ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
All of this can be true, but with the conclusion reversed. Nearly every time a "scandal" came up during the Trump administration, I chuckled and said, "...so today is the day that people are going to learn how X works, eh?" And when my left-leaning buddies would get into why it was a scandal, we'd discuss how X actually works, with the clinching question being, "So, what are you willing to do about the problem of X? The only constraint on your answer is that you need to be willing to apply the same standard to politicians you like as you do for politicians that you don't like." That's when it became clear that they didn't have any "solution" to the "blind spot" that they could embrace. Their initial reaction was not, "Oh my, this is a blind spot that is a problem with the system in general, and it would be nice if we could fix the system." It was always, from the first moment, motivated by and embraced specifically for its ability to get Trump, because he's obviously crooked and only someone so crooked could do such a thing.
We can check this in hindsight, too. If and when this mostly blows over, because people realize they can't take Trump's scalp on it without taking too many other scalps, how much energy do you think there will be to 'fix the blind spot'? What's an example policy fix that you expect is likely to be adopted in order to bring about changes to the system and then applied evenly to politicians on both sides?
ControlsFreak
9d ago
I have always preferred calling them "micro-aggravations". Yes, it's a real thing, but it really says more about the aggravatee's psychology and what they find annoying/unpleasant than it does about anything that can be properly called "aggression". One can still care deeply about reducing their impacts, even on a society-wide basis, but I think this terminology more appropriately captures the concepts that they use to describe the phenomenon and avoids the horrific conflation with literal violence that plagues the rest of the associated political movement.
ControlsFreak
8mo ago
Meta suggestion: there should be room for this.
The reason why the community jettisoned the BLR was because it was too easy to have drive-by link dropping to dunk on the outgroup. Not having a BLR paired with a requirement to have a substantial top-level post effectively stopped this problem. However, there is some news that is so blatantly and obviously going to be the topic of water cooler talk, if only people could find where the water cooler is. It's the topic on the front of every news outlet, absolutely core ground to anything considered the culture war, at the highest levels of American government, which is the most powerful and influential institution on earth. It is going to be a topic here one way or another. Posts like this are just putting the water cooler out.
I think there is asymptotic precedent for this. Consider the limit of stories that were the story in the past. Elections. Riots. Those various things. Rather than declare that no one can say anything around the water cooler until one person has a lengthy, unique, insightful essay, this place will, in fact, just put a water cooler out in the form of a megathread. When the mods post a megathread, they're not generally pairing it with an interesting top-level comment - they're putting out the water cooler for the conversation that is going to happen.
There is a spectrum between "lazy drive-by dunks on the outgroup from obscure blog", "obvious water cooler topics that are on the front of every newspaper", and "obvious water cooler topics that are on the front of every newspaper and which would otherwise overwhelm the thread." I contend that megathreads are only used for the latter category, but their secondary function is extremely useful for the middle category, too.
Given the premise that it's just putting out the water cooler, I would actually prefer that the top-level comment be a short, completely neutral description of the major news item, like this comment. If we wait for an in-depth comment, then the entire following thread will be colored by the perspective of the OP. You'd need an additional top-level comment to start any offshoot perspectives on the main topic, which fractures the discussion, possibly having other topics sandwiched in between the top-level threads. This way, you can have multiple second-level comments that have more effort, but also allow for conversations with different focuses.
One concern is that loosening this rule opens up a "race to post". I don't see that that's much of a problem, practically. But even so, maybe we could have an in-between mod action that isn't quite opening a megathread, but is opening a "mini-megathread" on topics that are of this sort.
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
If you're worried that this will lead to lax academic standards or shoddy research practices, I'd reassure you that academic standards have never been laxer and shoddy research is absolutely everywhere, and the existence of review boards and similar apparatchik-filled bodies does nothing to curb these. If anything, by preventing basic research being done by anything except those with insider connections and a taste for bureaucracy, they make the problem worse. Similarly, academia is decreasingly valuable for delivering basic research; the incentive structures have been too rotten for too long, and almost no-one produces content with actual value.
Whew, lots of thoughts. Let's start with total agreement that academic standards have never been laxer, that shoddy research is absolutely everywhere, review boards and such have done nothing to curb it, and that almost no one produces content with actual value. Moreover, I would agree that the incentive structures have been too rotten for too long, and I think that this is a huge driver of the previous four items. "Publish or perish" has creeped ever earlier, and I've actually stopped going to conferences, due to the flood of interestingly-titled talks that end up being, "So, I'm an undergrad, and this is really preliminary work, and... [total garbage]." The undergrads feel like they have to publish bullshit in order to get into grad school, the grad students feel like they have to publish bullshit to get a post-doc, the post-docs feel like they have to publish bullshit to get a professorship, and the assistant professors feel like they have to publish bullshit to get tenure (after tenure, paths tend to bifurcate a bit more, it seems), so the assistant professors are more than happy to push everyone down the chain to go ahead and publish their bullshit (so long as his/her name is on it, so it adds to a count on Google Scholar). It is all for the sake of number go up rather than advancing knowledge.
This trend has been decades long, but I would argue that it has also been exacerbated by one particular huge drop in barrier to submission - the rise of China. I don't know if they've really subscribed to our fucked up incentive structure, because I just don't know as much about how their unis work, but the regional flood has gone global. Not to say that there is zero good work coming from there (I finally recommended acceptance of my first paper from a Chinese group, but it's unsurprising that it was an exceptional case, as the main guy in that group is good enough that he's now taken a position at an excellent Western uni), but the quantity of folks pushing out the quantity of digital ink from there is astounding, and the vast majority of it is undergrad-tier bullshit. It really makes me pause when you say:
If anything, by preventing basic research being done by anything except those with insider connections and a taste for bureaucracy, they make the problem worse.
I really go back and forth in my head. Does having a sort of mental rule that nearly automatically rules out all Chinese work help? Probably so, like 99% of the time. Does having a sort of mental rule that if the first author is an undergrad from a low-tier uni, it's probably shit help? Probably so, like 99% of the time. I joke sometimes that I've never even seen a contemporary masters thesis that was at all interesting (there are some legendary ones from the past, by legit giants in their fields). Having some form of statistically-informed heuristic realllly saves a lot of time and effort that would otherwise be 99% wasted. This sort of "credential chauvinism" obviously won't stop the flood; incentive structures for conferences/journals are also fucked up enough that there's zero chance any will adopt a position of basically, "If you're an undergrad or from a Chinese university, your submission will basically be auto-denied." But they're adopted very pragmatically, almost out of necessity, by the good researchers who just don't have that much time to waste. (I know the irony of writing this in a bloody comment on a rando internet forum.)
My personal strategy is basically defection/free-riding. I've cultivated a network of really talented profs who I personally know, have personally spoken with enough to know how they think, with a not-insignificant percentage of them being assistant profs. They basically feel forced by their incentive structures to wade through all of the crap and constantly engage with all the conferences and reviewing and editing and shit... and they like magically filter through it all and bring up the small number of diamonds in the rough. Is it the best-tuned filter? Possibly not. Might I gain some additional insight by wading through more of it actively? Possibly. But damn if I'm going to ever feel like the cost/benefit tradeoff is going to be worth it anytime soon. But the nature of defection/free-riding is that not everyone can do it without catastrophic consequences.
Getting back to the point of LLMs, this is what I'm worried about. Sure, it'll make it harder for dyed-in-the-wool bureaucrat-and-nothing-more folks, but it'll also make it harder for us. It'll be Eternal September for academia. What possible filters can stand?
Meanwhile I expect harder fields like biomed and material sciences to (continue to) be supercharged by the capabilities of ML, with the comparative ineffectiveness of institutional research being shown up by insights from DeepMind et al.
I don't have as much to say on the social sciences bit, and you may well be perfectly on point there. For harder sciences, I'm really not sure where this will go. Traditional work has been extremely structured in form, whereas I do subscribe to the Nick Weaver School of ML in Research, which is, "ML is great for when you want to model something that you have a good reason to think is structured, but you have no idea how to model it, and you're okay with it being fabulously wrong some percentage of the time." Biomed and materials science are perfectly positioned to reap the gains of this. Those areas in particular have fantastically complicated underlying structures, and at least the experimental folks don't much care how we get a half-decent idea of what to try to build, so long as each iteration doesn't take too much time, we can just try a bunch of them and see what works out. Huge potential for big experimental gains, and a decent chance that experimental gains will subsequently push the theory part forward around those new lodestones. My view of the trends in institutional research has been that they've gone full steam ahead at trying to embrace it for every problem under the sun, even when it doesn't make much sense. But for every work that gets accelerated, every wonder material that gets developed, how many shit-tier "ML" papers will be submitted/published in the field that turn out to just be awful, obnoxious noise? (While this last paragraph is similar in a concern about the flood of crap, it's a bit distinct as it's less focused specifically on the administrative side of the crap production/evaluation.)
ControlsFreak
11mo ago
I've been thinking more and more about Robin Hanson talking about how the public basically said "no" to the nuclear energy revolution. He was making analogy to the possibility that the public might say "no" to the AI revolution, wondering what that might mean. In any event, he said something along the lines of, "Imagine if the public hadn't said 'no' to the nuclear energy revolution. Would energy be a tenth of the price today in the alternate timeline than it is in the real one? How would your life be different?" It's the "hidden costs", the "hidden timeline". @functor could have kept his apartment at 23C and paid like a Euro more.
Any organized competitive activity will certainly require a set of rules (and will inspire a corresponding set of rules lawyers). Those rules almost always include some element of eligibility ("This is a human running race; horses cannot enter; humans aided by segways cannot enter...").
Which brings to my mind an analogy that might be useful to get more left-leaning folks thinking about the topic differently: the special olympics/paralympics. I have no idea what rules they use, but I am 100% confident that they must have some set of eligibility rules. At some point, people sat down and said, "No, your specific condition does not qualify you to participate in the special olympics/paralympics." Any such set of rules is invariably going to have edge cases. (It's invariably going to inspire a set of rules lawyers, too.) There are going to be people who think it's unfair that they're not allowed to compete. There are going to be people who think it's unfair that someone else is allowed to compete. I think everyone can be aboard the train this far.
First off, I cannot possibly fathom someone on the left agreeing to a proposed rule of, "Anyone who self-identifies as 'special' is automatically eligible." This at least gets them into the right ballpark and out of the bailey.
Then, the motte about burden-of-proof shifting. The much harder position to crack is the claim, "We just need you to provide extensive peer-reviewed evidence that this person would have a competitive advantage." Here is where they set up a hundred foot wall and say, "If you can't crack this, we're back to the bailey of self-identification." However, again, let's go back to the special olympics/paralympics. There is an absolute myriad of specific situations/conditions that someone might think should qualify them for the special olympics/paralympics. It would be an utterly impossible standard to say, "Whelp, if you can't bring metareviews of peer-reviewed research showing that this particular condition, experienced by like 100 people on the planet (99 of which aren't competitive in the sport in question), does not unfairly situate them with respect to the other competitors, then you have to just go back to accepting everyone who self-identifies as 'special'."
Perhaps I'm wrong. If anyone here is "pro self-identification in women's sports" and also "pro self-identification in special olympics/paralympics" on the same grounds of requiring this type of peer-reviewed evidence, I'm all ears.
As an interesting note, I learned recently that the best bench pressers in the world, by the typical measure used, are all in the special olympicsparalympics. This is because the typical measure used is a ratio of weight lifted to bodyweight (or essentially this using weight classes). And, well, the people who max out this metric are all some form of leg amputee or other condition that results in extremely underdeveloped legs. They don't get the same "leg drive" strength that other lifters get, but the simple fact that they're not "wasting" bodyweight on a part of the body which isn't that useful for the bench press is more than enough to make up for it. I imagine that powerlifting federations don't have to go out of their way to exclude these people, because they probably are just happy doing what they're doing and have no need to jump into a powerlifting meet. Powerlifters are supposed to squat and deadlift, too, which they just can't do, so they probably don't bother, because all they'd be accomplishing is putting their name at the top of the bench board and everyone else being annoyed, mentally ignoring them, thinking, "Well, of course, there's that guy, but I set the real top bench number." Politics is dumb, though, and I sort of view the whole drive to require trans eligibility as politically-motivated; it would be akin to a political movement to do something dumb like try to wreck powerlifting federations with amputees just because your politics tells you to be an asshole.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
Update on the "Code is Speech" Front
Organizations like FFTF/EFF have long argued from a principle that "Code is Speech". Most recently, they applied their reasoning to maximum extent on behalf of Tornado Cash. I have long argued that while they are pointing at the barest kernel of a Motte (there is one case where pseudocode was being used in a textbook to provide an example in order to illustrate the ideas contained in the text, and that was deemed protected speech), examples like Tornado Cash are the Bailey, with the argument seeming to be something along the lines of, "Anything that you choose to do with code (...something, something, maybe as long as you open source it... something...) is protected speech." Ergo things like: Tornado Cash was open source code, therefore protected speech.
Matthew Green, a prof at Johns Hopkins, notable for being part of the Keys Under Doormats group and partnering with the EFF on Tornado Cash, joined with Andrew Huang, an inventor/engineer, to apply this principle in challenging the DMCA. They wanted to write code to bypass digital content restrictions, disseminate the ideas/methods of that code, and create/sell a device that implements it and allows the purchaser to just use that code to bypass said restrictions. They knew that there was a good chance of getting dinged by the gov't on DMCA grounds, so they filed a pre-enforcement challenge to see if the courts would bless their "Code is Speech" position and give them an assurance that they could not be prosecuted for those actions. This week, the DC Circuit weighed in.
The court split the case pretty much exactly between the Motte and the Bailey. That is, instead of treating the pair of individuals (and their respective proposed actions) as one in the same, the court recognized that the two individuals were proposing different actions - Green wanted to publish a book that describes ideas/methods for circumventing digital content restrictions (with example code), while Huang wanted to build/sell a device that actually implements that code and performs the actual action of bypassing such restrictions in the real world. The government had already conceded that Green's publishing of a book would not violate the DMCA, and so they could simply peel his part of the challenge off and ignore it (he's effectively already protected by the government's concession, so there's nothing else the court need do). Separately, Huang's device does not communicate any speech/expressive content. People would be buying it to use it, not to learn about how algorithms work. Therefore, Huang would not receive First Amendment protection.
I think this line is in about the right place, both as a theoretical matter and as a practical one. Practically-speaking, most people aren't going to be buying Green's book, then sitting down and coding up their own implementation to bypass content restrictions. So, to the extent that one thinks that reducing copyright violations is a worthwhile goal, this line probably does most of the job. I can already hear the rejoinder coming, "But isn't that pointless, because some people can still just go implement that code!? Once it's out there, it's pointless!" But it's not. Practically, there's still a big barrier to implementing it; the vast majority of people won't bother. No other law ever has ever been judged by its ability to 100% stop 100% of possible violations; that would be absurd; but it's somehow still commonly thrown out there in tech law arguments. Instead, if we embrace this speech/implementation divide, these cases are easy, and they usually come out the right way as a practical matter.
Tornado Cash: sure, it's fine for people to abstractly know how to use code to launder money; most people won't do it; maybe some small number will somewhere; if you actually do it, especially if you actually do it in a way designed to make law-breaking maximally-convenient for the masses (and you actually help the North Koreans launder money when you do it), you're going to get sanctioned.
Apple v. FBI: Recall, the FBI attempted to force Apple to help it break into the San Bernadino shooter's phone. Some tried to claim that writing code for the FBI to use would have been compelled speech. This case is another indication that if a follow-on to Apple v. FBI actually worked its way through the courts, 'compelled speech' would not likely be the grounds on which the gov't would lose.
ControlsFreak
5mo ago
I believe the phrase they usually like to use is "stochastic terrorism". At least, they like to use it when it can be used against their enemies.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
Because no one actually believes in a consent-only sexual ethic. That's mostly a lie in order to gather political support for various deviancies. The constant haranguing over what exactly is actually actually ackshually consent is indicative of the keyhole by which every other aspect of their preferred sexual ethic is smuggled in.
The easiest way to internalize this, to know it in your bones, is to go to the professional ethicists who write serious scholarly works on the topic, like Westen/Wortheimer. If you are looking for it while you read them, you can see it plain as day, and then it becomes nearly impossible to not see it anymore.
ControlsFreak
10mo ago
The Democratic National Committee, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Hillary Clinton's campaign manager were hacked into, and their internal communications were released in a manner designed to politically disadvantage her, and advantage her electoral opponent, Donald Trump. Given those crimes, and Donald Trump's public support and encouragement of them (including the famous "Russia, if you're listening" quip, as well as 100+ references to Wikileaks in his stump speeches) there's very obviously reason to follow up seriously with a look at the Trump campaign.
This is 100% not probable cause or legitimate grounds on which to premise an investigation into the Trump campaign. That is why none of the reports from the "investigations into the investigation" found that any of the investigations were predicated on this... it would be literally illegal to do such a thing. Instead, they relied on other grounds.
ControlsFreak
10mo ago
Ah yes, the gotcha. It's the right's fault, so your observation is invalid. Sorry, but I can acknowledge that the right certainly played a significant part in chipping away at the norm... while also acknowledging that the observation remains true. In the before days, one could at least sit back and say, "There are some crazy righties chanting 'lock her up', but we're a serious democracy which doesn't prosecute politicians on questionable charges, and there are serious people who will ensure that we stay that way." I am on record as one of those people, prior to Trump's election, prior to the reality become clear to everyone that he didn't try to force through some charges. (As an aside, has there ever been a single piece of reporting along the lines of, "We're giving an exclusive account of the breathtaking meetings in which Donald Trump applied consistent pressure to produce a prosecution, but was rebuffed by so-and-so"?)
At the same time, one can also sit back and say, "It turns out that many people who said they were serious people who would ensure that we're a serious democracy which doesn't prosecute politicians on questionable charges... are now cheering on efforts to prosecute politicians on questionable charges, so long as they're the politicians they don't like."
I agree that the public statements are a problem, even in the absence of substantial actions. One possible world we could have ended up in is a world where dems chant "lock him up" at rallies, but then dem politicians still refrain from pushing questionable charges once in office. It might have been a weird state of affairs; maybe the chants would continue to be tit-for-tat, but serious people would ensure that reality stays serious alongside it. In that world, do the chants eventually go away? Do they persist, like how in many other domains, the public chants and pushes both sides' politicians for things that those politicians continually reject actually doing? Man, I don't know. I wouldn't like it, but I don't know how it would go. Regardless, we are no longer in that possible timeline. We're in a different one.
ControlsFreak
11mo ago
I know this is already dead and buried... and that @firmamenti already pretty much explained why... but we have now gotten the NYT response. No surprise, it's "Republicans pounce". They're banking on their readership not actually reading the report. They just refuse to even acknowledge all the stuff in there that demonstrates how differently the FBI treated claims touching the Clinton campaign from those touching the Trump campaign. If they just close their eyes and ignore the screen for half the movie, it's no wonder they see a different movie. They get their zingers in. "In fact, Mr. Durham said he agreed that the F.B.I. should have opened a preliminary investigation." See! It's all bullshit, what these right wing nutjobs are saying! Of course, completely hidden in this sentence is the distinction between types of investigation, one of the major points of the Durham report. If you didn't read the report or you're not otherwise familiar with this, you'll never notice. They're not explicitly lying. They're just totally ignoring the entire discussion about how they shouldn't have immediately opened a full investigation, how a preliminary investigation wouldn't have justified many of the investigatory steps they took, how thinly the whole shebang was predicated, how an unbiased preliminary investigation would have almost certainly quickly noticed, "There's literally nothing here," and then been quickly closed, how a proper response that was trying to protect American elections and elected officials would have been to provide defensive briefings to Trump rather than the obscene exercise of doing everything possible to malign him for possibly being the victim of a foreign influence campaign... or critically, how this all goes down differently when it is blue politicians at risk.
Of course, again, as already said by @firmamenti, everyone on the right already knows all this, so there's not much that needs to be said here. The only culture war things of interest is the response. How partisan actors continue with their tactics of "not lying" and memoryholing "inconvenient truths". I spent a lot of time paying close attention to the developments of this story back when it was happening in real time in 2016. I know specific media people who know this topic in great detail. The real culture war story is seeing their silence. Usual Suspect Numero Uno, Benjamin Wittes; where is his comment on the Durham report? I've been looking, even went to his new Mastodon. Best I can tell, there isn't one. If you can get away with just squeezing your eyes shut and not watching the painful parts of the movie, you're going to.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
Back in the old place, in the old times (last summer, lol), we were talking about the raid of Mar-a-Lago for classified documents. I sketched a timeline:
The most important thing is the timing of the charges and potential conviction. You probably want to prevent Trump from becoming the official nominee. If he's already the official nominee, it's going to be a harder political sell to strip one of the major parties of their candidate at the last minute. Think back to Comey and the investigation into Clinton emails. On June 6, 2016, the AP and NBC declared that Clinton had won enough delegates/superdelegates to ensure the nomination. On July 5, Comey publicly addressed the investigation, attempting to declare it closed. At the time, I wrote that it seemed more like a 50/50 that they could get a conviction than an 80/20 either way, and that it seemed completely reasonable for the refs to swallow the whistle on a 50/50 call in the third period of a playoff game. Enough had been settled that it would be incredibly destructive to the political process if they brought charges at that point; either the case would be hanging over the whole process, just waiting to get adjudicated until after the election... or they'd have to rush through a trial, and the resulting clusterf would be immense.
The first primaries are January 2024. You need enough time for blue states to go through an expedited process that evaluates the conviction and declares that their understanding is that it prevents Trump from being on their primary ballots... as well as enough time to physically print/distribute the new ballots and such. So, the ideal time for a conviction is maybe late fall, early winter 2023.
Now, the Trump campaign would have to go to the district courts in all these states in an attempt to get it changed back. The states will vehemently reject any ruling from a district in another state (or a circuit they are not part of), and they will lean on how some provision in their state law is different than that of the other state, so they are not a suitable target of an injunction, even if a district judge tries to implement a nationwide one. Blue districts/circuits will slow-play the cases as much as possible, so the Trump campaign will have to target the reddest district/circuit in a blue state that is brave enough to try to strip him off the ballot. Game theoretically, if every blue state in sufficiently red circuits refrain from stripping him off the ballot, that probably won't tip the primary in his direction, but it prevents a case from getting pushed through quickly. All they need to do is gum up the works for long enough that some number of primaries happen before SCOTUS steps in. And SCOTUS could be put in a terrible spot - maybe only days/weeks out from some primaries, are they really going to tell states, "You have to change all your ballot material again to put this guy back on"?
If a few states go through without Trump on the ballot, you have the best shot at establishment Republicans rallying around an alternate candidate, everyone declaring post-hoc, "Candidate X was obviously going to win anyway; Trump is a loser; none of that stuff really mattered," and trying to ignore it all as hard as possible. While Trump's base will continue to be up in arms, they would really lack any power to do anything about it.
So, what implications does this have for the timing of everything else that leads up to this? Well, ballpark a typical case that goes to trial as taking a year. If you bring charges only six months out, Trump can probably delay things long enough that a conviction happens too late to make changes to the primary; if you bring charges a year and a half out, Trump will 100% demand the speediest trial that ever did happen. Obviously, you can't predict the future perfectly, but shooting for a year out is probably the best EV move (would love to hear some actual lawyers' takes on this). That means you want to file charges in late fall, early winter 2022.
...in turn, that means that if you're taking a shot on what may or may not be a fishing expedition, hoping that you can bring charges at the optimal chance to keep Trump off of the ballot, you'd want that shot to be... summer 2022. You have a few months to thoroughly analyze everything you were able to acquire and game things out in more detail, with much more information.
In hindsight, I feel like I wanted to lean on the lower side of 6mo-1yr rather than just 1yr, but that may just be wishful thinking. I'm pretty confident that I thought 1.5yr was definitely too long. Whelp, since those charges seem to have evaporated (with the revelations of classified materials at many other politician's private locations and all), this must be the next best shot. Nevermind that SDNY probably had all of the relevant information on the matter ever since Cohen's guilty plea, here we are, 6mo-1yr out.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
Article on John Edwards at the time and indictment.
John Edwards' case was a vastly better case for the purpose of campaign finance law. He took someone else's money and gave it to his mistress. The indictment describes the purpose as:
In order to restrict the influence that any one person could have on the outcome of the 2008 primary election for President of the United States, the Election Act established that the most an individual could contribute to any candidate for that primary election was $2,300.
Citizens United limited the purpose of these laws to quid pro quo. Consider Steven's dissent in Citizens United, trying to set a wider outer bound of what type of corruption these campaign finance laws can get at (beyond quid pro quo), saying things like:
Congress may “legitimately conclude that the avoidance of the appearance of improper influence is also critical . . . if confidence in the system of representative Government is not to be eroded to a disastrous extent.” A democracy cannot function effectively when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold
and
Proving that a specific vote was exchanged for a specific expenditure has always been next to impossible: Elected officials have diverse motivations, and no one will acknowledge that he sold a vote. Yet, even if “[i]ngratiation and access . . . are not corruption” themselves, they are necessary prerequisites to it; they can create both the opportunity for, and the appearance of, quid pro quo arrangements. [Emphasis added]
For Edwards, this could make sense. He took a million dollars from two specific blokes and gave it to his mistress. Those two specific blokes very likely had "ingratiation" and "access" on account of that money. I could at least see someone making a reasonable argument that they think such an arrangement means that laws were being bought and sold. They didn't prove quid pro quo, but it at least could point in that direction.
In this case, Trump it makes no sense to claim that Donald Trump was trying to enter a quid pro quo with Donald Trump; it makes no sense to claim that Donald Trump was trying to gain ingratiation, access, or undue influence over Donald Trump. At best, one could try to claim that the Enquirer was trying to gain something in return (like influence) even though money never actually changed hands between them, but Trump could say the same thing that he would say to everyone else who he has bought or attempted to buy something from: “That’s what the money (I offered you) is for.".
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
This, plus the fact that we have no idea how to do "treatment" that actually works. Scott posted loooooong ago that honest studies on rehab for alcoholism fail to beat a placebo. The end goal of most rehab studies for harder drugs like potent opioids isn't even "stops using potent opioids"; it's "maybe uses potent opioids slightly less and gets up to criminal mischief slightly less often". The true believers in the idea that we're just going to "apply 'treatment' directly to the forehead", if we just try hard enough politically and decide to spend enough money, and that it will magically convert addicts into non-addicts/non-users, are just banging their heads against reality.
ControlsFreak
4mo ago
Do we have to convert every fucking thing in the world into dollars and cents? "Oh, you like looking at the sunset, well now that'll cost you!"
Most of the time, sunsets are public goods, because it is extremely difficult to generally prevent people from observing them and your observing it does not impinge on my ability to observe it. Obviously, if people think there is a One True Best Location for observing a sunset, but like only ten people can fit there, then it becomes rivalrous and probably excludable, too. At that point, there's going to be some mechanism that meters who can use that particular location at sunset, whether it's people having to spend time by showing up two hours before sunset to grab one of the ten spots or people having to spend money to grab one.
It is also very common in development disputes to contest visual obstructions. If someone wants to build a high rise, but it will block the view of the sunset for a group of folks who used to be able to see it, the building will be contested. Here, the traditional solution is to, again, convert the dispute into dollars and cents, having the developer pay the obstructees to compensate them for their loss. In this case, they're getting a monetary benefit for their loss, rather than having to pay for their privilege, but it's relatively similar.
On a similar note, I just recently listed to this old old podcast, which raised several reasonable sounding concerns about things like National Park schemes for nature preservation. Worth a listen.
That said, this effort is likely as dumb as most carbon offset schemes, which Matt Levine routinely (and hilariously) lambastes. Definitely worth the read regularly if you're not already.
ControlsFreak
4mo ago
Thank you for your honesty. I have to ask, though, do you worry at all about any future backlash? That if people realize that the whole thing was a lie, an intentional one, purely for convenience sake to win a political battle, and that they were the dupes who fell for it... they might get angry and start not believing the other things you say in the public discourse?
ControlsFreak
4mo ago
My wife's family is from a more rural part of Canada. We went back to visit not too long ago. They're building apartments everywhere out there, all for the immigrants. All sorts of pockets that used to be empty now have a bunch of big apartment buildings and a small number of shops that are popping up nearby to serve them. Most of the people I talked to were natives, friends of the family. Everyone is definitely too polite blue to say anything outright negative, but in nearly every single conversation I had, it came up at some point. I wasn't bringing it up. But there would almost always be a moment where they'd kinda hesitate, think about what they're saying, give a little breath almost as if, "I'm not sure I'm quite allowed to say this, but I'm going to word it this way, and maybe it'll be okay," followed by some form of, "There are a lot of immigrants now. Especially since COVID. The local culture is changing. It's not the way it used to be anymore." They're not saying the follow-up, "...and I think that's bad," but I repeatedly got the impression that they sure were thinking something like that.
ControlsFreak
9mo ago
This comment made me realize that we really are moving to a world where, in order to decide whether some action is bad or not, you have to first figure out whether the victim is "good" or "bad". I noticed this a while back in prominent hacking cases. If the victim was sympathetic to the current political fashions, it's a horrible crime. If the victim, for any reason at all, might not be the most shining example of idealism, at best indifference, at worst "fuck 'em". For example, the discussion around the Ashley Madison hack wasn't, "Hacking is bad, end of story." It was, "Ha! Fuckin' cheaters get hacked. Plus, some of them were government employees, so extra fuck 'em!" "...Uh, hello! Some good, brave, possible minorities, might have good reasons to use a site like Ashley Madison. Maybe hacking is not so good." And so on.
There is likely some amount of pre-judging the alleged perpetrator, too, but I first noticed it in hacking crimes with mostly faceless/unknown perpetrators.
I guess, weirdly, I had previously thought, "Hacking/digital stuff is still a new area; we don't have developed norms yet; given that, there's going to be more 'who, whom' than normal, but once we flesh out some norms, we should head toward more consistency." And now, I, uh, probably think that less. Not sure it makes me more conflict theory-y, but at the very least, I feel more inclined to think that many other people are, in a deeply rooted way, more conflict theory-y than I had previously hoped.
ControlsFreak
10mo ago
Nah, we've got plenty of laws. Especially when people are pushing ideas like, "Campaign finance laws make it illegal to talk to foreigners," trying to resurrect the Logan Act, etc.
blatant procedure prosecutions
Can I introduce you to an indictment from New York County?
Through the last eight years or so, with the left-leaning friends I have in the real world, I've had discussions about this possible politician crime or that possible politician crime. There have been many such times where they were wound up about how you could totally plausibly read the law in a way that totally plausibly gets at so-and-so. Often, I just poke at the implications of their broad reading, especially given the reality of political life. When they start to see just how broadly this shit could be construed if we walk down that path, then I drop, "Is this something that you really value enough to 'let justice reign' equally on both sides' politicians?" And some issues might actually be. Most of them have not been. Most of the time, they realize, "Actually, that would probably have some pretty bad effects and barely bring any real benefit to society."
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
Mundane Scheduling Details - Trump Edition
For a while now, I've been wondering about very boring dates on calendars. Last summer, I wondered:
The most important thing is the timing of the charges and potential conviction. You probably want to prevent Trump from becoming the official nominee. If he's already the official nominee, it's going to be a harder political sell to strip one of the major parties of their candidate at the last minute. Think back to Comey and the investigation into Clinton emails. On June 6, 2016, the AP and NBC declared that Clinton had won enough delegates/superdelegates to ensure the nomination. On July 5, Comey publicly addressed the investigation, attempting to declare it closed. At the time, I wrote that it seemed more like a 50/50 that they could get a conviction than an 80/20 either way, and that it seemed completely reasonable for the refs to swallow the whistle on a 50/50 call in the third period of a playoff game. Enough had been settled that it would be incredibly destructive to the political process if they brought charges at that point; either the case would be hanging over the whole process, just waiting to get adjudicated until after the election... or they'd have to rush through a trial, and the resulting clusterf would be immense.
The first primaries are January 2024. You need enough time for blue states to go through an expedited process that evaluates the conviction and declares that their understanding is that it prevents Trump from being on their primary ballots... as well as enough time to physically print/distribute the new ballots and such. So, the ideal time for a conviction is maybe late fall, early winter 2023.
Now, the Trump campaign would have to go to the district courts in all these states in an attempt to get it changed back. The states will vehemently reject any ruling from a district in another state (or a circuit they are not part of), and they will lean on how some provision in their state law is different than that of the other state, so they are not a suitable target of an injunction, even if a district judge tries to implement a nationwide one. Blue districts/circuits will slow-play the cases as much as possible, so the Trump campaign will have to target the reddest district/circuit in a blue state that is brave enough to try to strip him off the ballot. Game theoretically, if every blue state in sufficiently red circuits refrain from stripping him off the ballot, that probably won't tip the primary in his direction, but it prevents a case from getting pushed through quickly. All they need to do is gum up the works for long enough that some number of primaries happen before SCOTUS steps in. And SCOTUS could be put in a terrible spot - maybe only days/weeks out from some primaries, are they really going to tell states, "You have to change all your ballot material again to put this guy back on"?
If a few states go through without Trump on the ballot, you have the best shot at establishment Republicans rallying around an alternate candidate, everyone declaring post-hoc, "Candidate X was obviously going to win anyway; Trump is a loser; none of that stuff really mattered," and trying to ignore it all as hard as possible. While Trump's base will continue to be up in arms, they would really lack any power to do anything about it.
So, what implications does this have for the timing of everything else that leads up to this? Well, ballpark a typical case that goes to trial as taking a year. If you bring charges only six months out, Trump can probably delay things long enough that a conviction happens too late to make changes to the primary; if you bring charges a year and a half out, Trump will 100% demand the speediest trial that ever did happen. Obviously, you can't predict the future perfectly, but shooting for a year out is probably the best EV move (would love to hear some actual lawyers' takes on this). That means you want to file charges in late fall, early winter 2022.
...in turn, that means that if you're taking a shot on what may or may not be a fishing expedition, hoping that you can bring charges at the optimal chance to keep Trump off of the ballot, you'd want that shot to be... summer 2022. You have a few months to thoroughly analyze everything you were able to acquire and game things out in more detail, with much more information.
No charges have appeared yet on the classified docs thing, and from this game plan, we're already sort of running late on the NY business records indictment. Most importantly, we have a calendar update! From Lawfare's account of the arraignment:
As the government intends to seek a trial date of Jan. 5, 2024 and there is intense public interest in “moving this case along as expeditiously as possible,” she says the government wants to produce these materials quickly to allow ample time for trial preparation before January.
Judge Merchan turns to Blanche [Trump's lawyer], who starts by emphasizing again that this has been a long investigation and the defense has not seen any discovery so far. Trump certainly wants this whole matter behind him, Blanche says, “But to sit here and say January of 2024 is good with us when we have not seen a piece of paper yet, is I think patently unfair for us given everything that I think we know about the case from the media and from witnesses talking.” The January 2024 date is “a little bit aggressive.” The spring of 2024 might be “a more realistic plan at this point.” But Blanche admits that he’s “speculating a bit because we have not seen anything yet.”
The court agrees that it’s difficult to anticipate being ready in January having not received any discovery yet. “The message I would like to deliver is we would like to move ahead as expeditiously as possible, without undue delay. Of course, you are entitled to the discovery. You are entitled to review the discovery and make determinations there.”
This definitely adds some real data to my estimates and gives something interesting to watch and consider. Even if they start next January as the gov't wants, the trial itself will take a little time. So, I think I was close with saying it would take about a year; this seems to indicate that it would be about ten months from indictment to verdict, minimum.
The Iowa caucuses are scheduled for January 22, 2024. NY may be thinking that if they push hard on the calendar, they can get a conviction in before this date, but with bringing the charges as late as they did, this may be a tough haul. At this point, I'm not confident I can predict either side's calendar strategy. For the rest of this, I'll mostly be assuming that Trump is not able to get the charges dismissed or removed to a federal venue via pre-trial motions; obviously, succeeding on either of those fronts would change everything. Does Trump want to push it further out, hoping that he can win a primary or two before the trial is supposed to start, adding pressure to not convict him on something ticky tack? At this point, if he is convicted, there's zero chance that he'll be able to fit a meaningful appeal in before the primaries, so probably a key question is his probability estimate of how likely it is that the NY court will convict him (whether or not he thinks it's bullshit or would be overturned on appeal); if he thinks it's above some threshold, he probably wants to delay and get a primary or two in first. If he thinks it's below some threshold, he could play a very risky strategy and hope for a huge "TRUMP EXONERATED" headline just before the primaries.
On the NY side, how much do they actually care about getting the official 'conviction' in before Iowa? Maybe they're perfectly happy with letting the trial date slip, so long as the case isn't dismissed; they can go into the primaries messaging, "Trump is an indicted criminal awaiting trial; you wouldn't want to vote for a criminal, would you?"
Either way, the potential schedule is in one sense unsurprising and in another sense suddenly sort of extremely real and threatening by how close it is to the electoral process. This may be how we're going to run this country, and I guess the writers of The Epic Tale of Trump and the US Political System have plenty of room for at least one more season that introduces another New Season Dominant Character and plenty of potential for extremely high drama individual episodes.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
A Modest Kickstarter Proposal
In multiple domains, there is a reasonably strong consensus within the zeitgeist that negative mood affiliated media does not correlate to negative behavior. In fact, the opposite is often claimed, that proliferation of such media provides a substitute for the negative behavior, actually reducing it. Casual Ducking pulls up hundreds of articles, many in academic works, arguing that pornography (even aggressive/violent pornography) substitutes for real-world sexual assault, that generally violent video games substitute for real-world violent behavior, that fake child porn (or just sufficiently cheap, legal, and easy to access child porn) substitutes for real-world sexual abuse of children. Many people make these arguments and attach their real names and institutional affiliations to them.
On the other hand, casual Ducking for games where one is a school shooter doesn't elicit any similar list of names/affiliations calling for such a substitute. Instead, it appears to have been kinda-sorta tried and mostly just shut down. What accounts for the difference? Is there a theoretical argument for why it should have a different effect? Is there some sort of data which could be marshaled against the thesis? I don't have solid numbers for the actual cost of school shootings, but I have to imagine that if someone could set up a kickstarter (or whatever platform you'd need to use to not have the effort immediately banned by the platform) to create a school shooter video game, and if said game could provide even a weak substitute, it would be an incredibly efficient use of EA contributions.
This thought arose from watching the bodycam video of the heroic police officers that was posted below. It reminded me of actual first person shooters that I played back when I was young. In addition, the discussion of whether the shooter had a poor strategy for a loadout was interesting. Some blamed (or, um, I guess praised) FPSs for having a typical mechanic where you can carry multiple weapons essentially "for free". Would it make a difference if the video game was tailored to give players the wrong idea about what would be effective in such a situation? Or should it (and FPSs in general) move to being a more realistic simulation?
Finally, what was actually my first thought on the matter was a response to people praising the officers (especially in comparison to Uvalde). Pointing out that their behavior is something that society has strong and important reasons to encourage. I actually thought first, "What if you made a game that let you take on that persona, rushing into danger to save children at great risk to yourself?" But then, I ran into a conundrum. Would this version of the game actually encourage such behavior? Or would it substitute away from such behavior? "Yeah, I get the rush of going headlong into danger to save innocents plenty at home; no need to actually go out and do that in the real world"?
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
I find that looking at these aggregate numbers to be fascinating, and also difficult to really understand, especially because I really get the feeling that it's tough to understand without really digging in to the data sources, seeing if there are discrepancies between sources and how they choose to do their groupings. For example see the wiki article, which has different tables that are listed from the 2014, 2019, 2021, and 2022 ACS.
Especially the "detailed ancestry" section. Median Indian household income is $152k?! That's wild and dwarfs the top line white/black gap. Makes me wonder if composition effects are significant. That is, are Indian "households" just bigger? Like, more people, plausibly more working people, living in the same house? Conversely, many articles have been written claiming that poor family relations and divorce have plagued black communities more. If Indian households have 2-3 individuals earning incomes on average, while white households have 1.5-2, while black households have 1-1.5, could that be a huge effect? I do recall EconTalk mentioning household composition effects being rather important when talking just about the country-wide median household income statistics, and I wonder how much of a story they tell here.
Additionally, in the detailed ancestry section, they don't have a category for "African Americans (Black Americans)" at all, like they do in the top line chart. So, how are they actually describing these group boundaries? The number from the top chart for this category would be at the absolute bottom of the bottom chart (coming in just below Appalachian), and that's kind of wild to me, too. Even the "Subsaharan African" number is substantially higher. Is the general African American number being pulled down specifically by people who don't identify with any other ancestry, even if they have some sense of where their family came from? It would have to be a pretty strong pull, and I don't have a sense for how relatively big these groups are.
What about self-identification issues? If Cletus decides that Appalachia sucks and that you can't make a living there, so he moves out, finds a job in the fancy city, meets someone there, marries her, makes a family there, etc., how many years will it be until he stops identifying as Appalachian? He thought Appalachia sucked! "Nah; I'm just American." Possible analog to an evaporative cooling mechanism.
I don't think today will be the day that I have time to pour through all the details, but thanks for another reminder that I really need to sometime.
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
Do you mean "not regulated at all" or "not regulated by a federal bureaucracy"? ... The latter statement is what is at stake
I mean, not even that is at stake. Congress could still give agencies pretty broad authorities and pretty broad discretion. It would only be that, given the particular wording the statute uses, if there is an ambiguity, the gov't wouldn't auto-win every time. They'd have to cry a little tear for the poor federal agencies out there make their case in court for their reading of the statute.
As a Science person with engineering degrees who doesn't like to do engineering1, I am suuuuuper skeptical of other Science people. More of them are simply actively bad at their jobs than is remotely acceptable, and you are 100% right that many of them face no repercussions from this due to the fucked up way the system evaluates work. Furthermore, totally agreed that the engineering folks have a much more visible benchmark for things working, and that is incredibly useful.
That said, if I were to defend those among my people who are good, I would say that one cannot reductively claim that it is only engineering that is pushing boundaries and driving progress. The story I once heard that might resonate with you was that if you were wanting to invade and occupy a country, you need four different types of people: spies, marines, army, and police. The spies have to be there early, get the lay of the land, a sense for what's going on, background information that informs choices of what it is that you're going to try to do and why. Once you have some idea, the marines have to go establish a beachhead, so that you can start to bring serious resources to bear on the problem. Then, the army has to very practically churn through huge piles of materiel, kicking in skulls and establishing concrete facts on the ground. Finally, once you've occupied the place, the police need to maintain order and keep everything somewhat functional.
The analogy is that the Science types are the spies. We try to figure out the lay of the land, when you don't even have a clue as to what types of things may be possible or not. The experimentalists who bridge the gap, pun possibly intended, between the scientists and engineers are the marines; they are often operating on shoestring budgets, trying to read our shit, figure out which ideas are most plausible, and cobble together at least some sort of proof of concept that it could actually work in the real world. Then comes the literal army of engineers. I admit that I'm a little jealous of how they get to see their stuff actually work, but maybe it's their ridiculously fat budgets that I'm more jealous of. They have to very practically establish routinized ways for the idea to consistently work in practice. Finally, you have the cops who maintain the whole thing and are more supposed to interact with the 'customer' to make sure that their needs are being met. Presumably, if you just try to dive in to a country with just your army, with no intel and no established beachhead, one could see the inherent difficulty of pushing the boundaries and driving progress. Maybe you could still get there, but damn if the endeavor isn't likely to blow even fatter budgets of even more obscene amounts of materiel, possibly toward goals that simply don't make any sense and are eventually doomed to failure, which you might have known if you had a proper understanding of the lay of the land.
Now here's the part of the analogy that I've come to add, but which I think makes sense. Not only do you need different types of people for these different jobs, but the way you evaluate the work that is being done in each stage is completely different. There is no sense in which you're going to evaluate a pre-invasion spy by the same sort of metric that you're going to evaluate the face-kicking army. It is, frankly, an unfortunate fact of reality that the nature of the work of spies leads to the possibility that they could totally bullshit you, and it can sometimes be very difficult to tell truth from falsehood. I don't know any honest-to-goodness real life spies, but I really wonder if they have some sort of similar dysfunction/skepticism toward each other that we Science types have toward our own. I also wonder if there just is a significant population of them who kind of suck at their job, the way many of ours do, but don't face many consequences because of the inherent difficulties of evaluation.
1 - I do math, and it's a tossup on whether reviewers will actually pay close attention to whether my proofs do, indeed, prove my theorems... or if they'll even bother reading the proofs and instead make their judgment entirely on the basis of shit like how many of their own papers I've cited.
EDIT: After reading @TheDag's comment, I would amend this by saying that your spies have a very analogous failure mode that is really really bad for you - double agents. They're actively working against you, against providing you knowledge of the truth, and for the adversary. This can be widespread, but also sort of localized. For example, if the Soviets totally convert your spy network there, they can completely wonk up your knowledge of what the hell is happening there, but maybe you still have perfectly good coverage of China. I would agree that there are vast swaths of the social sciences who have been entirely captured. They're worse than just having an evaluation problem; they're an adversarial problem.
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