I struggle to imagine any educated person in North America admitting that they do not possess the power of critical thought. Few uneducated people would say "Oh yeah, I'm a total rube." I have heard doctors say that they would only trust other doctors to raise their children in case of an accident because medical training imbues critical thought. Complaints about "stupid people" being allowed to vote are widespread. I am a teacher, and literally every teacher I have ever met believes that it is their core mission to "teach kids to be critical thinkers." The fact that not one of those teachers shows any evidence of critical thought suggests either that I am the world's most arrogant man (possible) or that I do not understand what critical thought actually is.
So what is critical thought? This is an honest question. Some uncritical googling gives these definitions:
-the objective analysis and evaluation of an issue in order to form a judgment
-self-directed, self-disciplined, self-monitored, and self-corrective habits of mind
-the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action. In its exemplary form, it is based on universal intellectual values that transcend subject matter divisions: clarity, accuracy, precision, consistency, relevance, sound evidence, good reasons, depth, breadth, and fairness.
-Critical thinking is the ability to think clearly and rationally about what to do or what to believe.
The problem with these is that pretty much everyone would say that their own thought meets the criteria in the definitions and few people would accept that their own thought is irrational, shallow, unclear, etc if you tried to point it out. Consequently, critical thought comes off as a sort of cool kids club, where we, the in-group, are right about important things because of our superior something-or-rather, and the erroneous out-group is deluded by their own biases and lack of discipline. The definitions are either so vague or so inclusive that they boil down to "I know it when I see it." I don't see it very much, though. Perhaps it is only me who lacks this understanding, since it is probably impossible to imagine anyone smarter than oneself (because if you'd imagine their thoughts and then you'd be that smart too). Maybe I just can't imagine anyone more critical(?) than me.
Below are some possibilities and the reasons why I don't think they work. Tell me why I'm wrong, and how to be right.
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Formal logic: A sound deductive argument provides true conclusions, but even a little work with formal logic raises the question of GIGO. "All men are mortal" is pretty uncontroversial, so Socrates must be mortal. Beyond that, however, very few premises are solid enough to merit insertion into logical argument. Induction is famously self-defeating (Hume), enough to lead to hypotheses that we're just hard-wired to believe in it (Kant, Schopenhauer). Abduction (Sherlock Holmes-style reasoning) is a nice idea, but boils down to experience and breadth of knowledge.
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Avoidance of fallacies: Fallacies are obviously bad, but day-to-day thought is just not very prone to fallacies of any consequence. Again the big danger is untrue or misunderstood premises. When someone brings up the Bible, for example, and says "The Bible says that the Bible is true, lol," they aren't really taking issue with the question-begging reasoning; if some Biblical council proved that that line was a later addition, the fedora guys wouldn't all become Christians- they just don't believe the Bible is true. The object-level debate over the facts is the root of the issue.
Furthermore, formal fallacies are of very limited applicability and informal fallacies are fallacies in limited enough circumstances that their fallaciousness is at very least debatable (the slippery slope, for example, happens all the time).
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The stuff stupid teachers tell students: "If the website ends in .edu you can trust it," "If bad people funded the study it's not true," "Check the credentials of the author," etc. List of tips on how to spot fake news are full of this. If these tips are even true, they depend on you either blindly trusting that PhDs (or whoever) are right about everything, which even someone as confused as I am can tell is not critical thought, or they depend on you knowing which PhD's are trustworthy and which aren't, who the bad study-funders are and why, which parts of .edu are part of the replication crisis, and so on. This doesn't take a PhD, but it takes a ton of subject knowledge.
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Fighting The Man: Big corporations are lying to you, Manufacturing Consent, AdBusters, cui bono, don't trust anyone over 30, and so on. This is all true enough, I guess, but the people who are the loudest about critical thinking are now The Man themselves (See the Disinformation Governance Board). Fighting The Man these days involves not getting vaccinated, driving your truck in a freedom convoy and rooting for Putin. If critical thought is the power of telling truth from falsehood, or Truth from Falsehood, then it doesn't shift as the culture shifts. And if it shifts as the culture shifts, then it would seem to be no more than a proclamation of tribal allegiance.
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Avoidance of cognitive biases: You shouldn't embrace them, but are they even real? Did most of that stuff not come out of questionable psych research?
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LessWrong-style rationalism: Even if Bayesianism is questionable, much of what is written in the Sequences is still true. That whole line of thinking, however, depends on knowledge of statistics, engineering, computer science; lots of knowledge of subject matter. Furthermore, it has severe blind-spots with regard to morality and metaphysical stuff because stats and programming don't lead that way. This is a sort of "I'm looking for my keys out front because the light is better" solution, where the meta-problem ("We don't have a solution") gets solved, but the actual problem ("How can we be right?") doesn't. That's why it's called LessWrong, and not just Right.
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All of these put together: Maybe the task is so huge that you need all of this. It seems to me that that would compound the flaws in each approach and result in amalgamating everything good into "Just know tons of stuff about the world. Like, literally everything, if possible." And if that's the case then "critical thinking" just means "breadth and depth of knowledge." It would also correlate with knowledge, though, which plainly isn't the case. Lots of polymaths are very wrong about things outside their specific fields, and one hears of them being wrong even within their fields.
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All of this plus intelligence: This seems like we're back to the cool kids club: "We just know more and we're smarter." This would, however, explain why some very knowledgeable people don't seem to fit the definition (?) vibe (?) aura (?) of critical thought- they just aren't smart enough. But it takes a certain intelligence to become very knowledgeable, so it would be surprising to find very many knowledgeable people without this power. This would also explain why many smart people don't fit the definition- they just don't know enough. It would suggest, though, that you could take smart people and have them read Wikipedia all day for 2 years and then everyone would agree that they were critical thinkers. I can't be sure that this isn't true, and I don't have an argument for why. But I really don't think it's true.
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All of this, plus wisdom. Well, what is wisdom? And so we go back 3000 years and start the entire conversation over again and hope for a better result the second time. Let's not.
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Emotion: When I consider the many defects I see in other people's thought and consider the ways I have avoided those exact defects (not all defects- you can't imagine anyone smarter than you, remember) I get:
-Intelligence
-Breadth of Knowledge of "facts."
-Familiarity with philosophy and religion (breadth of knowledge of "ideas," maybe?)
-Suspicion of consensus
-Love of conflict
-Hatred of error
-PROFOUND suspicion of any comforting thought/EXTREME fear of motivated reasoning. Like, crippling fear.
The last 4 are at best aesthetic preferences and at worst emotional tendencies. Is that what it takes? If so, is there any hope for someone without them?
TLDR:
-Is that what it takes?
-Is there any hope?
-What is critical thought?
-Are my objections flawed?
-Have I missed something?
-And I guess, is it possible to imagine anyone smarter than oneself?
Like many people I've been arguing about the nature of LLMs a lot over the last few years. There is a particular set of arguments that I found myself having to recreate from scratch over and over again in different contexts, so finally put it together in a larger post, and this is that post.
The crux of it is that I think both the maximalist and minimalist claims about what LLMs can do/are doing are simultaneously true, and not in conflict with one another. A mind made out of text can vary along two axes, the quantity of text it has absorbed, which here I call "coverage," and the degree to which that text has been unified into a coherent model, which here I call "integration." As extreme points on that spectrum, a search engine is high coverage, low integration, and an individual person is low coverage, high integration, and LLMs are intermediate between the two. And most importantly, every point on that spectrum is useful for different kinds of tasks.
I'm hoping this will be a more useful way of thinking about LLMs than the ways people have typically talked about them so far.
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There's a pretty big set of changes coming down the pipe. These shouldn't have much impact on users - it's all internal bookkeeping - but there's a lot of it, and if there's bugs, it might cause issues. Let me know if anything weird happens! Weird, in this case, is probably "comments you can see that you think you shouldn't be able to", or "comments you can't see that you think you should be able to", or anything else strange that goes on. As an example, at one point in development reply notifications stopped working. So keep your eyes out for that. I'm probably pushing this in a day or two, I just wanted to warn people first.
EDIT: PUSH COMPLETE, let me know if anything goes wrong
Are you a software developer? Do you want to help? We can pretty much always use people who want to get their hands dirty with our ridiculous list of stuff to work on. The codebase is in Python, and while I'm not gonna claim it's the cleanest thing ever, it's also not the worst and we are absolutely up for refactoring and improvements. Hop over to our discord server and join in. (This is also a good place to report issues, especially if part of the issue is "I can't make comments anymore.")
Are you somewhat experienced in Python but have never worked on a big codebase? Come help anyway! We'll point you at some easy stuff.
Are you not experienced in Python whatsoever? We can always use testers, to be honest, and if you want to learn Python, go do a tutorial, once you know the basics, come join us and work on stuff.
(if you're experienced in, like, any other language, you'll have no trouble)
Alt Accounts: Let's talk about 'em. We are consistently having trouble with people making alt accounts to avoid bans, which is against the rules, or making alt accounts to respond to their own stuff, which isn't technically against the rules, and so forth. I'm considering a general note in the rules that alt accounts are strongly discouraged, but if you feel the need for an alt, contact us; we're probably okay with it if there's a good reason. (Example: We've had a few people ask to make effortposts that aren't associated with their main account for various reasons. We're fine with this.) If you want to avoid talking to us about it, it probably isn't a good reason.
Feedback wanted, though! Let me know what you think - this is not set in stone.
Single-Issue Posting: Similarly, we're having trouble with people who want to post about one specific topic. "But wait, Zorba, why is that a problem" well, check out the Foundation:
The purpose of this community is to be a working discussion ground for people who may hold dramatically different beliefs. It is to be a place for people to examine the beliefs of others as well as their own beliefs; it is to be a place where strange or abnormal opinions and ideas can be generated and discussed fairly, with consideration and insight instead of kneejerk responses.
If someone's posting about one subject, repeatedly, over and over, then it isn't really a discussion that's being had, it's prosletyzing. I acknowledge there's some value lost in removing this kind of behavior, but I think there's a lot of value lost in having it; letting the community be dominated by this behavior seems to lead to Bad Outcomes.
Feedback wanted, though! Let me know what you think - this is also not set in stone.
Private Profiles: When we picked up the codebase, it included functionality for private profiles, which prevents users from seeing your profile. I probably would have removed this if I'd had a lot more development time, but I didn't. So it exists.
I'm thinking of removing it anyway, though. I'm not sure if it provides significant benefit; I think there's a good argument that anything posted on the site is, in some sense, fair game to be looked over.
On the other hand . . . removing it certainly does encourage ad hominem arguments, doesn't it? Ad hominems are kind of useless and crappy and poison discourse. We don't want people to be arguing about the other person's previously-stated beliefs all the time, we want people to be responding to recent comments, in general.
But on the gripping hand . . .
. . . well, I just went to get a list of the ten most prolific users with hidden profiles. One of them has a few quality contributions! (Thanks!) Two of them are neutral. And seven of them have repeated antagonism, with many of those getting banned or permabanned.
If there's a tool mostly used by people who are fucking with the community, maybe that's a good argument for removing the tool.
On the, uh, other gripping hand, keep in mind that private profiles don't even work against the admins. We can see right through them (accompanied by a note that says "this profile is private"). So this feature change isn't for the sake of us, it's for the sake of you. Is that worth it? I dunno.
Feedback wanted! Again!
The Volunteer System is actually working and doing useful stuff at this point. It doesn't yet have write access, so to speak, all it's doing is providing info to the mods. But it's providing useful info. Fun fact: some of our absolute most reliable and trustworthy volunteers don't comment. In some cases "much", in some cases "at all". Keep it up, lurkers! This is useful! I seriously encourage everyone to click that banner once a day and spend a few minutes at it. Or even just bookmark the page and mash the bookmark once in a while - I've personally got it on my bookmark bar.
The big refactor mentioned at the top is actually for the sake of improving the volunteer system, this is part of what will let it turn into write access and let us solve stuff like filtered-comments-in-limbo, while taking a lot of load off the mods' backs and maybe even making our moderation more consistent. As a sort of ironic counterpart to this, it also means that the bar might show up less often.
At some point I want to set up better incentives for long-time volunteers, but that takes a lot of code effort. Asking people to volunteer more often doesn't, so that's what I'm doing.
(Feedback wanted on this also.)
I want your feedback on things, as if that wasn't clear. These threads basically behave like a big metadiscussion thread, so . . . what's your thoughts on this whole adventure? How's it going? Want some tweaks? Found a bug? Let me know! I don't promise to agree but I promise to listen.
Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Okay! So you may have heard of The Problem Of Susan, a literary critical view of what happened to Susan in “The Last Battle”, the final Narnia book. This has been quoted on Tumblr, I responded to that, and this is a development of my view of the reading.
A lot of people have done psycho-sexual readings of the line about “lipstick and nylons” and gone on about this being indicative of Susan maturing into a sexual being. Naturally, since C.S. Lewis is a famous Christian, this means that as a Christian he heartily disapproved of:
• Sex
• Women
• Women Being Sexual
• Children Growing Up
• Children Losing Innocence About The World
• Children Growing Up To Be Women Who Are Sexual
and probably a ton of other stuff too which I can’t be bothered to go search online for them to tell me he hated. Some people do not like Lewis, Narnia, or Christianity, and have a very dour view of The Problem Of Susan and like to tell us all how, why, and where Lewis is a horrid old Puritan sex-hater. Before we get into this, I want to say: if you don’t like Lewis, Narnia, Christianity or any combination of these, you’re free to do so and nobody can make you like them.
The problem I have with The Problem Of Susan is that it’s a very shallow reading.
First, there seems to be little to no reading of that part of the text as a whole:
"Sir," said Tirian, when he had greeted all these. "If I have read the chronicles aright, there should be another. Has not your Majesty two sisters? Where is Queen Susan?"
"My sister Susan," answered Peter shortly and gravely, "is no longer a friend of Narnia."
"Yes," said Eustace, "and whenever you've tried to get her to come and talk about Narnia or do anything about Narnia, she says 'What wonderful memories you have! Fancy your still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.'"
"Oh Susan!" said Jill, "she's interested in nothing now-a-days except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up."
"Grown-up, indeed," said the Lady Polly. "I wish she would grow up. She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she'll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age. Her whole idea is to race on to the silliest time of one's life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can."
It gets quoted as “lipstick and nylons” and the part about “invitations” gets left out. And there’s latching on to “too keen on being grown-up”.
So what is Lewis saying here, or trying to say? “Growing up is icky, especially if you start liking boys”? To take the reading that he is saying ‘loss of innocence (especially sexual innocence) is bad, adulthood is bad, children should stay children as long as possible’?
I don’t think so. Polly is a grown-up herself, and yet a friend of Narnia. If Susan is now ‘grown-up’, then Peter - as her elder brother - is also a grown-up. But he’s here in Narnia. So if adulthood per se is not the problem, what is?
And here we get the view as expressed by someone in a response to my response:
Uuhh I’m PRETTY sure Susan got kicked out of the gang bc winklydinnkkkllllllllldl :/
Sex is the problem. But is this a plausible reading?
Well, sure. Sexual maturation, developing sexual interest and sexuality is all part of growing up. People have used “nylons and lipstick” as signifiers that Lewis means sex because, well, nylons: lingerie, fetish or at the very mildest sex fantasy fuel. And lipstick means reddening the lips, making them look like the labia, ready for sex.
(Look, if I’ve had to read these intepretations, so do you).
But is there a better reading? I think there is.
So here is the second part of what I think is going on.
Now, if the problem is that Susan is now sexually aware, what about Peter? (And Edmund, and Lucy?) On this reading, if they are still ‘friends of Narnia’ then they must have avoided Susan’s sexual awakening. Peter must be developmentally stunted and have remained a good, innocent, little boy mentally at least.
So for the proponents of The Problem Of Susan, the only mature adult is Susan, who is cast out of Narnia for that knowledge and that choice (Pullman wrote an entire trilogy of books in response about how sexual awakening is the means of becoming adults and independent).
However, I disagree. Let’s segue off for a moment about homosexuality (this was a joke comment in the original post to which I was replying). Lewis was writing in the 50s and was a Christian to boot, he must have had the same repressive social ideas as you imagine a 50s Christian would have, right?
Here’s where I recommend you read his memoir Surprised By Joy, particularly the parts about his early schooling.
Here's a fellow, you say, who used to come before us as a moral and religious writer, and now, if you please, he's written a whole chapter describing his old school as a very furnace of impure loves without one word on the heinousness of the sin. But there are two reasons. One you shall hear before this chapter ends. The other is that, as I have said, the sin in question is one of the two (gambling is the other) which I have never been tempted to commit. I will not indulge in futile philippics against enemies I never met in battle.
("This means, then, that all the other vices you have so largely written about..." Well, yes, it does, and more's the pity; but it's nothing to our purpose at the moment.)
Okay, looks like this is going to be a long ‘un, so breaking off here for Part One before getting into Part Two
I’ve criticised the take that the Problem of Susan is reducible to the simple (and simplicistic) answer of “Sex”, and here’s why I think that.
Let’s look at the full version of the much-quoted line about “lipstick and nylons”:
"Oh Susan!" said Jill, "she's interested in nothing now-a-days except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up."
“and invitations”. To drag in another writer, “What’s invitations, precious? What’s invitations, eh?”
Well, they’re exactly what they sound like. “Oh, you mean boys asking her out on dates, maybe?” No. Being asked out, yes, but I mean “invitations to parties and social occasions and grown-up events”.
I’m hobbled by the fact that Lewis doesn’t give us any exact ages for his characters, particularly the Pevensie children (Tolkien would have told us the day and month, not alone year, they were born so we could have worked it out) but we can roughly take it that for “The Last Battle”, Susan is old enough to have left school but isn’t going on to college (that we know of, at least not yet).
So she’s about eighteen or so at a minimum, and looking around online there’s an estimation that she’s twenty-one.
Let’s go with twenty-one: legal age of adulthood, but still young and inexperienced. Polly is a little hard on Susan:
She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she'll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age. Her whole idea is to race on to the silliest time of one's life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can.
Which of us has not wanted to be treated as a grown-up and chafed under “you can’t do that, you’re too young” when we’re in our teenage years, caught between no longer a child but not quite adult yet? And mostly we’ve had a simple view of what being grown-up means: nobody imagines “I’ll have to do my taxes and get a mortgage” when they’re contemplating what it will be like to be free and independent and nobody can tell us what to do or eat or wear.
So Susan was eager to be old enough to wear adult clothes and makeup and go to parties and have fun. That’s not a bad thing! The bad thing is if that’s all she wants to do, ever; if her reasons are based on vanity and selfishness. We all like to be admired, so if Susan wants the boys/young men to find her attractive and be interested in her, that’s only natural. But if she spends her time only going to parties, looking for flattery of attention, and trying to be ‘mutton dressed as lamb’ as she gets older, then she’s wasting her potential. I don’t think anybody imagines that Susan as an airhead is a good future for her.
Let me jump back into the memoir to show that Lewis knew about, because he had experienced, adolescent desire. He attended a preparatory school between the ages of thirteen and fifteen:
It is quite true that at this time I underwent a violent, and wholly successful, assault of sexual temptation. But this is amply accounted for by the age I had then reached and by my recent, in a sense my deliberate, withdrawal of myself from Divine protection. ...The mere facts of generation I had learned long ago, from another boy, when I was too young to feel much more than a scientific interest in them.
...Pogo's communications, however much they helped to vulgarise my mind, had no such electric effect on my senses as the dancing mistress, nor as Bekker's Charicles, which was given me for a prize. I never thought that dancing mistress as beautiful as my cousin G., but she was the first woman I ever "looked upon to lust after her"; assuredly through no fault of her own. A gesture, a tone of the voice, may in these matters have unpredictable results. When the schoolroom on the last night of the winter term was decorated for a dance, she paused, lifted a flag, and, remarking, "I love the smell of bunting," pressed it to her face -- and I was undone.
You must not suppose that this was a romantic passion. The passion of my life, as the next chapter will show, belonged to a wholly different region. What I felt for the dancing mistress was sheer appetite; the prose and not the poetry of the Flesh. I did not feel at all like a knight devoting himself to a lady; I was much more like a Turk looking at a Circassian whom he could not afford to buy. I knew quite well what I wanted. It is common, by the way, to assume that such an experience produces a feeling of guilt, but it did not do so in me. And I may as well say here that the feeling of guilt, save where a moral offence happened also to break the code of honour or had consequences which excited my pity, was a thing which at that time I hardly knew. It took me as long to acquire inhibitions as others (they say) have taken to get rid of them. That is why I often find myself at such cross-purposes with the modern world: I have been a converted Pagan living among apostate Puritans.
So Lewis is going to be the last person in the world to condemn Susan for natural part of growing up. What he does want to condemn her for - is going to be developed in Part Three.
Part Three, and if you’ve stuck with me this far, congratulations! “Jeez, will you ever get to the point?” I will, I promise!
So here’s where we have to get into theology (sorry, but it is relevant, I promise) and here is a handy definition:
In Christian theology, the world, the flesh, and the devil have been singled out "by sources from St Thomas Aquinas" to the Council of Trent, as "implacable enemies of the soul".
The three sources of temptation have been described as:
world -- "indifference and opposition to God’s design", "empty, passing values"
flesh -- "gluttony and sexual immorality, ... our corrupt inclinations, disordered passions"
the Devil -- "a real, personal enemy, a fallen angel, Father of Lies, who ... labours in relentless malice to twist us away from salvation".
What proponents of The Problem Of Susan think Lewis is preaching against is the second, the Flesh (lipstick and nylons = sexual maturity and awakening).
I maintain that what he is warning against, in the person of Susan as she has abandoned her family and Narnia, is The World.
“But what’s wrong with liking fun and parties and having a good time and meeting people and making new friends?”
Nothing! And everything, if it turns you into a liar, a traitor, a snob, a sell-out.
And that is what Susan is doing, in her quest to be a ‘proper’ grown-up:
(W)henever you've tried to get her to come and talk about Narnia or do anything about Narnia, she says 'What wonderful memories you have! Fancy your still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.'
She’s lying to herself as much as to the others. She knows Narnia and everything they say is real, but because it doesn’t fit in with the type of person she wants to be now, she’s doing her best to deny it and forget it. She’s convinced herself that it was all just a game and childish imagination, and she’s not a child now. Popular, cool people don’t believe in fairy stories, and she so desperately wants to be popular and cool and to fit in with the right sort of people, the people who throw those parties everyone wants to go to, the invitations she is so eager to receive.
And Lewis knew about that from the inside, too:
He was succeeded by a young gentleman just down from the University whom we may call Pogo. Pogo was a very minor edition of a Saki, perhaps even a Wodehouse, hero. Pogo was a wit, Pogo was a dressy man, Pogo was a man about town, Pogo was even a lad. After a week or so of hesitation (for his temper was uncertain) we fell at his feet and adored. Here was sophistication, glossy all over, and (dared one believe it?) ready to impart sophistication to us.
We became -- at least I became -- dressy. It was the age of the "knut": of "spread" ties with pins in them, of very low cut coats and trousers worn very high to show startling socks, and brogue shoes with immensely wide laces. Something of all this had already trickled to me from the College through my brother, who was now becoming sufficiently senior to aspire to knuttery. Pogo completed the process. A more pitiful ambition for a lout of an overgrown fourteen-year-old with a shilling a week pocket money could hardly be imagined; the more so since I am one of those on whom Nature has laid the doom that whatever they buy and whatever they wear they will always look as if they had come out of an old clothes shop. I cannot even now remember without embarrassment the concern that I then felt about pressing my trousers and (filthy habit) plastering my hair with oil. A new element had entered my life: Vulgarity. Up till now I had committed nearly every other sin and folly within my power, but I had not yet been flashy.
These hobble-de-hoy fineries were, however, only a small part of our new sophistication. Pogo was a great theatrical authority. We soon knew all the latest songs. We soon knew all about the famous actresses of that age -- Lily Elsie, Gertie Millar, Zena Dare. Pogo was a fund of information about their private lives. We learned from him all the latest jokes; where we did not understand he was ready to give us help. He explained many things. After a term of Pogo's society one had the feeling of being not twelve weeks but twelve years older.
…What attacked me through Pogo was not the Flesh (I had that of my own) but the World: the desire for glitter, swagger, distinction, the desire to be in the know. He gave little help, if any, in destroying my chastity, but he made sad work of certain humble and childlike and self-forgetful qualities which (I think) had remained with me till that moment. I began to labour very hard to make myself into a fop, a cad, and a snob.
I would be sorry if the reader passed too harsh a judgement on Pogo. As I now see it, he was not too old to have charge of boys but too young. He was only an adolescent himself, still immature enough to be delightedly "grown up" and naif enough to enjoy our greater naïveté. And there was a real friendliness in him. He was moved partly by that to tell us all he knew or thought he knew.
There’s no harm in Susan either, even as she is no longer a friend of Narnia. She can always come back. Unless she lets herself harden into a caricature of a silly, vain attention-seeker who follows and drops every social fad as it comes into and goes out of fashion, who is always taking the cue as to what to say and think from others instead of her own views and opinions, and who continues to deny reality.
Nobody locked her out or kicked her out. She walked out herself, or rather ran out, rushing to go to that party or function or event or gathering of the real adults.
Well, that’s my take on it, anyway. Take it or leave it as you like.
This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful. But first, we have a special AAQC recognition this month! If you caught last month's quality contribution report, you may have seen @Soriek's first "International Update." Well, there were five Thursdays in June this year, and Soriek didn't miss one. Pulling multiple Quality Contribution reports on a regular "feature" of the Culture War thread is impressive and bespeaks substantial community appreciation of this user's efforts. Bravo, @Soriek!
We now return to your regularly scheduled programming!
Quality Contributions in the Main Motte
Gex and Sender
Contributions for the week of May 29, 2023
Identity Politics
Contributions for the week of June 5, 2023
Identity Politics
Contributions for the week of June 12, 2023
Contributions for the week of June 19, 2023
Identity Politics
Contributions for the week of June 26, 2023
Islamic Exegesis
Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
I am embarking on a self-study of American politics in the hopes of becoming generally fluent and comfortable understanding the issues of our day. That said, I don't want to study at such a narrow level (i.e. the news cycle) that what I learn will stop being relevant in two weeks. I have a sense of which general areas I should study, but not which textbooks are ideal. I am open to suggestions! (My background: I just have a BA in philosophy and a BA in psych.)
I assume I should probably read a textbook on:
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Economics
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The American Public Policy Process
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American History
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World History, esp Modern Europe and the Americas since 1800
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Comparative Politics/History of Major Political Ideas?/Explanation of major ideologies?
I've been enjoying this year's ACX book reviews a lot more than the previous round, with cool essays on the Icelandic Sagas and Jane Jacobs. I particularly liked last week's review of "Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism" by Paul Sabin. The book is about Ralph Nader's contribution to modern sclerosis in the American government, but the essay serves as an interesting history of the public interest movement in relation to the government in general. It's not long and definitely worth a read but a few sections I liked:
the New Deal relied heavily on a new model for delegating congressional powers: Congress would create a federal agency with broad latitude, then they, or the president, would staff that agency with outside experts. Freed from the grubby pressures of the political process, these agency men—and they were pretty much all men—would use their expertise to reshape the country...
In his 1952 book American Capitalism, John Kenneth Galbraith summed up this equilibrium via the concept of countervailing powers: big government, big business, and the big unions worked together to collaboratively manage the economy.
But by the 1960s, the cracks in this model were starting to show. A report prepared for President-elect Kennedy outlined the problem of regulatory capture, the process by which agencies intended to regulate private businesses got too close to their subjects and end up serving them instead. And a new class of liberal intellectuals rose to prominence by pointing out the ways in which the political establishment’s plans sometimes rode roughshod over the citizens they were supposed to serve.
The new intellectual class was deeply critical of government action, especially the ways it propped up big business, and they invested a ton of energy into criticizing, investigating, and suing the government. The non-profit wasn't really a thing before Nader, now it's some 10% of the private sector. Advocacy on behalf of Nader and associates dramatically expanded public comment periods on agency actions, "gave the agencies they created extremely detailed mandates, procedures, and timelines .... required judicial review of agency decisions, and explicitly empowered citizens to sue the agencies for not following the rules. (Previously, it wasn’t clear that a random individual American would have standing in such a case.)"
These ideas were intended to prevent bureaucrats from cravenly serving big business or from crushing the citizenry with their major projects, but of course they made it hard to implement major projects at all. Government slowed to a crawl, and of course money-flush big businesses found themselves better able to afford dealing with all the new regulations, and better able to make use of judicial review and comment periods. All this has led us to our kludgocracy where:
Across the country, NIMBYs and status-quo defenders exploit procedural rules to block new development, giving us a world where it takes longer to get approval for a single new building in San Francisco than it did to build the entire Empire State Building, where so-called “environmental review” is weaponized to block even obviously green initiatives like solar panels, and where new public works projects are completed years late and billions over budget—or, like California’s incredible shrinking high-speed rail, may never be completed at all.
There are strong shades of the kind of supply-side progressivism talked about by Ezra Klein, Matthew Yglesias, and Noah Smith, that holds we have overcorrected from the era of Robert Moses running highways through helpless neighborhoods to a world where its impossible to do anything big at all or for the government to effectively serve its people. The problem is broader now, the liberal desire not just for lengthy review but expanding government without holding it to clear standards; the conservative impulse to cut budgets regardless of efficacy or to saddle troublesome agencies with oversight bodies that save no money but slow activity down to a crawl; the seemingly bipartisan willingness to allow technical skill to corrode in the government and contract everything out to dubiously useful and vastly more expensive consultants. But it's interesting to hear one version of the story of where this general anti-government movement began and really took traction. Interested to hear what other people thought of it.
The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
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On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
After @urquan's recent post about participation on TheMotte not being as enjoyable anymore, I dropped a comment suggesting a group creative activity, to take our mind off the Culture War, and give people other reasons to come here. The idea to make a mod for Freespace 2 got fairly good feedback, so I'm making this post to give you my pitch, and to coordinate development.
High Fleet (in Spaaace)
Freespace is a space fighter sim that sends you to fight alongside massive capital ships duking it out with each other with giant beams, shells, and missiles. It does a very good job making you feel like you're a part of a bigger war machine, doing your part to fulfill a grander strategy... the problem is most of that is accomplished through good mission design, scripting, and storytelling. You might sometimes wonder if you could have turned the tide by knocking out a beam cannon, or disabling a ship's engines before it gets away... why yes, you could, and this is why these subsystems have been made indestructible during that particular mission. Such are the joys of story-driven games, so I'm not even mad, but this made me feel there's something missing in the game.
By contrast High Fleet is a part-strategy part-action-arcade roguelike, where you take your fleet behind enemy lines to strike at their heart. The combat mechanics are the least interesting part of the game in my opinion, but the strategic view in which you spend most of your time feels very compelling. You can split your fleet, and have your detachment clear up the area to prepare for the arrival of your flagship, gather intelligence, or look for allies. You do all of this while dodging patrolling enemy strike groups.
So why not combine them? FS2 had been open sourced, and now features an extensive Lua scripting API, and an optional libRocket based interface. It is possible to implement a High Fleet-like strategy game in libRocket, and dynamically generate a combat mission upon encounter. The lore of Freespace has a few things that lend themselves to this sort of strategy game:
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FTL is done through subspace jumps. Throughout the vanilla campaign there are references to ships needing to power up their drive before they can make a jump, and while to my knowledge rules governing subspace drives have never been hashed out (and may in fact be contradictory, in service of the storyline), setting up something simple like “bigger ships need more time to charge their drives” will already create quite a bit of strategic depth. Maybe you have a destroyer that's more than enough to deal with a threat you detected, but if you use it, it'll be comitted to that battlefield for an extended period of time, what if they're just luring you away from their true objective? Do you scramble a few fighter wings, and send them instead, since they'll be easier to recall if necessary?
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Inter-system jumps rely on “jump nodes”. This limits where you can travel to from the current system, and allows for blockades which you might need to break through (or set up yourself if you want to make sure your enemies won't escape).
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Subsystem mechanics. Each ship has a bunch of subsystems, typically: weapons, engines, sensors, and navigation. You might not have enough firepower to destroy an enemy ship, but maybe it's worth it to sacrifice a few fighters to knock out a subsystem? Maybe you're want to raid a freighter convoy, but there's a patrolling anti-fighter cruiser nearby that will make mince meat out of you. If you knock out it's engines it will give you enough time to deal with the freighters. Maybe you're trying to lose a pursuit, and there's no way you can jump out of their sensor range - why not knock out their sensors then?
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Ship specialization. It's hard to give justice how much room to play there is here, even with just the vanilla assets. Some capital ships are very good at taking out fighters, some are very good at taking out other capital ships. Bombers are a threat to even the biggest capital ships, but are vulnurable to fighters and interceptors, and need to get into point-blank range or there's a high chance their payload is intercepted. Reconessaince will be very important, and the player will need to adapt their strategy to what they have vs. what they're up against.
Hopefully, the result will be the best of both worlds - dynamic strategic gameplay, with a fun combat system.
What we have, and who/what do we need?
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I'm a developer, and I'm happy to handle to coding side of things, although the more, the merrier
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@FCfromSSC has offered to handle the 2D/3D art. I don't know if you can/wan't to handle this side in particular FC, but we'll need someone who can design a nice interface.
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@netstack has provisionally offered to join in unknown capacity.
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a writer would be nice to have. A strategy game could still be fun with no/minimal story, but if we're cloning High Fleet I think it would be nice to have a storyline. If nothing else, can someone please come up with a title for this project!
What's the plan?
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I'd say step one would be the UI, and the intra-system strategic gameplay, and dynamic mission generation.
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After that we have to decide about the inter-system/"high level" strategic gameplay. Do we indeed just copy High Fleet, or are we adding/changing something?
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Do we use the Freespace universe or make our own? The former is easier, and we can reuse existing assets, but maybe our artists want to run wild?
Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
Many of you are familiar with some of my writing on early childhood education. Here, someone I’ve chatted with explains at some length her process for helping her children acquire absolute pitch. This is something possible for almost everyone during a narrow window of time; it and similar time-sensitive skills are worth serious consideration if you are a parent of a young child.
The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
A theory im playing around with that the apparent Vulgarity and crudeness of American country/redneck/Conservative culture is actually an adaptive mode of Counter signaling akin to Orthodox Jewish or Amish cultural adaptations to maintain high birth rates and internal cultural coherence in the face of the homogenizing anti-natalist effects of Mainstream Global-liberal-urban monoculture...
American redneck/conservative culture, and Orthodox Jews especially are unique in being the only wealthy cultures to maintain high birth rates beyond the global middle-income, and that both adapted and are defined by their hostile largely hostile relationship with the the most advanced strains of the global mono-culture found in Urban America and the Urbanized anglo-world.
Nations as far afield as Hungary, China, and Iran are trying to save themselves from declining birthrates... Should they try to import American Country culture?
...so I was drunk in rdrama/motte BotC server one day and promised to write up a post-level critique of the American middle class. Of course, the "project" kept getting bumped for the sake of far more important things, such as drinking joylessly while reposting telegram posts on shitty drama discord servers, this being a far less effort-intensive way to anger people. However, today I suddenly felt bored enough to actually remember my prior commitments, so here it is:
Lawns are fucking moronic. Just think about it - if you put like 20% of Cook County lawns together and combine all the land, money, and effort that goes into their maintenance into something actually useful - you'll have a fucking Disneyland with a Champs-Élysées annex. But nooooo, this isn't good enough, because that would be public and not MINE, MIIIINE, MOOOOOOOOOM, HE'S USING A TOY THAT'S MIIIIIINE!!!
Worse yet, if I were to personally decide "fuck this, this is retarded, I don't need this shit, there's a perfectly good park like three fucking blocks away - I'll just grow potatoes or something else actually productive on this plot" - a formless, permanently scowling creature - the dreaded bored HOA housewife - is sure to be crawling out of the woodwork in seconds, with a clipboard and her trademark Karen-y bangs. And she'll instantly begin to shrilly preach about how something so unbelievably ludicrous could not possibly allowed under any circumstances, because, god forbid, other Karens looking for a place to live will drive past and certainly think "waah, waah, this is proposterous! Potatoes?! I can't even! I need everything to be exactly uniform!", leading to her pride and joy, the land value of the lawn containing her shitty cardboard box with fancy beige siding - will go down. Un-acc-ept-ab-le!
This isn't really my main point - it's just an absolutely phenomenal illustration of why the American middle class is the worst fucking socioeconomic group to ever live. They are petit bourgeois to an extent (primarily in their deeply rooted insecurity and precarious status), but their sensibilities are worse than that - they see themselves as some sort of smaller-scale genteel manor lord, whose lifestyle they so artlessly attempt to ape - but they lack the taste, the resources, or the confidence to actually do that. So instead, they ape the simplest bit - a manicured lawn that said gentleman would use for playing cricket or going on mid-afternoon horseback rides or whatever the fuck it is that those inbred bastards do there - but without the space to realistically be usable for that or really anything else outside of serving as a glorified litter box for the family dog.
And yet they do see themselves as above everyone else. They are aggressive about it, too! “Look at me, I have made it, I have my lawn. Mine! MINE! I won't live in a pod like those disgusting city-dwellers, ugh!.. I'm a real American. This is real America! I like my Bud Light Coors Light, my pickup, my Jesus, and my Red Lobster! Oh, and my vastly superfluous rifle collection! My office plankton job makes me inherently superior to those dirty poors, who just lack my good, old-fashioned work ethic, or they’d be able to file regional shrinkage dynamics reports just like me and become productive members of society!”
To sum it up, the only real question is... Why are they like this? Who hurt them? What possible calamity has caused them to become these incredibly shallow, yet exceptionally vain shells of something vaguely resembling human form? Perhaps we’ll never know.
I am, however, interested in your guys’ opinions on the subject!
This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
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Shaming.
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Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
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Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
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Recruiting for a cause.
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In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
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Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
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On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
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It's a book review submitted to Scott Alexander's blog for his book review contest(not by me, I just enjoyed reading it). It a summary of an Icelandic Saga that's half-fable, half-historical record of a series of legal proceedings in medieval Iceland, and how society that teeters between civilization and barbarism.
Note: I reached out beforehand to the mods, and got their permission to make this post. Normally, recruitment posts are off-limits. They gave me a clear set of requirements they would want from so that this is not a low-effort “recruitment post”. If you are not happy with the effort of this post, leave a comment on what you would have liked to see
TL;DR: A forum where people can discuss NEPA reform is important for enabling local-level advocacy groups to apply pressure to state/federal institutions. Such forums do not exist, so I created r/ReformNEPA to get something off the ground.
Reform of NEPA (National Enviromental Policy Act) is something that is increasingly being discussed. Trump was responsible for updating the Council on Enviromental Quality (the procedure-setting agency for NEPA) in order to lessen the regulatory burden imposed by NEPA. Biden was responsible for rolling back all of Trump’s changes. The debt ceiling deal recently passed made minor changes to NEPA.
So what is NEPA? Brian Potter and Eli Dourado provide a detailed analysis of NEPA and its effects. In short, NEPA was originally a short piece of federal legislation passed in 1970. The bill announced that it:
… is the continuing policy of the Federal Government, in cooperation with State and local governments, and other concerned public and private organizations, to use all practicable means and measures, including financial and technical assistance, in a manner calculated to foster and promote the general welfare, to create and maintain conditions under which man and nature can exist in productive harmony, and fulfill the social, economic, and other requirements of present and future generations of Americans.
and required federal agencies to act in line with this policy. However, the courts found that such broad language was unenforceable, and thus, NEPA ceased to be a substantive piece of legislation. However, the following line with the statute was found to be enforceable:
The Congress authorizes and directs that, to the fullest extent possible: All agencies of the Federal Government shall include in every major Federal action significantly affecting the quality of the human environment a detailed statement by the responsible official on the environmental impact of the proposed action, any adverse environmental effects which cannot be avoided should the proposal be implemented, etc.
This ‘detailed statement’ became the Enviromental Impact Statement (EIS) that all agencies are required to produce for any action that is expected to have a significant effect on the environment. The length of a EIS has repeatedly grown. The Department of Energy has found that the length of their EIS has doubled over the past 20 years, with lengths increasing from an average of 1,100 pages to 2,500 over the period from 1994 to 2016. The time to complete an EIS grew from 26 month to 40 month. Producing an EIS is also expensive, with the Department of Energy spending 94 million dollars on just 3 EIS! The average cost varies per department, but the U.S. Forest Service spent 40% of its total work budget on enviromental planning and assessment documents. As action cannot proceed until an EIS is produced, the long period of delay introduced by the requirement to produce an EIS (or an enviromental assessment statement, or a categorical exclusion, or a finding of no significance; see Brian Potter’s that I linked in the beginning) severely limits the effectiveness of federal and state agencies. Noteably, San Francisco spent over one million dollars and 2.5 years on the EIS required in order to build new bike lanes.
Note that due to the enforcement of the courts the statute is now completely procedural. NEPA does not require agencies to consider the impact that their actions can have on the environment; they must only show that they know about it.
NEPA is an increasingly burdensome regulations because it allows bad actors a ‘heckler’s veto’. When an agency introduces releases a EIS for a particular project, it can be sued by advocacy groups who opposes the project by finding a consideration that was not considered in the EIS. This can lead to years of delay as agencies must wait for case to navigate the court system, and as they further expand their EIS. This is a known strategy used by activists. Additionally, as the costs of producing an EIS is often borne not by the agency but by the sponsor (for example, the FAA approving SpaceX’s orbital launch program at Boca Chica), NEPA imposes a heavy and direct cost on businesses that interact with federal agencies.
I believe NEPA reform is essential to ending ballooning American construction costs, government ineffectiveness, and constant delays. The issue is that after the passage of NEPA, states proceeded to pass their own version of NEPA. This means reforming NEPA will require constant pressure on the Federal and State level. As to most people, this is an obscure piece of legislation with little bearing on their daily lives, it is difficult to imagine where the political pressure to change will come from.
My theory is that to reform NEPA, the dynamics of the YIMBY movement must be reproduced. The YIMBY movement got enough people interested in a topic as obscure as ‘zoning reform’ to successfully apply pressure in California to start getting things done. These are a minority of people who can form local activist groups, show up to town halls, apply pressure on their representatives, and comment during public feedback periods in order to push the legislation in their direction. Thus, despite not becoming a culture war issue that has the attention of a lot of people, progress is still being made. I was looking around for something similar to /r/YIMBY or the YIMBY alliances but there is nothing. It seems that discussion of reforming NEPA remains at the level of a minority of interested policy makers and substackers. Thus, I created r/ReformNEPA. I’m hoping it will get the conversation off the ground and give people who are interested in reforming NEPA a place to meet, discuss, and coordinate, eventually leading to the creation of local action groups, websites with appropriate resources, etc. Please join and contribute if it is something you are interested in! I am looking for mods, and for people interested in organizing and creating resources to make progress on this important issue.
Since this is the motte, I am interested in what your perspective is on this. Is NEPA such a burden as I believe it is? Is my theory on how NEPA reform needs to be achieved wrong?
Edit: also wanted to add this link which has more details about the cost, length of time required, and delays: The Case for Abolishing NEPA
Despite good intentions, NEPA is one of the primary reasons why it’s so hard to build anything in America. There are three main types of NEPA review—Categorical Exclusions (CEs), Environmental Assessments (EAs), and Environmental Impact Statements (EISs). Environmental Impact Statements are the most stringent category of those three. In 2020, the White House Council on Environmental Quality estimated that the average EIS took 4.5 years to complete and ran more than 660 pages long. This is likely an underestimate as the 4.5 years figure is the time from the “Notice of Intent” filing to the “Record of Decision” ruling, and work typically begins before the Notice of Intent. The American Action Forum estimated an average time of 5.8 years for infrastructure projects to gain NEPA approval. The problem is also getting worse over time, with average NEPA review times estimated to be increasing 39 days per year.