facts that she gets lots of mental stimulation at work and I am smart enough to give her some distilled information on subjects she has some interest in but that she doesn’t want to follow intensely and that I have some domain specific abilities, the gap though it would be notable in some situations isn’t noticeable in most daily interactions. There is still plenty of room to enjoy each other in the facets of life that don’t require matching IQs to get along.
If your whole life revolves around intellectual ability then you will have a hard time getting along with people several standard deviations below you in this regard, but if you are able to enjoy things that don’t revolve around it then you can connect with people far more easily.
145-150 to 130-135 is not a huge gap, though. My entirely unscientific hypothesis is that a gap of about 30 points is the point just before the smarter person starts thinking “this guy doesn’t understand me; what an idiot” and the dumber person starts thinking “I can’t understand this guy; what an idiot.”
It’s no coincidence that politicians seem to fall into the 120s-130s range: it means they can communicate both with the average voters (people below a certain IQ tend not to vote, it would appear) and the occasional hypergenius who’s telling them about the atomic bomb research that will let them win the war or whatever.
The original post implied two questions–how to get along with people and how to find a mate. I’m not sure anyone’s whole life revolves around intellectual ability, but intellectual matters are important to some.
After my first marriage broke up, I concluded that one requirement if I married again was a wife whom I could talk with about ideas without feeling as though I needed a translator. Part of the reason for that requirement is that creating and working with ideas is a good deal of what makes me feel good about myself so I want to be able to share that with the person sharing my life. What I was looking for wasn’t only IQ, also the degree to which ideas are real and interesting to a person, but IQ is part of it.
The requirement was satisfied and we’ve been happily married for something over thirty years.
But that requirement doesn’t exist for everyone I interact with, not even for all friends. It’s nice to share what feels most important to me with others, but there are lots of other interactions I enjoy as well. I enjoy interacting with small children. With people online who see the world differently than I do. With people interested in learning something I can teach, not necessarily something to do with ideas. With people I like and admire for reasons not having to do with intellect.
Going back to the original issue of finding a wife … . The IQ distribution is tighter for women than for men, so if you are male and near either tail, there are fewer women than men in the same location. On the other hand, I have at least heard it claimed that many men don’t want smart girlfriends or wives, especially not smarter than they are, so the number of smart women looking for smart husbands might well be as high as the number of smart men looking for smart wives.
And, of course, there are lots of institutions that effectively filter by IQ, so you don’t have to interact with a random population either for courtship or other interactions. You are, for instance, interacting with people here. If you go to a good university, a chess club, or any other setting that tends to attract higher IQ sorts, your odds improve. Of course, if you are looking for a mate and are heterosexual, it also has to be a setting with a substantial number of women.
Thanks to geographical sorting by intelligence, there’s no real shortage of reasonably intelligent people to talk to in places I’m likely to be. As the saying goes, “Thank God for Mississippi”, and I don’t live there. Nor in Newark, nor in any of the other places the less-intelligent tend to end up. I suspect your particular circumstances have landed you in a place where you’re in more contact with the low and average IQ than would be usual for a high-IQ person.
Of course, it also helps to try to control your tendency to be arrogant.
Mostly avoidance and sticking to my bubble.
My attempt to be a SSC commenter is an experiment that may certainly fail.
My real language is LaTeX.
Hard to convey.
Start with that. Stop doing all of the things your friend told you about. It can’t be helping your ability to cope with the IQ gap if they’re also picking up on your body language that’s saying they aren’t valuable. If somebody is enjoying talking to you, and you don’t give them a reason to think you can’t wait to get away from them, you’ll probably find it much easier to give them a pass for saying some dumb things. You might end up with a bit of eye strain when they start talking about one of your areas of interest, but they might also appreciate hearing a more knowledgeable person explain some of their misconceptions.
How do you control unconscious body language? For that matter, how do you even notice it?
You don’t.
You have to change your thinking.
Having said that, you could force yourself to do something to calm yourself, or whatever, but it’s more the effect that a physical action will have on your internal state.
If you feel hatred, contempt, weariness with someone, you’re never going to be able to fake the body language to a necessary degree.
Just a guess, but study acting.
I tried in high school with a drama class… after the first couple of sessions I was permanently exiled to working backstage. Much like how when I took dance in high school, I ended up after a couple of weeks permanently on soundboard duty.
Or if not acting, then perhaps strict observance of formalized social protocol. This would be easier in a society that has formal manners, but it should be possible even in our own.
My own Rock-Bottom Rules for the Socially Incompetent go like this:
1. If you can say nothing, say nothing. (It’s hard to give offence by being too quiet.)
2. If you must say something, punctiliously observe the rules that have been taught to you by parents and teachers as good manners. (You won’t be sincere about it, and people will be able to tell, but in good manners, effort counts.)
3. If your best attempt at good manners aren’t getting it done, just say what you want clearly. (Now you’ve done it. Someone is going to get upset. Clarity is the best you can hope for.)
ETA: @James Miller’s advice is probably better.
It depends on the body language. Something like unconsciously glancing around for more interesting things might be really hard to change, but other things like having a closed-off sort of posture are easy to stop doing when you make an effort, and the only hard part is maintaining it, so you just have to remind yourself to take control of it periodically.
Noticing it might also depend on the body language, but generally having somebody else notice it for you is probably easiest. If it’s hard to notice even after you’ve been told about it, you can spend some time in front of a mirror trying to get a better feel for it.
I’m possibly being overoptimistic here, but hopefully a small decrease in standoffish body language will result in a small increase in the enjoyableness of interactions, which will make the next decrease in standoffishness easier.
I think the acting/control route is a bit of a hard ask, and not just for an asperger person.
You certainly get people who are good liars, but, in general, most of us are naturally fairly transparent, at least when it comes to strong emotions (I feel bad/ I feel good).
As a natural skill it’s almost another extreme of mental illness to be able to detach from your emotions to such an extent and have complete control of your expressions.
And if you are going to learn to do the social thing through acting, you’re going to have to be doing pitch perfect, improvisational movie acting in one take.
It’s become the best actor in the world vs. try and change your attitude.
I think we broadly agree. But I might be more optimistic about how much a small behavioral change could influence interactions. I did try to be clear that I didn’t think acting was a good long term solution. My hope was that a little bit of acting could produce slightly more pleasant conversations, and then in future interactions there would be less acting required.
We both think that in the long term, an attitude change is what will improve interactions. I’m suggesting that one way to initiate that attitude change is by faking it to whatever degree you can, and then seeing that the results are more positive than what you’re currently getting.
And I do think (absent proprioception issues) it’s not that difficult an ask to have somebody periodically do the opposite of some bit of body language they’ve been told about during a conversation. Whether small changes will have any noticeable results, or if you really would have to get to a high level of acting before people didn’t see through you and treat you exactly the same, I’m less confident about.
Yeah, I agree.
I don’t think acting classes would be the best way to achieve that though – probably better to find some way to record yourself having a social interaction, and see if there are any big body language no-nos going on.
I recorded myself doing a job interview practice and I realised I was rubbing my legs a lot while grinning insanely. It looked mental and I was completely unaware I was doing it.
As you say, trying to consciously adopt relaxed body language can make a bit of a difference as a stepping stone to addressing the underlying emotional issue.
I’m not too sure how that applies to aspergers, but a somewhat inept but well meaning person would probably be better than an inept and irritated/condescending one.
You could be right. I’ve never tried one; I just assumed they would have figured out some better strategies than I could come up with myself. I would be shocked, though, if recording yourself and studying it wasn’t a major component of any decent acting class.
It’s like breathing, once you have it pointed out to you, it’s possible to make a conscious effort to manage it.
@genisage, @Whatever Happened To Anonymous
See, when I started out in preschool, I was in Special Ed for speech delay and both gross and fine motor skill difficulties. The latter were given a diagnosis of what was then called Sensory Integration Dysfunction (tactile-defensive subtype), now Sensory Processing Disorder. I’ve, over the course of my life, had to train myself to resist the powerful instinct to sit on my feet, which instinct occurs because otherwise my brain loses track of where they are. While I can mentally plot parabolic trajectories, I can neither throw nor catch things with any real skill because of the difficulties of trying to move and position my body so as to produce or respond to said trajectory. I schedule trips to the bathroom because my ability to perceive the need to use it is somewhat limited compared to the average person. I have difficulty telling when I’m ill. In short, I have lousy proprioception compared to the average person.
Edit: I and my brothers also took Gōjū-ryū karate as a kid for a time — because it was the cheapest option for an athletic activity — and was never even able to get the first kata down.
Aspies as a rule are not physically graceful.
That’s why I had extra-curricular forced classical dance training from the age of 5.
A dance studio wont switch you to soundboard.
I took AP classes or independent study my senior year in HS.
The company of animals also worked very well for me. Volunteer for dog or cat rescues, or for horse rescues if those exist in Alaska.
@Kevin C.
Ah sorry about all that. That probably puts your situation outside of my abilities to predict what might work, but one thing that could be worth trying is to find some body language you can manage to do deliberately that might be weird, but at least isn’t whatever is currently causing problems. Like, instead of being my normal, hunched over, fidgety self when I end up in a social situation, I’ll juggle, or stand on one foot, or do card tricks. No idea what specific things might be applicable for you. But if there’s something that’s easy to do without focusing much, and incompatible with whatever particular body language you’re trying to avoid, it might plausibly help.
For what it’s worth: Do something proactive when meeting people?
I read about an asperger person with face agnosie (couldn’t recognize anyone by face) who always handed out a leaflet explaining the asperger condition and some relevant concrete consequences of his difficulties, along the lines of “when I meet you on the street (i.e., in a different context situation) and do not greet you it is not my intention, please tell me who you are. If you have altered your hairdo/glasses/shoes I will certainly not recognize you unless you give me a strong clue.” etc. it was a double-sided sheet, IIRC.
If you happen to have any diagnosis that can be whittled and massaged into similar excuses (maybe putting a bit of ‘unconventional cognitive processing style’ blame onto yourself) that may go a long way of people accepting you and not reading too much into your body language. This in turn should ease some of the problems you have in accepting them — not being able to fine-control your body language does not mean you’re not sending, nor reading theirs unconsciously! Once people realize you are a penguin in their savannah the interaction becomes less tense, it may even open into a friendly curiosity (there will still be lions trying to eat you, but also flamingoes trying to show you their oase lakes [this metaphor starts to fray…]).
If you can’t stand being around your intellectual inferiors, how do you expect to deal with children?
I don’t. That was my point in the earlier discussion. But I’ve got folks around here like Deiseach and Hlynkacg telling me that accepting that my tribe is utterly doomed is despair, and therefore Absolutely Forbidden under penalty of being denounced as a perdiferous traitor, and thus I have do something no matter how futile to fight for my side, and folks like Well… going on about the best way to do that is reproduction: ‘if you want the world to have more people like yourself, use the means nature equipped you with for making more people like yourself,’ or something like that.
So, if having kids is not the way for me to do my duty to fight for the survival of Borderer Kyriarchy, what is, then?
You are intelligent, articulate, and you have a lot of time. You want to propagate your values, some of which overlap with more mainstream groups, and others which do not.
I think you should become an online essayist for some collection of topics that the general conservative readership is interested in and overlaps with your own values. Become the absolute expert on those topics. Write lots about all sorts of aspects of them. And whenever anything concerning them comes up in the conservative blogosphere, join the conversation and link to your work. You’ll know you’re succeeding when others start pointing people to your writings and (ideally) mentioning your ideas directly.
Also, you need to start presenting yourself in different terms. “White Monarchist Kyriarchy” isn’t going to fly right now, even among distinctly conservative people. It’s way outside the Overton Window. Tone some of that stuff down as much as you can without feeling like a liar.
All of this is going to be the work of years and will require some compromises on your part. But you might actually succeed, and if you did you would shift our cultural meme-cluster slightly in the direction of your ideals. And that’s what you want, isn’t it?
Do you mean Kevin is going to have to become a missionary and prophet?
And wander in the wilderness for 40 years?
@bintchaos
No. Since he is an atheist, those terms are definitely inappropriate. More apt words would be blogger, essayist, advocate, or political commentator.
Again, no. I am advising him to find common ground with more mainstream conservatives so he will gain an audience more easily and won’t have to figuratively wander the wilderness for forty years.
Aren’t Dawkins and Harris missionaries of atheism, then?
And arent they creating prophecy with their claims that atheism is inevitable?
Maybe Kevin should move to Australia.
My armchair psychologist opinion is also that it would probably be a very bad idea for Kevin C to have children. Ever since Moldbug quit, I’d say that there is a niche for him there (Kevin Moldbug?).
If you define intellect by knowledge then children are dumb as shit. If you define by ability to learn then even children who will measure at a standard deviation or two lower than you in IQ will be superior to you for stretches of your life.
If you don’t like kids, don’t have kids, but don’t assume that just because you don’t like adults with an IQ sub X that you won’t like kids with an IQ sub X, they are very different beings.
It depends on what is the salient point in Kevin’s interactions with others. I assumed it was something like “an ability to converse about complex topics” which a bright five year old isn’t likely to be able to do much better than a 105 IQ grown up.
Yes, it’s quite possible that any given child will have a greater potential than a brilliant adult, but the adult will still require patience in their interactions. There’s a reason “explain it to me like I’m five” is a saying.
Some people find that dealing with their own children is different.
A friend of ours agreed with his wife that their children would be primarily her responsibility for the first few years, then when they got older his, because he knew he didn’t like small children.
It turned out that he was mistaken. He even ended up creating children’s stories. Good ones.
Just be a nice person? Listen, be polite, don’t put them down, etc. Also, don’t divide up the world into “smart people like me” and “stupid people not like me”. That’s just a bad perspective to be carrying around.
+1
I suspect this is a common side effect of both bullying of smart kids in school and also the fact that sometimes people end up with high intelligence test scores + few accomplishments. Both of those encourage a kind of self-serving mental model of the world in which intelligence is the really important thing that determines the value of people.
At one point in high school, I was in serious danger of being unable to graduate. Why? Because, thanks to my accelerated pace in math, I took calculus, the highest-level math course the Anchorage School District, as a freshman. How is that a problem, you ask? Because one had to take two and a half years of math (2.5 math “credits”) to graduate, no exceptions. I had one year’s credit, and no classes left to fill the other 1.5 years. What were the teachers and administrators’ response? The same one I got throughout my youth when these sorts of problems came up, and I quote: “if you’re so smart, Kevin, you figure it out.”
So, clearly, the fact that I’m unable to solve my problems means I’m not really that smart. Is this not the community that understands that a computer with nothing more than an internet connection, or just a text interface, could still take over the world and wipe out humanity if it’s smart enough. That any obstacle short of the laws of physics themselves can be overcome with enough intelligence?
The Brutal Tyranny of g
— Dr. Hsu
Did you graduate?
Who figured it out?
Suck it up, take pre-calc, and cruise to an easy A while reading comics and playing tetris on your calculator during class.
There, I figured it out for you.
@Matt M
I don’t know about others, but my high school didn’t allow you to take courses they thought you were already past.
With a sympathetic teacher, an individual curriculum with them could count. Or if there’s a local community college, taking math there might work.
Also, be less bitter. Bitterness repels people of all levels of intelligence.
My guess is they didn’t allow him to take a course his freshman year which would then make it literally impossible for him to graduate, then, when this was pointed out to them, shrugged their shoulders and told him to “figure it out.”
But I could be wrong.
@Matt M
They don’t let you move “backwards” like that.
The answer for how I graduated:
You could take courses at UAA or APU (the local colleges) and, under certain conditions, use them for high-school credit, at a reduced conversion rate. However, being poor, my family could not afford these, and the administration knew it. (In a different battle with an ASD administrator, his explicit attitude when pointed to a provision in state education law was “so what, we know you can’t afford the lawyers necessary to make us comply with it.”)
What happened then was the “Anchorage is a small town” effect, whereby, my mother, in the course of, with the free daytime hours that came with being a housewife, making herself a persistant and belligerent irritant to the ASD administration, caught the attention of a kind-hearted individual in the Gifted Program personnel (who, as it turns out, was passingly professionally familiar with my retired-Special-Ed-teacher grandmother due to the Gifted Program being administratively grouped under Special Ed in Alaska, and who is also a second cousin of a childhood friend of mine) finally, out of charity, personally paid out-of-pocket for me to take two years of college calculus (whereupon, when asked by classmates to join them in study sessions thanks to being near the top of the class, I had to remind them that I was under eighteen, being driven by my mom, and still had a bedtime), which converted to the necessary year-and-a-half so I could graduate. Had said woman not stepped forward and given so generously, I would not have graduated.
Edit:
@urstoff
How do you do that? I mean seriously, I don’t know how. Same as how I just don’t get how to “let things go”.
Counseling / therapy would be a good start. It really can help people get over anger and bitterness (assuming they want to).
@Urstoff
I’ve been receiving various psychiatric care since my 2004 suicide attempt. Remember, everyone, this is me with therapy and on antidepressants.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If I can suggest an exercise, dedicate a day or two to turning off all the electricity where you life (if possible). Spend most of your day there without lights, heat/AC, internet etc. The guy that wired your house probably had an IQ 3-4 SDs below yours, and yet he was able to be a major piece in providing you with comfort and entertainment for years just by doing his job. There is so much more to the world than just being smart, and if you honestly feel like you are an unemployable loser perhaps trying to appreciate some other valuable qualities will be a good step forward.
I second this.
It also helps if you can rewire your concept of “smart” to include forms that don’t hinge on being an intellectual. A carpenter might have a lower IQ than a top-linguist but he will be to do the things the linguist can not accomplish.
Baconbacon, Zodiac,
You might not have read any of my comments where I shared this information, but I spent time growing up in a rural locale with no electricity, running water, sewer, and with only a woodstove for heating (in Alaska). And for longer than I’ve been alive, my father has worked in building maintenance and carpentry-type work (he used to be the maintenance guy for the very apartment building I live in back when it was owned by a different landlord).
(Then again, it was primarily undianosed dyslexia and ADD that led to his dropping out of high school and entering blue collar trade.)
Sounds like you need to find an environment where there simply are not many intellectually low-performing folks. A top law firm, college, or major tech company would be the sort of place where you would feel at home. And if you were also to live in a place where most work at such places, you would only rarely need to deal with the left-hand side of the distribution.
If he actually does have a problem interacting with people below IQ 130, you will still find plenty of people in the 120 range in good law firms, academia, etc.
Oh sure. But the distribution will be much more favourable. It will be like a hay-fever sufferer moving from a farmhouse to a big-city highrise.
Unfortunately, first, as I’ve explained before, I’m pretty much stuck where I am, for multiple reasons not readily remedied. And second, while I’d probably fit in better to the sort of places you list in terms of intellect, I would be even more likely expelled over the tribal/political differences.
On the other hand, the internet makes it possible to be part of non-geographical social groups.
If I could turn it around, what is it about normal people that irritates you?
I would say I’m in the medium intelligence category (nearer the top of “normal person” ( though I did end up in the top 1% for the Cambridge brain science test thing, so who knows?)) – and I find it very annoying when people are really amused by simple vulgarity, or when they take ideas seriously when they aren’t really prepared to think about them.
Examples that come to mind are non-respectible working class, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. How I cope with these people is to look for good intentions, and I also try to make their lives more enjoyable, as the purpose of the interaction.
If you end up looking like a stick-in-the-mud, or an unbeliever, sometimes people can enjoy that. So, be an honest misunderstood genius and think about all the fun normies are having out-grouping you.
The following passage offers inspiration that even if something doesn’t come naturally, you can compensate and learn to do it:
Beautifully argued!
I have a child and I think having kids, especially smart people having kids, is pretty great. So I support the idea in principle. It will take work to fix the problems and full advice would be very very long (you can email me at “theXXX@gmail.com where XXX is my first name if you want to chat about things, I had to go through some reasonably similar things, and I empathize enough that I want to devote a little time and try to help, if I can) but I’d say two things to start out:
1. You should (partially) fix the can’t-tolerate-normies thing by treating normies as systems to learn from via observation, rather than an equal to relation. Dale Carnegie said he never met a boring person, and there’s wisdom in that. Yes, they can’t think like you can, but you’re trying to figure out what makes them tick, what made them who they are, what matters to them, how you can help, and how you can improve your world model, and also share their joy/sadness/whatever and maybe even make them like/love you. None of that requires them to be *smart*. When you have to deal with such people, you then don’t think of it as being forced to have an intellectual talk with a (relative) idiot. You’re sort of combination playing a (very deep and difficult to master) game and studying the (very complex) world. As you say, in an important sense you’re not all that smart – yet. Time to get smarter.
2. You don’t want to actually marry a normie. Yes, this and age and gender and a few other conditions you clearly have given your other statements will together filter out 99.9%+ of the population but you only need one success and you have some rare positives to offer too. If you’re serious about this, you need to be in the places where you have a chance to meet people you could date and that wouldn’t bore you, so you can at least get the practice, and prioritize that, etc etc.
I’d also assure you that yes, you can get pretty far along in life with all of these problems, overcome them, and have a great family at the end of it, if you want it enough and do the work. And you should want it. And you should do the work (and the work is worthwhile just to improve your own life experience on your own, with the rest as bonus).
None of that is earth shattering or genius or even weird advice, of course. The work is the work.
But what inspired me to actually start typing this comment is the part where someone these Hlynkacg, Deiseach and co. called you a perdiferous traitor and that this seems to be your motivation for going through the (by your current estimate, Shut-Up-And-Do-The-Impossible-Level-Hard task) so that these people would *stop calling you names*.
I don’t know what kind of warped dynamic is going on there, but it sounds pretty freaking terrible. If you want to have kids so you can fight for the future of yourself, your family, your tribe, your memes, humanity, whatever, I have less than no problem with that. If those guys convinced you that this is the right thing to do, I have no problem with that either. But that’s not what you said! What you said was that this was so those people would stop calling you a traitor. This is very different from you thinking that not doing this would actually make you a traitor.
You are taking on a task that will take up a huge portion of your remaining life even in the best case of huge outrageous instant success. It has great rewards. If your heart is in it, I encourage you to do it! But don’t do it so other people stop calling you names. As a general rule, don’t do ANYTHING so some guys on the internet stop calling you names. It’s a stupid reason, and if you try to have a family for that reason your heart will NOT be in it, it will be obvious to you and to everyone else, and it will… not go well.
Most of your numbered “advice”, and my objections, limitations, and barriers thereto, were covered in the previous discussion which started here. But, to quote from that opening post, I described myself as
And when I say I’m an “ultra-rightist”, I mean I think that, in terms of politics, culture, society, and pretty much everything but science and technology, the entire “Enlightenment” is a terrible, terrible mistake. That we’ve been going in the wrong direction for at least 500 years. That we should bring back feudalism and hereditary aristocracy. Forget gay marriage or no-fault-divorce, I think we need to roll back the whole “romance” thing toward arranged marriages again. Even though I’m an atheist personally, a fan of Arnaud “Kill them all and let God sort them out” Amalric and the Inquisitions. I’m a self-described Kyriarchist.
So, I ask of you the question I’ve asked others: if marrying and having and raising White Monarchist Kyriarchist children isn’t the way for me, personally, to fight for the survival of White Monarchist Kyriarchy (as folks like Well… claim it is), then what is?
I noticed you pulled a bait-and-switch. In those other discussions, where those other commenters ordered you not to despair, you were talking about the survival of “your tribe” or “your people.” But now you’re explicitly talking about the survival of “White Monarchist Kyriarchy.” The issue is not whether you have any chance of perpetuating your philosophy, the issue is that they disagree that everyone must follow your prescriptions to prevent the inevitable destruction of the white race, or whatever it is you’re actually arguing for. (I admit, I find your philosophy hard to follow, partly because the implications about (((my people))) make it hard for me to approach it objectively.)
They aren’t saying “don’t despair, because there’s a chance that kyriarchy will spread and save the Borderers”, they’re saying “don’t despair, because your beliefs are wrong – the Borderers aren’t doomed.” But you’re stubborn about your beliefs and they haven’t argued against them, so instead we’re going back and forth over whether your beliefs are grounds for despair.
Of course your beliefs are grounds for despair. You think everything is terrible and everyone is doomed. Now if I ever reached that conclusion, I would wonder if there was something wrong with my premises, but honestly I don’t have the patience or fortitude to engage with your beliefs any longer. I just want to make it clear what we’re really talking about here.
And they’re clearly wrong.
Why? Why is “everything is terrible and everyone is doomed” automatically always not a reasonable conclusion to come to when the evidence supports it?
Because it means I wouldn’t enjoy every sandwich as much as I could.
let (((my people))) gooooooo
————————————
Kevin C, look, my guy. Under your philosophy, everyone is screwed.
In reality, people will probably find a way to make it work. We’re adaptable. The current situation can’t continue on forever (and if it can, then we’re fine regardless). The worst-case scenario is usually that our society will collapse and we will fall back into some sort of Dark Age…but considering your outlook, isn’t that basically what you were looking for anyways?
Not to mention that people are rebels. Many young people nowadays are going more “traditional” or “conservative” or “reactionary” or even just “anti-SJW”. I think humans are designed towards a pendulum effect, as an automatic corrective – thus, children rebel against their parents, and society constantly changes.
There doesn’t seem to be much evidence that he actually said it.
The evidence doesn’t support it. It can’t. Human society is too complicated and technological change too rapid and uncertain for the evidence to provide adequate support for either that claim or its denial.
Which at least suggests that your belief in it may be due to things other than evidence.
So what immediately jumps out at me with respect to the difficulties of relating to people, is that you’re having trouble due to a *combination* of high self concept and low achievement signal, perpetuated by a broken humility system. (I really don’t mean this to be overly harsh, and I read you as having a thick enough skin that you can handle the gritty details without too much offense. Let me know if I’m crossing any lines.)
Having *either* cocky arrogance or low achievement are acceptable in and of themselves in the sense that people tolerate a lot of bullshit from high status people and will frame that bullshit in surprisingly favourable light. But if you’re not packing high local status and hard to fake proof of competence, you’ve got to be humble, because people are going to emphasize any mistake you make and hold it against you. You can get away with talking down to people relatively freely, IF they believe that what you’re saying actually has real value to them. The key problem seems to be that they hear the words, look at your credentials, and conclude that you’re more deluded than smart.
What seems to be holding you back is that your humility drive is turned completely off. The ample evidence that the majority of the population is flat out better than you are at some very important skillsets that you seem to genuinely wish to improve upon should engage those humility circuits and downregulate your sense of superiority. When it doesn’t, this is what people read as arrogance (At which people they’re likely to want to sabotage anything you’re doing). The fact is, raw intelligence without having the necessary supporting skillset is like having beefy quads over broken femurs.
So from here, it looks like you have a few options:
1) As suggested above, practice being nice and realizing that despite what the tests have told you, you’re no better than the normies you currently look down upon. They don’t understand the complex subjects you use your smarts for, but you don’t understand how to interact with other people well enough to accomplish your goals. Congratulations, you’re both humans with tangible and meaningful strengths and flaws. Welcome to the team.
2) Get money, fuck bitches. If you apply those mental skills and succeed to the point where you can afford some good clothes, a sweet car, a big house, and cash to buy exclusive tables and bottle service at the local clubs, as depressing as it is, you can be as much of a superior dick as you like to people and many will love you for it. Success without talking to people is hard, but possible if you can code up a killer app, sell things online, play emotionless competitive poker or, fuck, run a suitable cryptocurrency mining botnet scam? I don’t know what your skillset is, but I do know that to get anywhere you’ll need to find a way to start leveraging it.
3) A combination of the previous two. In that both of these strategies have positive synergy with the other. Relating to people gets easier when they’re inclined to give you more slack, and gaining the status that leads to them giving you slack is easier when you’re being cordial. It’s always hardest when you’re starting from no momentum.
In answer to your final question, 3 is my strategy, and it works fairly well. I’m naturally a pretty big dick, often get frustrated when people don’t grasp things that seem obvious, and have to expend effort to keep it in check. I still run into trouble in places where I have low local status, and will come off as arrogant in those situations with the same behaviour that would be lauded as confident in places where I’ve had a chance to demonstrate ability. It’s going to be a long learning process no matter how you do it.
Don’t force kids in your life right now. Sounds like you have other issues too work out first.
Instead, start working harder to persuade other members of your tribe to have more kids.
Suppose you figure out a way to overcome all your problems, you are planning on using those new skills to more efficiently convince other people to … well to punch people like me, right?
Would it be accurate to describe your goal as tricking a woman into letting you impregnate her, on the basis of feigned interest in her as a person? A child that she would then have to support entirely on her own, given that you have no job? You have a different outlook than many people, but you’ve never indicated that it is amoral. Why wouldn’t this simply be a wrong thing to do, as murdering someone else is (typically?) wrong?
Your ongoing “SSC regulars have stated X, Y, and Z and therefore I must reproduce” shtick is beside the point.
Be fair, he could be the homemaker in that scenario.
Granted, that’s more at odds with his desired culture, but that doesn’t automatically rule it out; culture isn’t an all-or-nothing deal.
Plus, there is also always government support. Plenty of groups manage to have lots of kids on “welfare”. Just look at the high usage rates of “government benefits” by the Hasidim of places like Kiryas Joel, New York, and the large number of children they manage to have. (Now, I know some on my side see this and rant about “Jewish parasites”, but not here, right?)
First, it isn’t my goal. (My goal is White Monarchist Kyriarchy.)
Fine, in case it wasn’t clear, I’ll make it more so: this would indeed be wrong. I agree that I’m not fatherhood material and that having kids like that would, beyond being effectively impossible, would also be immoral. I think all of us, my IRL friend included, are agreed I should not be biologically reproducing (with the possible exceptions of Mr. “the ‘All-Trite’ just need to focus on getting themselves and other white people to have more kids” Well…, and my mom’s faint hopes for grandkids). I’m not interested in having kids.
So, then: how do I then, personally, advance the cause of White Monarchist Kyriarchy, since “laying down and accepting inevitable defeat by an invincivle Left” apparently remains an unacceptable option (if I want to be anything other than “(((Grima Wormtongue)))”, that is)?
And further, to the other main question: how do other smart folks manage the difficult task of interacting over a >30 IQ gap, with all the differences in modes of thought, of interest, and everything else? Or handling the knowledge of being vastly outnumbered by said alien folks?
(Further, I’d also point out that when I reference a particular trio of commenters, that’s because the post is at least partially aimed in their particular direction.)
What would you have to do if your master told you that your ideas were stupid?
Probably get killed for being an infidel. Like I’ve said before, any government which is even moderately close to my ideal, to what I think is necessary, would almost certainly have me executed.
That’s good. Psychologically questionable but ethically sound.
(1) You have to persuade some people. There therefore has to be something appealing about your political ideas.
(2) Aim to create the conditions where such a political system would be the only one that could flourish.
(3) Just put it out there and don’t worry too much about doing anything about it. Leave that to social developments and more socially influential people.
Write stuff. Given that you expect the masters to kill you, it might be for the best if it comes to pass after you’ve gone.
@Mark
How? What conditions would that be, and how does one aim to create them?
@Kevin C.
Start by reading the Handmaids Tale and study the rise of New Gilead.
Sounds a lot like your complaints, except for religion part.
Foster an alliance between the Militant Atheists and the Pence style Evangelical Christians.
Make a Big Tent.
Think up better arguments for it or better ways of putting those arguments. The biggest thing I’ve ever done to advance free trade was thinking up a way of describing the principle of comparative advantage that was more intuitive than the usual ways (“growing Hondas” for those familiar with it).
Most interactions with other people are not about explaining difficult ideas.
Why is that a problem? If most people are less smart than I am, that makes it easier for me to achieve status, and it provides me ways of earning income used, among other things, to pay other people to do things for me that don’t require a high IQ and that I don’t particularly want to do.
Are you imagining that all of those people are a threat to you? Smart people different from you would be more of a threat. When someone calls up to offer, in an Indian accident, to fix my (nonexistent) Windows computer, it’s obviously a scam. If the scammers were much smarter, they might sometimes fool me.
Find or create a shared interest. Outside the most abstract and intellectual skills, hard work beats IQ ten times out of ten, so if you have broad enough interests you can almost always find something the “normies” have to teach you. Especially if you’re talking to people who’re older than you are.
If your friend is not just a “normie” but also an unskilled layabout, find better friends.
Perhaps I wasn’t clear, but my friend wasn’t talking about when I talk to him, but when I talk to others; he’s got a verbal IQ in the 150 range himself. (And he’s got a fifth kid on the way.)
s/friend/new friend
My impression has always been that hard work is really really rare. I generally don’t count on finding it in groups that haven’t selected for it somehow.
While this is true, one problem I’ve always had with it is that when I’m learning from somebody a couple SDs below me in terms of IQ, I often feel somewhat constrained in the types of questions I can ask and actually have them understand. Or the range of concepts I can try to find analogies in. I think this is a good start to a strategy, but learning from somebody who isn’t as smart as you can be challenging. Do you have any advice about how to be taught by the “normies?”
What kind of questions could you ask that people wouldn’t understand?
Depending on the person, it could range from questions that involve math, to (it feels like) questions that take more than five words. Example from a recent conversation on real estate prices:
How valuable is it for an essential repair to already be done? For example, if you could buy a house for $200k, but there was a crack in the foundation that you estimated would cost $20k to fix, or you could buy an identical house next door that had had the same problem, but the owner had fixed it and documented it, how much more would you pay for the second one?
Unless I’m missing something (whoops!), that doesn’t seem conceptually difficult – it’s probably more a matter of language processing.
(You also have to take into consideration how long a repair lasts?)
I suppose the real limiting factor is keeping a number of balls in the air at the same time when dealing with a complex sentence. I think people can sense when something is pointlessly complex, as well.
“I go to a shop, and they are selling four sweeties for 2p, but two of the sweets are inedible. What is the maximum price I should pay to a shopkeeper who is prepared to sell me two sweeties?”
You can rephrase that as, “A shopkeeper will sell me two edible sweets for 2p. How much should I pay a shopkeeper for two edible sweets?”
So I suppose less intelligent people are just less well able to parse complex sentences?
I’ve definitely got a lower than 150 IQ. Can someone ask me a question (that doesn’t rely on specialist knowledge) that will bamboozle me?
[ EDIT
I can answer my own request here:
Prove any line passes through at least two points using the axioms given below.
Definitions:
Collinear means lying on a common line
Lines are parrallel if no point lies on both
Three axioms:
Any two points lie on a unique line
If the point P does not lie on line L there is exactly one line, L’, passing through P and parallel to L.
There exist three non-collinear points.
========================
I don’t have the brain power to answer that question. Why not.
Answers on a postcard.
]
I also think it’s not conceptually difficult, but I didn’t get an answer out of them. There’s certainly a balance between specificity and simplicity and that phrasing tilts a bit towards specificity. In most conversations, I would probably have asked something more like:
“How much value does a repair add to a house? E.g. would you rather buy a $200k house then pay $20k to repair it, or buy a house for $220k.”
And trusted them to answer the version of the question that’s most interesting for somebody who cares about real estate to answer. But I’ve learned that the person I was speaking to will get distracted by details that I was really not trying to talk about (E.gl Whichever one has the better neighborhood)
Anyway, phrasing choices aside. I don’t think my version is particularly hard to understand. Which is my point. It can be hard to learn from somebody with a much lower tolerance for complexity/math/pointless erudition than me, even if I know they are experts in the subject and I am a novice. I asked some questions I thought were more complicated and got perfectly good answers, but something about that one didn’t translate into their framework. And I was imagining that that sort of thing would only happen more for somebody with IQ 150 instead of ~120.
Spoilers ahead
@Mark
1) Suppose you have a line L, we will show that there are at least two points on L.
2) We have 3 points, A, B, and C, which are not colinear
3) Therefore one of the points (WLOG it’s A) does not lie on L
4) There is a line L’ which passes through A and is parallel to L
5) Now either B xor C lies on L’ or neither does
6) Case: neither B nor C lies on L’
—-a. Then the lines defined by AB and AC are different lines from L’, so they are not the one line parallel to L
—-b. So AB and AC must each intersect L at a point. And they can’t intersect at the same point, say D, because then both lines would contain AD, which would mean they were the same line, A, B, and C are not colinear
—-c. So there are two different points that lie on L
7) Case: B and not C (WLOG) lies on L’, and C does not lie on L
—-a. The same basic argument as above applies. CA and CB are different from L’ so they’re not parallel to L, so they intersect L at two different points. So there are at least two points on L
8) Case: B and not C (WLOG) lies on L’, and C lies on L
—-a. Consider the line AC, and the point B.
—-b. As we know, B is not on AC, so there is a line B* which passes through B and is parallel to AC.
—-c. Since there is exactly one line parallel to B*, and it’s AC, L is not parallel to B*, so they have a point in common, but it’s not C, since C is on AC
—-d. So there are at least two points on L
In all cases, L has at least two points
That was fun, thanks.
@genisage
That seems like an answer as well, which translates to:
“Your question is not worth answering because the two choices are so similar that other differences are almost certainly more important.”
I’d suggest that the issue is not so much that they don’t understand the question, but rather, that they consider it a waste of time to answer.
Me and my best friend have had a lot of conversations on this matter. The main thrust of it is he feels that despair that you describe pretty strongly while I feel it a lot less.
It may be difficult to change because the difference in our outlooks comes largely from very core values. He seeks approval and understanding from others. I do not. I learned very early on that to seek this is a fool’s errand, so I stopped caring about it. I don’t know how easy or hard this is to change for someone later in life.
The key to my finding peace with the situation was that I formed my values and preferences such that my happiness relies on other people as little as possible.
The only real frustration I get is, predictably, when interacting with someone who has power over me who is also not as intelligent. For obvious reasons this is infuriating to anyone, but the more intelligent someone is the more often it’s going to happen.
As for finding romantic partners, hell if I know what to do. Combine lack of practice, a little awkwardness, a crushing work schedule, and high IQ disastrously squelching compatibility, well, you know how things are going. I’m sure there are a lot of things I could be doing differently to help my chances. I even know what some of them are, but I feel like there are way too many problems for me to solve. That is, it’s bad enough that solving one or two of the problems probably won’t help very much.
Maybe I should stop caring about my partner being of similar intelligence to me. I guess let me turn around and ask that as a question: can deep romantic relationships across a large intelligence gap work?
How many people without a large intelligence gap have deep romantic relationships? What is ‘deep’ anyway?
In general, relationships can offer a bunch of things, like companionship, being pushed out of your comfort zone, getting to have/raise children, sex, having deep intellectual conversations, etc.
Most people compromise in relationships, where they regularly seek the missing things outside of the relationship. Intellectual stimulation is especially one such thing, which people sometimes find at work, with their friends or on the Internet.
Do you want to? I’m dead serious. Do you actually want to have friendly/normal interactions with less intelligent people? Do you want to tolerate, much less appreciate, them? Or would that be a betrayal somehow of your identity? Are you sure you haven’t built a disdain for unintelligent people into your self-narrative? Think seriously about these questions.
You have my sympathy. At a certain point in my life I realized I had to give up being a “smart person.” I consciously starting saying “stupid” things, having “stupid” conversations, making “stupid” small talk, listening to “stupid people” music, watching “stupid people” television. I changed my political and religious views to “stupid people” ones, etc. I found, of course, that none of this affected my ability to think deeply about math. That is to say, while being smart had some concrete practical benefits for me, it turned out to be completely nonessential to my identity.
Remember that you’re a stranger in their land. It’s your duty to learn their language and assimilate. You’re being asked to sacrifice important aspects of your identity for something greater. And if the ideas you hold dear aren’t up to the task of inspiring you to accomplish this, they might not be worth the trouble.
Maybe you should find yourself a mail order bride. One that doesn’t speak much English, so you won’t need to have conversations with her and suffer that issue.
Though given you seem to hold some form of white nationalism (unless I’m mistaken) I suppose you wouldn’t want to have mixed race children?
This is bad advice, since he doesn’t seem criminally savvy. Approximately all of the services that offer connecting mail order brides and grooms are scams. I figure there is a black market in I-can’t-believe-they’re-not-sex-slaves, but he’s unemployed, not a shady millionaire.
I can’t say I have any familiarity with mail order brides beyond the handful of sensationalist news stories that pop up every now and again, but I did expect cost would probably be an issue for the guy given his status.
But having seen a fair few of Kevin C’s tales of woe in past open threads, I’m not sure if there is good advice that he can follow. Every time people make suggestions they are rebuffed, sometimes with unavoidable reasons and sometimes because it seems he just won’t make the effort. So, I figure that some out-of-the-box ideas could prove more useful
Lateral thinking is fine, but let’s shoot for things at least as likely to give him progeny as converting to Islam and joining ISIS in Syria.
@sohois
White nationalism is extremely compatible with a bride from Eastern Europe, where many people have such beliefs.
She would presumably also cope better with the Alaskan weather 🙂
Was assuming that the most likely source of a mail order bride would be East Asia, though I suppose Slavic countries do also seem to be a source. The former is presumably a lot more obtainable from a financial perspective.
I’m just a counterfeit 135, but:
– I’ve learned some of their “language” and can imitate it reasonably well.
– I restrain myself from giving them advice, because they can’t handle any advice I can give them.
– I avoid contact with those that compound low intelligence with bad personality. A well-behaved, pro-social dumbass is not hard to get along with.
There are some interesting bits of data that can be dug out of the US Department of Homeland Security’s latest quarterly “Legal Immigration and Adjustment of Status Report“, covering the six-month period from October 1 to the end of March:
•560,150 legal immigrants got green cards, for an annual rate of about 1.12 million/year. By comparison, the US annual birth rate is 3.98 million a year, only 3.55 times higher.
•286,541 new temporary workers and their families, with 167,510 being “temporary workers and trainees” specifically, arrived during the Oct.-Dec. 2016 quarter, for a rate of about 670 thousand per year. As best I can find, the number of people turning 18 in a year in the US is roughly 3.9 million, about 5.8 times higher, or roughly one new temporary worker for each five to six residents entering the workforce*.
•Add these two, and you get something like one new foreign worker for every 2.2 Americans entering the work force.
•Further, if you look at the break-down of the temporary workers by profession, about half are fairly high-skill “white collar” jobs like engineers, accountants, doctors & nurses, professors, and designers**.
•Of those 560,150 new green card holders in the six-month period, only 75,262 got in based on their work or their skills (“employment-based preferences”), or roughly 13.4% (about one in 7.4). 375,274 got in as family (“chain migration”), or 67%, and the rest are mostly refugees, asylees, and the 20,516 listed simlpy as “Diversity”.
Remember, this all refers legal immigration. So, some hard data on present flows, for understanding what is meant with regards to more or less legal immigration, more or less skilled or unskilled immigration, the relative proportions of family-based entry, and so on.
*Yes, not everyone turning 18 is entering the workforce, as many are going to college, but the older cohorts who will be either graduating or dropping out from those same colleges are only slightly smaller, which would serve to push the temporary worker/”native new worker” slightly upward. Also, at least some of the people who get in as “spouses or other family” of temporary workers will probably be entering the workforce as well, also nudging up that ratio.
**Not exactly the sort “taking jobs Americans just won’t do.”
Of note you want to use net immigration, not gross. A cursory reading makes it appear that you are just using total immigrants, when some portion of them return to their home country (and I would wager than % is higher than that of US born moving out of country).
So, the US immigration system (67% family, 13% work/skills, 20% others, mostly refugees and asylum claimants) is near the opposite of the Canadian, as far as those numbers go? In 2010, says Wikipedia, the numbers for Canada were 22%, 67%, and 11% (of whom 9% refugees/asylum claimants).
It seems weird to, instead of bringing in high-skilled immigrants, bringing in temporary workers instead to do high-skilled jobs.
Yeah, the especially crazy bits of our immigration policy, to my mind, are:
a. We take in a lot of foreign grad students/postdocs, often in STEM fields. When their studies are done, their visas expire and they have to go home. This makes no sense to me–if there’s anyone we can be pretty sure isn’t going to be a major drain on the public treasury, it’s someone who has just gotten a PhD in molecular biology or computer science or something.
b. We take in a lot of guest workers on H1B visas that chain them to their employer, creating a kind of serf class of employees that can’t negotiate on pay or move between employers. Again, this is nuts–if they’re worth letting in to work as programmers or engineers or whatever, we should give them flexibility to work wherever they like. That would also make the competition between foreign and domestic workers a lot more even, since the foreign workers wouldn’t be chained to their job. (Making them somewhat more appealing to some employers, and giving high-tech employers a big advantage in negotiating salaries with domestic employees.)
What is the point of this system? Is it just the way it’s evolved? It seems like it benefits universities and industry more than the US as a whole.
The big flaws with the Canadian system, as far as I can see, are: one, that letting someone with Qualification X in doesn’t mean that the British Columbia X Association or whatever will let them practice, because their incentive is to keep the number of people doing X down to keep wages high. Two, the immigration court system is badly backlogged, and what judge someone gets seems to be the decisive factor over any others.
As it actually plays out in practice, those STEM grad students get two years of OPT work authorization. That gives their employer two shots at the H1B lottery to get them a visa, or if they aren’t Chinese or Indian directly apply for an employment based second preference greencard.
And as for those H1Bs, portability is a very real thing that H1B holders are very savvy about in my experience.
The system has some really dumb features, but the problems you point out are not nearly as bad as you are making them out to be in practice. At least as things stand right now — growth mindset!
A statistics note: very few people getting green cards are new immigrants: almost always, they previously had legal temporary visas. I think that you are double-counting: of the 167,51 temporary workers, 75,262 will eventually get green cards.
Or in other words, the total number of legal immigrant was about what it was a century or so ago, into a population three times as large.
A glorious thing of which I have only just become aware: Rococopunk. Much like the author of that piece, I dig the style of the guy with “OPULENCE” written across his knuckles.
Occasional SSC commenter Freddie DeBoer published this post on Medium a few days ago, about the slippery lack of principles in the current anti-free-speech behavior and rhetoric of some leftists. I must admit, the fictional conversation he wrote is rather stilted and clearly designed to make him look like the better party. But overall, I find his characterization of such arguments completely accurate based on my interactions with others and observations of others’ interactions within the leftist communities I inhabit. Thus I find his post quite convincing.
But of course I would find DeBoer convincing; I’m in his tribe, and I already agree with almost all of his ideology and political views. The fact that I find him convincing when he says “There’s no there there” doesn’t tell me that there actually is no there there. And when I perceive something as having “no there there,” I believe the healthy thing to do is to lean towards the belief that I’m being blind to some important principle, rather than that the people I’m looking at really are just being unprincipled and tribal (I certainly don’t consider “my side gets to do whatever” to be a legitimate underlying principle). That’s way too convenient an explanation that anyone can jump to for any reason.
So what I’m curious about is, does anyone know strong counters to DeBoer’s post? Where does he make errors, or where does he miss important points that the real people upon whom he bases his “Pro-censorship leftist” character might make which show that actually, they do have a principled pro-censorship position? I’ve looked for such principles, but so far I’m still stuck at the “no there there” phase, and I’m at a loss as to if there’s a way out. Unfortunately actually talking to these people hasn’t gotten me anywhere, because from my experience, conversations go like the fictional one DeBoer wrote up in his post, along with being called a Nazi sympathizer (I’ve been fortunate enough not to be called a literal Nazi, at least).
I would rather avoid rah-rah-ing about how correct DeBoer is and how much those “Pro-censorship leftists” suck. All that would do is to feed my own confirmation bias. Also completely uninteresting is whether or not there exist just as many people on the right wing that are just as censorious. What I’m really interested in is what principles those on the left who are pro-censorship are holding which I believe I’m missing.
Nice article, thanks for sharing. I lean center-right and this is further evidence that, while I disagree with several of his object-level ideas, Freddie DeBoer is admirably principled and coherent. Much respect. I wish more Twitblr lefties were more like him and less like the PCL caricature.
I would also be interested in a steelman of the PCL if someone has it.
As an aside, I don’t really agree with Freddie De Boer on political principles very much, but I find him worth reading because he’s a smart person who seems to me to be honestly trying to think about the world and discuss it. IMO, one of the best ways to avoid sealing yourself into a self-congratulatory bubble is to find serious thinkers with whom you disagree on many fundamental ideas, and read them. (Randy Waldman, who writes the interfluidity blog, is another thinker on the left who I’ve come to take very seriously, for the same reasons.)
I suspect DeBoer’s caricature departs from reality with:
“What, you want to give “mainstream conservatives” a place to speak on campus? Any conservative contributes to racism, war, and poverty!”
Milo and Spencer and Condoleeza and Coulter and the rest aren’t entirely mainstream conservatives. Some of them are only half a standard deviation or so from the mainstream, but I’d expect most of the pro-censorship left to articulate reasons why any particular speaker is objectionable, and to assert that they would be entirely amenable to a truly mainstream conservative speaker but that somehow the conservative students’ groups never invite those speakers.
And they are sort of right, because in the political spectrum “truly mainstream conservative” maps to “boringly milquetoast and uninteresting to college activists”, hence either not invited or not noticed when they are. This would merely make the would-be censors’ argument unfalsifiable, not correct, but even that much DeBoer won’t allow them (at least in this essay).
I think its way simpler than that.
Conservative ideology is simply not competitive in 21st century academe, and conservative ideologues are just seen as accessible proxies for the Hated Donald Trump.
De Boer is just a high-verbal panderbot.
How does Condoleeza belong in that group?
I’ve seen that from non-campus SJWs, perhaps not quite word for word (less poverty and war, more oppression of marginalized people).
Best I can tell, they wouldn’t accept anyone to the right of Kasich.
I have seen a couple of articles on Middlebury suggesting that Murray was just an accessible proxy for Trump, even though Murray doesnt support Trump– do any conservative intellectuals support Trump?
One article also stated that the student union voted against disciplinary action for the protestors but the administration imposed it anyways.
And they only accept Kasich during the GOP primary. Once he wins the nomination, they don’t accept him anymore either (see: McCain, Romney)
@Matt M
I suspect you’re right, but I don’t have direct evidence.
The most liberal guy with something of a shot in the GOP primary becomes a mainstream media folk hero just about every cycle. Unless they actually win.
The Liberal Pulpit post Free speech on campus didn’t convince me, but it did lay out some principles that the writer felt supported protesting/blocking/disinviting speakers on campuses.
I don’t know if this answer is satisfying or even welcome but I’m pretty much here:
and as for his response:
To take it in two parts, yes I could see how you would care very much about the issue since it is your workplace. Likewise for the individual students and professors involved. But I’m not an academic or a college student, so those reasons don’t apply to me.
As for the second part, I guess I’m not really defending student activists so much as pushing back on the meta-level against the notion that collectively we need to spend a lot of time, energy, and worry thinking about them. I don’t take student activism seriously. I think by and large it hasn’t accomplished much or been very influential. There are a handful of exceptions, but they are exceptions and I don’t think the current bunch has what it takes to replicate even those modest successes. Nor do I fervently wish that they could be reformed and harnessed into something powerful and positive. I suppose that implies I don’t fit the leftist part in the way FDB means either.
Even with respect to college campuses, I think what professors are writing is far more important than what undergraduates are doing. Look at Middlebury — Charles Murray wasn’t coming to present his political science research in a seminar to other political scientists. It wasn’t a serious academic event — it was the type of high middlebrow event sometimes put on by the local NPR affiliate or a public library. Academic freedom is fundamentally about research at the bleeding edge of human knowledge, not about the little status games undergraduates play with their student organizations.
Like everyone else I think “triggered” and “unsafe” is beyond dumb, but tell me that things like that are *the* major problem facing the United States and could easily lead to an existential crisis, and now I’m going to bucket you in the same general category as people that tell me seeing a rainbow flag with a star of david on it makes them unsafe.
Brad:
I think you are making a really fundamental error here in your assessment of the impact of no-platforming some speakers and ideas. Research is important, and obviously we want scientists to have unfettered flow of good information. But it’s also very important for people making decisions (including people who are now at Middlebury and in a few years will be elected governor somewhere, or will be working as a congressional staffer, or will be a midlevel manager at a big company, or just will be voting) to have good information available to them.
When I was a kid, I was able to read a lot of popular books on evolution (and lots of other areas of science). That helped shape my worldview, and led me to read and try to understand further as I got older, even though my field is nowhere close to evolutionary biology. But that was possible only because there wasn’t some successful campaign to shut down people spreading the idea of evolution to impressionable bright ten year olds. I would be a much poorer human being now if such a campaign had kept those popularizations out of my hands, lest I get the wrong ideas about morality or religion or something.
That’s not to say that a protest at Middlebury is anywhere in the top twenty political issues facing the US today. But there *is* something important going on there–deciding what college students will be allowed to hear or read or learn about or discuss is a way of influencing what the next generation of people making decisions will be allowed to know.
But no-one is seriously proposing banning Charles Murray’s books. They are proposing to not let him speak at a single university, and their mildly boisterous method of doing so is objectionable. The amount of people whose access to Murray has been shut down is probably actually negative, given the publicity he’s got, and so far as Middlebury was a step down a slippery slope towards widespread violence against political enemies, it was a pretty small one (in my opinion). It is relevant to principled left-wingers who don’t want ingroup members doing bad things, and relevant to right-wingers (both principled and not) who like to point at outgroup members doing bad things. That doesn’t make it important.
@albatross11
To follow up on what rlms is saying, and without trying to to be too cynical or channel Robin Hanson too much, the event really wasn’t about learning what Charles Murray had to say.
It was about the conservative student union doing something to justify its existence, hopefully poking the eye a bit of their fellow students, networking with each other and maybe with Charles Murray, being able to tell other people that they saw Charles Murray speak and so on. The invitation and speech was more performative than anything else.
Because of the Streisand effect it is far more likely given what happened that undergraduates at Middlebury are aware of Charles Murray’s basic view than they would have been had the speech went forward exactly as planned, with the the twelve members of the conservative student union plus a handful of significant others as the only students in attendance. It is true that those students are also aware that many of their contemporaries strongly disapprove of Charles Murray, but that would presumably also be the case if the student activists were to follow FDB’s preferred policy of engagement.
Information flow has literally never been freer than it is today. There’s absolutely no way to stop undergraduates at Middlebury or anywhere from going back to their dorm rooms and looking up Charles Murray on the internet.
What would you think about, hypothetical example, students pulling the same move on a university rally during the presidential campaign? Does the specific party/candidate in question affect your answer? Such events were for broadly the same purpose.
Apologies if this is an overactive pattern matcher, but this strikes me as unnecessary snark that makes your argument look more partisan-ly motivated.
There the situation is even clearer. Nothing at all to do with academic freedom — the college is just a venue.
Fair enough. But it is also true. I should know, I was one of them.
I’m willing to bet that the CSU at Middlebury is small and even big student groups don’t get high attendance at their non-controversial events.
Would you accept the general principle here that it’s not a big deal to disrupt / make impossible in-person meetings and speeches, because everyone’s ideas are available on the internet? That seems like a pretty awful principle to me. If I heard of some country where no books or websites were banned, but political rallies and speeches by some political parties/movements always got disrupted and shut down and the police never bothered arresting anyone for it, I would not think of that country as a place with strong freedom of speech.
So the Heckler’s Veto is fundamentally okay? I guess props for consistency, though I definitely disagree.
Yeah, it was hard to tell if I was making a mountain out of a molehill. I went to a big uni with big clubs (even my moderately niche group could reliably pull 30-40 people for meetings) so it was a biased assessment. It just scanned as mocking the group for being unable to pull higher membership, which given that it’s explicitly a partisan group pushes certain buttons… Apologies if that was not the intent.
@Brad
The idea that the event was intended as a publicity stunt for a political minority makes its violent suppression a bigger issue than otherwise, not a smaller one. Even Robert Bork agreed that freedom of political speech was important.
Blithely dismissing it as unimportant because after all, people can still buy Murray’s book is missing the point.
@The Nybbler
Freedom of speech in the sense that you are using, or the sense of that virtually everyone else uses (i.e. as against the government)? Because I don’t recall Bork ever writing about the former and I’ve read at least two of his books.
@albatross11
I think you are, perhaps unintentionally, moving the goalposts.
I started off by endorsing the view:
“Look, does any of this matter? It’s just happening on college campuses. Who cares?”
In response you said “if college kids, our feature leaders, don’t have access to these ideas it would be a bad thing”.
My sur-reply was “college kids are going to have access to these ideas”.
Your sur-sur reply goes off in a new direction about whether or not we’d say that such a place has strong freedom of speech. That doesn’t have to do with whether or not college kids have access to the ideas. Are you conceding that point?
As for the substance — first, I never used the term freedom of speech because I think it is a category error to use in the context of a private university and second that leads me right back to “”Look, does any of this matter? It’s just happening on college campuses. Who cares?”
I guess as another example, suppose it developed that gay pride parades in some blue collar city always got busted up by protesters. I mean, yeah, some people trying to support the gay pride parade get hospitalized, but no big deal, right? I don’t live in that blue collar city, and even if I did, there’s no censorship on the internet so gay people can communicate to their hearts’ content there.
Or suppose it developed that on some college campuses, whenever a bunch of black students invited controversial black speaker to campus, the white students showed up and disrupted the speech and sent one of the professors trying to host the event to the hospital.
Maybe neither of those would be a big deal in the grand scheme of things, either. I’m pretty sure they would be reported as major stories in the news media we have now, though, quite possibly with a Justice Dept investigation triggered.
1971 Bork would have excluded it:
1984 Bork had softened up a bit, and would have covered it:
Bork in both quotes is talking only about freedom of speech as it applies to restrictions or punishment from the government. I.e. the only thing anyone ever meant by the phrase ‘freedom of speech’ until not very long ago.
They are completely inapplicable to the discussion at hand.
This tired old meme again? It is astonishing how sensitive people can be to non-governmental power when it comes to economic issues, while forgetting all about it when it comes time to consider rights that aren’t property rights.
@Brad, I certainly am no expert on Bork (nor any kind of fan based on what I do know of him), but your sweeping generalization on what “freedom of speech” has always meant will not stand. John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty is not particularly recent, seems to be regarded as fairly influential, and champions freedom of speech. It is by no means exclusively concerned with government-imposed restrictions; Mill is quite explicit in discussing other threats to the freedom he advocates, and indeed seems to be more concerned about the non-governmental threats (as he seems to have thought his own government was mostly behaving itself in this area in his time).
@Protagoras
I’d be happy to discuss JSM’s take on liberty of thought and the contradictions it gives rise to in an appropriate thread. This isn’t it. Bork was referring to the First Amendment. Bringing him up was a red herring. Assuming arguendo there is a universally applicable ethical requirement in play, there’s no reason at all to believe its contours happen to track the First Amendment as interpreted by Bork or anyone else.
Don’t you think most of them got a false picture of Murray’s views, along the lines of “if so many people objected to him as a racist he must be a racist,” rather than the idea they would have gotten by hearing his account of his views? How many do you think actually responded by reading one of his books?
@David Friedman
Very few. But what’s on the other side of the balance?
You are a prominent non-left wing professor. I’m sure either advice a non-left student group or have been asked to so. Probably you’ve introduced an invited speaker or ten over the years.
If Bryan Caplan gets invited to speak at your university by the libertarian student society — no one protests, no writes a letter to the editor denouncing him, there’s no controversy — how many undergraduates show up? How many that aren’t already familiar with his positions?
Two responses: first, as albatross11 pointed out, academics influence the culture and elite college students eventually will govern you, whether through official positions or corporations, so this is at best equivalent to saying that the hole is at the other end of the lifeboat. And second, this mentality may be at its height among college students, but it has infected virtually every knowledge-based field. You can be a software engineer or a writer or a journalist or a moviemaker or a scientist, and there are still perfectly mainstream views which will put your employment in jeopardy if it’s a slow news day and enough Twitter zampolits find out about them.
I’ll agree with you that this isn’t the major problem facing the United States, but it is certainly a problem, and it’s the sort of problem that makes all the other problems worse by increasing the general atmosphere of mutual hostility and/or self-censorship in this country.
The historical evidence overwhelmingly shows that when college students cease being college students they cease acting like college students. It turns out that a whole generation didn’t turn on, tune in, and drop out but instead elected Ronald Reagan.
You are pointing to something that happens about as often as shark attacks and telling me it is certainly a problem. Sorry I’m not buying it. I feel bad for people that get attacked by sharks, but it’s a big country and lots of weird and unlikely shit happens.
Suppose you are a prominent social scientist, someone at the level of Pinker or Haidt. And suppose you find that the question of IQ and meritocracy and cognitive stratification really interests you. My claim is that given the example of Murray, you are substantially more likely to decide to go study something less contentious. Or you will decide not to publsh some analysis that you are pretty sure is true, because who needs the heartache?
That has consequences. Convincing researchers to go into some other field that is less likely to get them ostracised and no-platformed, that has a cost. (How interested are you in being a tenure-track assistant professor who studies heritability of IQ, in an environment where sometimes, people in your field gr a huge political backlash from the overwhelmingly liberal/progressive/socialist faculty?) Making it clear that making certain true and well-sourced statements can get you fired, that’s a good way to make sure that there are few accessible to the public discussions of that issue. Visibly establishing the norm that some questions and some subjects are outside the realm of allowable discussion, that can have consequences long after everyone’s forgotten about your kinda embarrassing protest-everything phase when you were 19.
I think incentives matter a lot. Just as a lot of journalists are effectively controlled by the threat of loss of access, I think a lot of researchers and prominent public intellectuals are effectively controlled by what ideas are controversial enough to get you shut down, make it really hard for you to give a speech, etc.
As a thought experiment: We rewind the clock to 2004, but make one change: Anyone who speaks in favor of gay marriage on a college campus can expect a good chance of being shut down, potentially having a riot start. Occasionally, someone is outed as being in favor of gay marriage, and then is visibly hounded from his job.
My guess is that in that world, we wouldn’t have legal gay marriage today. Becoming an open supporter of it would simply have been too risky, and so it wouldn’t have become something that most people were openly okay with.
Incentives matter.
Somewhat off to the side of your point, but are Pinker and Haidt even scientists anymore?
To your main point, I do think academic freedom is important. Faculty hiring being based in part on ideological litmus tests is a problem Something like this: Theology professor pressured out of Duke after protesting liberal racism ‘training’ program is concerning.
If yall were talking about actual academic freedom, I’d be right there with you. But the focus is instead on “freedom of speech” (with a very strange definition) and on the last crazy thing some undergraduates did somewhere — or in some cases not even undergraduates but random outside agitators.
Yiannopoulos was not a faculty member, Murray wasn’t a faculty member, Nicholas Christakis was faculty member but the incident had nothing to do with his research (didn’t even really have to do with him so much as his wife). If its chilling effects on research you are worried about these are not the examples that should have so much prominence.
I know that there is a wide range of ages of posters on here, I’ve seen the surveys and individual posters have mentioned their ages, so I don’t know why the obsessions and viewpoint are so often those of 20 year old beleaguered campus conservative that spends a lot of time on twitter.
Brad, you’re arguing that people shouldn’t be scared, and that’s just not how it works. It doesn’t take that many high-profile examples of folks punished for having the wrong politics to get everyone else to keep their damn heads down. Who wants to be at the center of the next Donglegate because they didn’t realize a cheka was in the next row of the audience eavesdropping on their dumb joke and composing a report to Buzzfeed and Gizmodo? It’s just not worth it, so you keep your joke to yourself. As well as your opinion of the cheka, because why take chances?
Over in the latest thread, abc is making dark remarks about the elephant in the room. Over here, we have Brad pointing at the rampaging elephant and saying “There’s no elephant! It’s just a harmless little mousie. Besides, it’s really far away and even if it bites, what harm does a little mousie do?”
@ThirteenthLetter
You can be as scared as you like by Stalinists hiding under every bed. And your counterparts can be triggered and unsafe by the Nazis that are lurking everywhere.
So it goes.
Beyond the points made by albatross11 and ThirteenthLetter, I’d also like to quote a bit I saw recently on Tumblr to address this point:
fatpinocchio:
Twitter, Tumblr, and the culture war industry in general represent a loud minority. In my experience (and I went to a small liberal arts college in CA), the regressive left isn’t even that popular there, so I expect that what we see is the result of the media seizing on unusual incidents because that’s what gets the clicks. In the broader world, it seems to basically be a non-factor. It’s more common to passively share posts with a regressive-left message, but most of those people are still reasonably normally tolerant in real life. Consistent liberalism is rare, but the norm of at-least-minimal liberalism through apathy still looks very strong. Free speech issues aren’t on most people’s radar, but they’d see punching “Nazis” as politically motivated hooliganism – if it were ever relevant to them.
I think if someone wasn’t directly subscribed to the culture war (or following someone who really cares about it), they’d see very little of it. Even if they’re interested in politics, the culture war may only rarely come up. While the left gets a lot wrong, in practice, it looks more like “Senator So-And-So introduced the Safer Pencils for America Act and some people support that” and less like the kind of illiberal SJ that Scott is concerned about. Republicans controlling everything means less influence for Senator Safer Pencils, but it doesn’t make a significant difference for the antifa cluster, because they wouldn’t have been able to do much anyway.
Which is not to say that the culture war is completely irrelevant for everyone. Maybe if you do IQ research at a university, you’d like to be able to talk about it without worrying that someone might come down on you. If you’re a conservative in a generally progressive industry, you’d like to speak your mind without being viewed as an idiot. And in the regular political sphere, both sides keep finding new ways to damage political liberalism. But as far as cultural liberalism is concerned, it doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere.
brazenautomaton:
it must be nice to exist somewhere that is yet undevoured, so you can pretend those who saw it happen are all just stupid and contemptible
fatpinocchio:
Considering the variance in places I’ve existed that are all undevoured, including what are supposed to be the main SJ centers/battlegrounds (liberal arts college, tech company), I’m skeptical of the extent of the devouring. And I don’t think that people who think otherwise are stupid and contemptible. I have a great deal of respect for Scott, whose post inspired my original comment. The problem is that there’s enough culture war content to surround yourself with it, and then it seems like it’s everywhere, so it’s easy to overestimate its importance.
This isn’t the greatest analogy, but it’s kind of like alcohol. Not only the addictive aspect, but also because if you’re in a peer group where heavy drinking is normal, it can seem like an inescapable part of socialization and takes up some of your mindspace, but if you stop engaging with it and find different people, you see that you were part of some weird group and that it’s actually not important.
brazenautomaton:
Yeah, if alcohol explicitly colonized all of the places where you could do the thing you wanted, and it was no longer possible to do the thing you wanted to do that had nothing to do with alcohol, due to the knowing, malicious, and deliberate actions of alcoholics; and alcoholics were currently colonizing another related thing that you wanted to do and making it their explicit mission to make it impossible for you to engage with it without being showered in alcohol and everyone was helping them and nobody was permitted to notice it was happening and every time you point it out people call you a hysterical liar who should be punished because you hate alcohol-drinkers.
fatpinocchio comes off as quite reasonable and brazenautomaton comes off as unhinged. The whole “aren’t permitted to notice” thing is especially nonsensical.
YMMV
Brad,
Search the SSC comment archives for the handle “DrBeat”.
The future ruling class is disproportionately likely to come from today’s students. If these people are picking up the kind of narrow-minded, censorious views shown by the student activists, that is a pretty serious problem, because they’re likely to carry them over into their future careers. Whilst being ruled by a class of narrow-minded, censorious people might not be the single biggest problem a country can face, it’s surely somewhere in the top tier .
They’ll be calmer and have more of a sense of proportion in their 40s as people with some actual power. On the other hand, their understanding of the world will still be profoundly shaped by what they saw and heard and thought about and discussed in college.
So, has anyone else here read The Guardian‘s “Why have four children when you could have seven? Family planning in Niger”
As a couple further points of discussion, I’d first note that a lot of people — not those in the article, but elsewhere — seem to assume that wealth alone is a solution. That however strong these pro-natal cultural norms are, that once these people become more “developed” and attain improved material conditions, that alone will cause these deep attitudes to shift. (Yes, the “demographic transition”, but don’t both American Hasidim and the Amish and associated groups provide at least limited counterexamples?)
On the other hand, I did see a comment criticizing this article (keeping in mind Poe’s Law and the near-ubiquity of trolls), on the grounds that it’s at least a little bit racist for white people to be discussing the fertility of foreign black people like this. And that trying to pressure shifts in these authentic cultural norms toward Western ones at least smells slightly of cultural imperialism. (I seem to recall asking here once before how one tells the white people pressuring other cultures toward WEIRD cultural norms that are “defending universal human rights” from the white people pressuring other cultures toward WEIRD cultural norms that are engaged in “cultural imperialism”.)
Yes. I think that an accusation of racism is basically the same as saying “be nice” or “that’s not nice”.
That’s what it means.
And actually, the world would be a far better place if we could find some way to replace every mention of racism with “not nice”.
Well…
pallets of cash are the obvious solution…don’t you watch Teen Mom?
Never heard of it. [Googles] Oh, “reality TV” on MTV, that’s why.
Also, not sure how that’s relevant, either.
You should watch it, its really a fascinating social experiment. You have these wildly disadvantaged teenagers, mostly low SES, some parents drug abusers doing prison time, some parents that are upper middle class. These girls are also unwed mothers and you know the statistics on unwed mothers…so in the beginning they do terrible things, like porn or drugs. But after 7 or 8 years of cash transfusions (250k per year I think) they have all transitioned to being successful citizens with nice houses in upper middle class suburbia, good parenting ethics, marriages, savings accounts and profitable businesses.
So yeah, pallets of cash.
So of course this doesnt scale to Kevin’s problem. But infusions of cash can change a country’s or ethnic group’s culture. Consider what Hamas did in Palestine and what KSA is currently doing in Indonesia.
This contradicts the usual story about lottery winners ending up rapidly in worse off situations. While that may be partly myth, I’d be quite wary to believe the workings of MTV reality show producers constitute a firm foundation for truth (a priori.data. you know?).
Secondly, do you really think “pallets of cash” scales to an entire nation? How does foreign aid to third world nations usually work out?
Reality TV is not real.
@Randy– its a mini-socio-lab with a sample size of 8.
It neither scales or maps. But it does contradict the cw on lottery winners.
@Well…
The pallets of cash are real.
If it does not scale, what’s the relevance to Kevin C’s excerpt?
As to the rest, I must say your comparison paints sociology in a rather unflattering light.
@bintchaos:
Maybe–maybe! But the results are produced by movie crews.
@bintchaos
Don’t have MTV, or any of the non-broadcast-TV channels. Can’t afford it. And not interested an pretty much all of them anyway. Probably at least 30% of the “visual media” I consume these days was made in Japan or Korea.
Plus, yes, all the points everyone else made: “reality” TV isn’t, non-representative, non-scaling.
@Kevin
That wasnt my point– my point was buckets of cash can fix problems.
For example– scolding Americans to have more children probably won’t work. But you could bribe them– big tax breaks per child, extended maternity/paternity leave, subsidized child care, free college educations, etc.
OOps! Those are all anti-conservative ideology!
Next optimal strategy– recruitment of outgroup chidren– like immigrants and college students.
OOps again! Banning immigration and forced reeducation on Racial Theory of IQ are going to alienate your target demographics.
Now what could work is what Hamas did in Palestine and what KSA is doing in Indonesia. Religious charity as a delivery vector for buckets of cash. But I guess that isnt appealing either because you are an atheist.
Shingeki no Kyojin?
This isn’t remotely true, last I saw. I haven’t seen the current season, but I did notice this little news article.
Same old teen mom screw ups.
Dr. Alexander, who is VERY INTERESTING really?
Are sock-puppets against the rules for SSC?
Scott, in the essay “Against Murderism” there were a few minor typos that I thought you’d want to fix up:
“…but a usually result of…” (usually a)
“When people ask whether immigration restricts are really…” (restrictions)
“IF you tried to solve this by firing these people…” (IF is in all caps)
“…but you can’t liberalism with people…” (You can’t use liberalism)
I don’t think I can steelman the whole anti-free-speech movement on campus, because it’s a multi-headed beast. You’re not dealing with a single person or small group that has a coherent intellectual position. Nor are you dealing with random sampling of what activists say–everyone reporting on those protests wants something sensational and offensive, so we surely aren’t seeing the best side of their arguments. Connor Friedersdorf has tried to actually engage some of the campus anti-free-speech people, and my take was that their position didn’t actually come off too well. (But then, I *would* think that, wouldn’t I?)
Here’s my attempt to steelman the one thread of this sort of argument I think I *do* understand. Around here, I think Ilya Shipster has argued something along these lines, but I don’t know how well I’m capturing his POV. Also, this is an attempt at steelmanning a position I don’t agree with, so I may or may not do it well.
Suppose you want to evaluate factual claims and political arguments, not just on a single axis of “how likely is this to be right,” but on two axes: The Y axis is likelihood of being true; the X axis is social impact of the idea being widely heard/believed.
We now have four quadrants. On the top right, we have things that are both very likely to be true and are socially beneficial. From a mainstream Democratic POV, an example of this might be global warming–it’s probably really happening, and it’s probably a net win for people to believe in it either way, since it will get people to move from coal to solar power. Those are discussions you want to encourage.
On the bottom right are things that are probably not true, but are still socially beneficial. An example of this would be “There’s no biological meaning to race” or “Differences between women and men are all socially defined.” It’s not really true, but it would be okay if lots of people believed it, because it would lead them toward good actions (encouraging women to play sports, breaking down sexism).
On the bottom left are things that are probably not true, and are also socially destructive even if true. An example of that would be the idea that vaccines cause autism or other major health problems. It’s pretty sure to be false, and belief in it leads people not to vaccinate their kids against measles.
On the top left are things that are probably true, and are also socially destructive whether or not their true. An example (from the mainstream Democratic POV) would be racial differences in IQ. Those exist, but having people know about them and talk about them will encourage bad actions and bad policies.
If you accept that ideas and facts should be evaluated on both these axes at once, then you have a problem when someone like Charles Murray wants to talk in public. You don’t want to engage him intellectually, because:
a. He’s probably right
b. Whether he’s right or wrong, discussing the matter in public gives it more attention, which is exactly what you want to avoid.
In that case, what can you do to respond to him? Something like the VOX hit piece doesn’t work, since they ended up basically saying in careful scholarly terms about 90% of the stuff you think nobody should ever say in public, for fear of bad social consequences[1].
So the only two choices left to you are either:
a. Ignore him in hopes nobody listens.
b. Try to no-platform him, shout him down, and send the signal that bringing up this topic will get you a bunch of unpleasant consequences.
Short form: If you believe that there are many political/social ideas which are socially damaging independent of their truthfulness, and should be suppressed to prevent that social damage, then no-platforming and protests that shut down speakers looks like a reasonable strategy. This is also a pretty good argument for formal censorship–banning the publication of some ideas or research or arguments.
Is this a fair summary of this point of view?
[1] I infer that they wanted to push back on the idea that discussing IQ or racial IQ differences was taboo, and that attacking Murray in Vox was a reasonably safe way to do so. But this may be me being uncharitable about their true motives.
If women have less desire to play sports, it doesn’t seem a good action to put social pressure on them, making them do things they like less over things they like more.
If people are susceptible to persuasion, isn’t increasing polarisation entirely explained by the internet? Maybe combined with some sort of ‘first-mover’ advantage for winning over someones heart/mind.
This is my thinking as well. Imagine a simple model where people tend to match their opinions with their neighbors, people are grouped into small clusters of neighbors, and there is some noise/randomness. The noise will lead to some of the clusters having different opinions from each other. But if you increase the size of the clusters or the connectedness between clusters, the effects of the noise will be less likely to persist. You’ll eventually get large “domains” with well-defined borders, like in an annealing process.
I don’t consider myself patriotic, but something kind of adjacent. I feel very fortunate to have been born and live in the country I do compared to most others, I generally appreciate the broad culture of the people where I live, and I feel affinity toward my country’s military members (I grew up on air force bases!). But given I support the dissolution of nation-states, including my own, and am generally not supportive of the political apparatus of my country, I think I’m dq’d from being patriotic.
Do you consider yourself patriotic? If you don’t, do you feel anything kinda patriotic towards your country?
It’s kind of arrogant to not be patriotic – you’re assuming that your preferred culture has a more-than-local significance, and/or you’re someone who just does things without any reference to those around you.
So, yes. I’m patriotic.
Rule, Britannia. (please)
What about the scale problem? Like that, I feel loyalty to my particular state and it’s local culture, but not the United States as a whole?
Hmmm… well I definitely love my city more than my nation, but I don’t think there is such a great difference that Northerners have become completely alien to me.
There is room in my heart for them. They fit into one of the concentric circles of love.
On the other hand, a distant stranger is probably preferable to a familiar enemy…
“I don’t think there is such a great difference that Northerners have become completely alien to me.”
Wish I could say the same (joking, everyone not on the wrong side of the Pennines has a place in my love circles somewhere).
Huh. I’d say not being patriotic is being humble – “I don’t know what the best country is, but I do know that my country isn’t perfect.” Sort of like making an antiprediction.
It would be arrogant to claim that some other culture you like is better, but I don’t see how an absence of patriotism alone is arrogant.
@IrishDude
And is that country Ireland, or is your username misleading?
I feel lucky to be born here, and like IrishDude “generally appreciate the culture of the people where I live,” but I’m not sure I would describe those feelings as “patriotism.”
I’ve always interpreted the idea as a tribal marker that has perceived value independent of a state’s other good-making properties. So “America is the best because it’s the land of opportunity” != patriotism, “America is the best because AMERICA” == patriotism.
Depending on the definition you choose, I’m either one of the most or least patriotic people I know.
Considering I am German I am not patriotic. It is basically part of the German identity to be anti-patriotic at this point. Anyone saying he is proud of Germany will immediately be suspected of being a literal Nazi.
The only time I personally was kinda proud of Germany was when Merkel opened the borders and seeing the ensuing way many communities reacted. Note: I am not for or against the refugees staying (that issue goes way over my head) but accepting them at least temporarily was the right thing to do.
So I was wrong about US-made Godzilla being America’s kaiju eiga.
Blompkamp’s second Oats Studio production (also released on Steam) is.
Firebase
Pretty amazing.
From Against Murderism.
Not me–I want this country to be destroyed by River God.
I hope this is allowed, but if it’s okay I’m going to repost a comment I made towards the end of the last OT, because I was hoping to hear what pro-minimum wage folks think, but I didn’t get any responses. Also, I have a thin pre-text of adding some culture war content I didn’t add last time.
After reading both the article in the NYT’s business section about the Seattle study and (coincidentally) some of Ron Unz’s pro-minimum wage increase writings, I would very much like to hear what pro-minimum wage/pro-minimum wage increase people have to say about this objection:
So, the minimum wage is pretty much as clear a violation of the material I studied in Introductory Microeconomics as one could imagine. We learned that price controls, where the government dictates a maximum or minimum price in a market, are bad ideas, because, if binding, they lead to shortages or surpluses, bad in the short run because welfare increasing mutually beneficial trades are prevented, bad in the long run because they send inaccurate signals to suppliers causing inefficient shifts in the supply curve. Like, literally, after writing that I got out my Intermediate Microeconomics textbook, and double-checked that, yup, this is exactly what’s cautiously yet definitively stated in chapter 1.
If I was the son of Kryptonian parents, sent to Earth as a teenager, not knowing anything about “politics” or “economics”, and I took an economics class at Smallvile High, I would have walked out assuming that maybe in the pre-Enlightenment era, foolish uneducated monarchs instituted price controls, but in the modern world of course our societies are rationally organized according to basic principles agreed upon by our learned scholars.
But then I would have been proven to be a total chump, because apparently, not only do politicians ignore the scholarly consensus, the scholars ignore the scholarly consensus. Not only do we have a minimum wage, but many prominent economists, even though generally notably less supportive than the general public, actually support raising it. See e.g. the IGM panel survey on a $15 minimum wage or the letter signed by 600 economists in support of a $10.10 minimum wage. (Just from scrolling down the list of signatories briefly, I see multiple economics Nobel laureates.)
(THIS FOLLOWING PART IS THE ACTUAL OBJECTION YOU CAN IGNORE THE OTHER PARTS IF YOU WANT)
So…why? Well, as best as I can understand, the arguments are:
(I’d like to include links, maybe will do so in follow up comment, but adding them seems to get comments banished to the circle of the digital Inferno reserved for spam.)
1) Efficiency wages: because people aren’t inanimate objects, paying them more incentivizes them to be more productive.
Please enlighten me if I’m missing something, but this makes no sense to me: if paying people more is a self-fulfilling productivity prophecy on some margin, why isn’t that already incorporated in the demand function for labor? (That is, if paying people more makes them produce more, why do business owners need the government to tell them to do that, rather than just doing it to gain an advantage themselves?) What collective action problem does government intervention solve (or ameliorate) here?
2) The effects won’t be that bad.
Okay, sure…but that’s not really an argument for raising (or having) the minimum wage.
3) It will save ordinary taxpayers money by reducing welfare payments. It will reduce corporate profits, not increase prices, and who cares if it reduces corporate profits?
The thing is, even though a fair amount of people pay some taxes, a hugely disproportionate share (relative to population) of taxes are paid by the very wealthy, whose income/wealth is at least partly due to said profits—according to the Tax Foundation, in 2013 the top 1% of earners paid ~38% of income taxes, and the top 10% paid around ~70%. Even if you think the wealthy should be taxed more, the logic is still the same: the potential tax base for the government could just as plausibly be decreased in proportion as the welfare expenditures are (allegedly) decreased.
4) (what I think is the most serious argument) The demand for the kind of low-productivity service sector labor that tends to be around minimum wage is inelastic, so hopefully the minimum wage will result in mostly a transfer rather than a reduction of the pie, and that transfer will hopefully be from richer capital-owners to poorer workers, thus increasing utility.
So to me, that sounds like in the absolute best case scenario for the minimum wage: a transfer of income from the richer to the poorer. However, this transfer may cause involuntary unemployment, higher prices disproportionately harming the poor, unnecessary redirection of research into automation of areas that a relatively adequate supply of labor is already available for, etc. So it’s a tricky problem, huh?
Well, instead of doing that, couldn’t you just…have/expand a transfer of income from the richer to the poorer like the EITC? People say “well why not do both?” but my point is that I don’t see what a minimum wage could do that is good that an equivalently high EITC could not, but I see things that are bad that a minimum wage could do that (I think) the EITC could not.
Now, the culture war angle to this that I didn’t mention last time is one that’s at least implicit in Ron Unz’s campaigning for a higher minimum wage: namely, for Unz the market distorting effects of the increase are a feature, not a bug, because they prevent, particularly Hispanic, immigrants from finding employment, thus discouraging Hispanic immigration. And I suppose Unz thinks that the indirect approach,as B.H. Liddell Hart might have put it, is superior here than just campaigning for immigration restriction. Which I guess is something that pro-immigration, pro-minimum wage liberals might want to think about, at least.
P.S. An extra bonus problem with price controls is that they may lead to either equal or inferior outcomes through substitution. (The classic example being rent control leading to poor apartment quality/maintenance.) For example, a worker might be “paid” both in terms of the cash he receives and the relative (in)convenience of his working schedule. So if a worker is paid $8 per hour at a certain schedule, but would be willing to work a less convenient schedule at $10 per hour, if the minimum wage is raised to $10 per hour the employer might be able to get away with demanding that the worker abide by the less convenient schedule for the worker, leaving the putative beneficiary indifferent between being “paid” $8 and $10 an hour. (This is of course the concept captured graphically in indifference curves.)
What about controls that are very close to market prices? Shouldn’t they have a minimal effect?
1. I think the point here is not that the employee will make more effort, but that the employer would be incentivised to make the job a higher-quality one through training, automation and so on. The benefit is a general push in the direction of high quality, well payed jobs. The flipside is that if you allow very low wages in an advanced economy, as David Friedman recommends, you reach a situation where it becomes cheaper to hire people to sweep floors or wave fans than to buy machinery, which is the situation that is actually found in third world countries. So the argument is about what direction you want to go in., whether you want a downward spiral or an upward spiral.
2. I suppose you mean the macro effects. Obviously. the effects for the people getting wage raises would be good. SImplistically, good+neutral=good. Less simplistically, the catch is that you can’t assume that everyone in a low wage job will get the increase, since employers might respond by downsizing. As to whether minimum wages actually cause unemployment, I would recommend empiricism over textbook arguments
3. The argument here applies only if you have a welfare system and it allows top-ups for working people. By a simple argument, a homo economicus employer would want to pay $0.01 an hour to an (easily replaced) employee, even if they valued them much more than that, if they knew the government would take up the slack. So the minimum wage could be seen as counteracting distortions introduced by the welfare system.
4. Are you quite sure that automation is a bad thing?
See (3). That’s getting fairly close to UBI: individuals are essentially supported by the state, and someone somewhere, presumably the corporations, has to pay a lot of tax. I’m not saying that is necessarily bad, but compared to minimum wage policies, it’s pretty radical.
This recent FB post by Eliezer seems somewhat relevant.
tl;dr:
Bryan Caplan thinks the left hates free markets and the right hates the left. Actually, the left doesn’t hate markets, since most of them acknowledge they’re great wealth generators; rather, the left wants market outcomes to accord with morality of the sort which prevails among friends, family, and close associates.
Example: among friends, family, and close associates, people are taken care of. If they’re not taken care of, it means someone is being mean and selfish. Among close associates, gifts, rewards, and quid pro quos have something to do with your past history with those people and a mutual evaluation of how much work it took them to do it. If your low-skilled friend labors for many hours to create you a gift which, on the market would be worth very little, you are nonetheless expected to be very grateful, since it’s the effort relative to the person doing it and your past history with them which counts, not an abstract analysis of the broad societal supply and demand of the type of labor and materials deployed.
Thus, the left looks at something like a fast food worker being paid $7/hr and says “this means you don’t value these people! The people who are making your food! It’s not possible to live with dignity on $7/hr, so if you oppose raising these wages by mandate, it must mean you think these people don’t deserve basic human dignity!”
Eliezer’s point is that prices aren’t moral judgments, they are information. They are valuable signals for economic coordination. Thus, distorting them in the name of producing a “moral” outcome is pretty much always a bad idea. If you want poor people to have more money, you can just give them more money (this is probably part of the thinking behind a lot of the UBI support around here: help the poor without distorting economic signals).
But for many on the left, even direct transfers to the poor would be a second-best solution, because it wouldn’t “fix” the immoral market outcomes. I think that in some sense, the left also buys into the same sort of myth they frequently accuse the right of believing: that one’s market wage is an indicator of your worth as a person. Therefore, they’d rather mandate employers pay fastfood workers $12/hr than let employers continue to pay them $7 while the government contributes an additional $5, because the former seems to lead to a more just society, even though the economic consequences of the latter would likely be less harmful.
Why isn’t giving poor people more money a different distortion of signals for economic coordination?
Well, pretty much any state action whatsoever introduces some kind of distortion in markets.
But prices are the key point here. Minimum wage laws distort the economic signals sent by the price of labor. Taxing the rich and distributing it directly to poor people distorts who’s spending/saving/investing the money, but it doesn’t distort the coordination of supply and demand accurate prices enable.
Poor people doing different things with their money than the rich would have will have some effect on prices, but the signals sent by those prices will still be accurate so far as the “we tax the rich to give the poor more purchasing power” economy is concerned.
A UBI would almost certainly change who seeks jobs and who doesn’t, and therefore change the supply of labor and the price of labor. How isn’t that a rather direct “distortion”?
When you say “accurate”, what is the standard of accuracy? A minimum wage doesn’t muddy the waters on the level of communication.
And otherwise the signals will be accurate so far as “the minimum wage is X dollars” is concerned.
More specifically, if the issue isn’t one of accuracy of communication, the concern seems to be that if we set the minimum wage at $X, we lose track of what the price of labor would be if the minimum wage were not $X. Why is that important, and particularly why is it more important than losing track of what the price of labor would be if there were not a UBI as compared to if there were a UBI?
The difference is between a law which has some effect on some prices and a law which actually outlaws certain prices. The former is producing a different result than an unfettered market would, but isn’t messing with the prices within the system that law is a part of. The latter is directly messing with a specific price signal.
This exists as much on the right as it does on the left.
Look at the entire debate over trade barriers, implicit subsidies, and the nonsensical concept of “shipping jobs abroad”.
There’s plenty on the right that have the exact same notions about the relationship between pay and worth, right down to rejecting direct transfers as an inferior option. The only difference is that they think the market gets it right for those lazy city folk but not for us hard working, American heartland, salt of the earth types. Sure they don’t support a minimum wage, because that would include the wrong people, but they definitely want wildly inefficient amounts of money to be spent making sure their region / industry has “good jobs”.
The real cleavage is between a tiny number of technocratically minded people of various ideologies and everyone else.
Yudkowky’s simplistic theory of the left is that the left want to apply personal morality about the markets…but the left are capable of articualting a more sophistcated and rational objection to just letting the market dow what it wants.
In an *ideal* market they are, but ideal markets don’t exist. If the price of bread is set at 1$ by the government, then what is the information that bread is worth 1$? All real markets are distorted: what does information mean in the context of a distorrted market?
PS: And how did he get to be an expert on economics, exactly?
This seems to be a common talking point: “real free markets are a fantasy.”
They’re only a fantasy insofar as governments not interfering with any buyer-seller and employer-employee transactions is a fantasy. Which it de facto is right now, but it’s not logically inconceivable, especially not when it comes to implementing or not implementing any particular new law.
The “ideal” market outcome is simply the outcome we might expect minus a given state intervention, or, really ideally, minus any state intervention. If the government sets a price ceiling on gas at $3/gallon, but it would be $4 a gallon without that law, then $4/gallon is the “real” or “ideal” price, which we don’t get to find out because of the law. Shortages ensue.
I don’t think EY is wrong, but a simpler and also true explanation is that people prefer solutions that involve someone else paying for just outcomes to solutions that involve they themselves paying for them.
My take is that job markets just don’t work very well; if you don’t have significant experience job-hunting or employee-hunting, ask around and horror stories abound.
More formally, there are features we can observe that are incompatible with the classic frictionless free market with uniform spherical consumers. For example, there’s significant downward nominal wage stickiness even at levels well away from the minimum wage (that is, if you look at wage changes during a recession, you’ll see a smooth-ish curve that suddenly stacks up at 0 and has little area less than zero).
I think economists are coming around to including significant search frictions in job market models; damned if I understand what those models say though.
Another market failure I just remembered: usually when employers complain of labor shortages people roll their eyes and reply “just raise your offering wages, and qualified people will appear, or, crazy idea here, train someone”. That’s indeed what the 101 theory predicts, but in addition to training time/costs there’s another factor unique to job markets.
If you raise your offering wage to more than existing employees are making, you’ve just detonated a bomb on your morale. Keeping salaries secret helps alleviate this, but doing that means you couldn’t advertise the higher wage in your job postings. So, to draw qualified people out of the woodwork, you might need to give existing employees raises, which then could make the marginal cost of hiring the newbie greater than the value they add, pushing you to an equilibrium of hiring nobody.
Yes, as Sumner recently pointed out, employers who can’t get unlimited workers at the market clearing wage are better modeled as monopsonists than as acting under perfect competition. There’s still a model for that, though.
You’re not wrong, but the question is whether minimum wages improve the market or make it even worse.
I think this is largely a political/cultural thing.
You can occasionally get the red tribe to reluctantly go along with minimum wage increases, because at least the beneficiaries are people who are actually working. Even if it technically violates free market principles, it doesn’t trigger the disgust mechanism that a UBI would, and it’s a simple enough concept that your average rural voter can understand it (as opposed to tinkering with the ‘earned income tax credit’ which sounds like some complicated accounting thing which nobody knows what it actually is).
If your intent is to redistribute from the rich to the poor, the minimum wage is probably the best way to get some red-tribe buy-in, if you need it. Even if you don’t need the red tribe masses, (like say, if you’re Seattle), you probably have some rich business owners that you need to appease, and they’re likely to favor the minimum wage over things like, say, a higher corporate income tax – because they have better options to avoid it (you can replace workers with slightly more expensive robots, but there’s not a whole lot you can do about a tax hike).
As for solutions: I think a lot of trouble with jobs springs from the dual way we think about them:
A) As a straightfoward economic exchange of labor for cash and benefits
B) Something necessary for survival, self-worth, moral worth (think “deserving poor”), etc.
Side A pushes us towards minimal regulation of employment, to maximize economic efficiency and overall value. Side B pushes us towards heavy regulation to limit how arbitrary and capricious employers can be, for humanitarian reasons (including minimum wage, but also sexual harassment prevention, recent movements towards mandating predictable schedules and the like).
Personally I think a UBI would neuter a lot of side B, and would support removing most employer regulations (including minimum wage) in exchange for one. Some of side B is cultural though (Puritan work ethic) and could only change slowly.
What is the evidence for and against greater male variability in g?
Today in news that 0.005125% of human society pertain:
Germanies parliament voted for absolute equality of same-sex marriages to normal marriages. They were already the same in many ways. The changes now are concerning adoption and inheritances law.
Only problem now: some of the Christ-Democrats are planning to go before our supreme court because this might be unconstitutional. I predict failure since our constitution doesn’t define marriage and merely states that it enjoys “special protection”.