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ControlsFreak


				

				

				
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joined 2022 October 02 23:23:48 UTC

				

User ID: 1422

ControlsFreak


				
				
				

				
4 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 October 02 23:23:48 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 1422

School/education on its own seems relatively fine. It's just the particular way we go about it that ruins everything.

The standard meme in government economics is, "...best I can do is subsidize demand and restrict supply." We see this meme played out in at least three domains where there is high government involvement: education, medical care, and housing. Even just from that, there's not much surprise that prices rise higher and higher. But I think the standard bifecta is missing a third factor to make it a trifecta. What does the government do after subsidizing demand, restricting supply, and seeing prices go up? Why, they invariably come in and help the cartel they've set up price discriminate as perfectly as possible!

Every company wants to price discriminate. Companies/cartels with market power really want to price discriminate. The standard economics result is that if a monopolist is able to perfectly price discriminate (i.e., charge each individual customer exactly their willingness-to-pay), then they capture all of the gains from trade, leaving none of the surplus to the consumer. All consumers are still just barely willing to engage in the transactions, but none really feel like they've gotten a good "deal" out of the trade. These companies with market power are the bootleggers.

The baptists are in the government, seeing that high prices appear to harm poorer people, and they looooooove to help poorer people! So, what do you have to do when you want to go to college? Oh, just submit this federal form that tells the company gobs of data about your income/assets/etc..... oh, and for your family, too! That'll allow us nice people to help make college affordable price your personalized college experience as darn close to your individual willingness-to-pay as possible! Hospitals often tout (not sure if required by the government) programs that simply slash your bill, give you a personalized price, if only you give them a bunch of information about your finances. The government will even directly provide health insurance options for you... but, ya know, if you want a good individualized price, you better give us your financial data. I even saw this week that they're going to start adding fees to mortgages for homeowners with good credit (personalize their price) in order to subside those of homeowners with bad credit (personalize their price, too!).

All of this is wonderful, if you're part of the cartel that determines who can be a doctor, who can build a hospital, who can start a university (or even a program within a university), who can build what where (and have ease-of-permitting). Those are the people who will capture all the gains from trade. Everyone else? Whelp, be glad that you can just barely buy it, nevermind that you won't have much left over for any other aspects of A Good Life you might want.

Russ Roberts talks about how inserting money into things can change the culture around said thing. The example he often goes to is that of day care centers. Some day care centers had a problem with parents picking up their children late (i.e., they were supposed to be all picked up by 6pm or whatever so that the center could close at that time). In order to try to fix the problem, they implemented a late pickup fee. People follow incentives and will then do a better job of picking up their children, right? Whelp, the result was that the number of late pickups went up.

Prior to the fee, parents had a cultural incentive to try to pick up their kids on time. 'I would feel bad if I was late and the workers at the center had to stay later than planned.' After the fee, a person could reasonably believe, 'Well, they set the fee at a rate that appropriately compensates them for the trouble, so as long as it's worth it to me to pay the fee, everyone wins.' And so the culture around how people viewed their choices changed; parents apparently valued not being rude (in the prior regime) more than paying the fee (in the current regime) more than picking up their kids on time... and so late pickups went up.


There have been a lot of discussions lately about financial incentives to have kids. I'd like to finally share an experience I had recently with my wife. We were on a trip in the southern US, and we happened to be out at a restaurant for breakfast on a Sunday morning. The place was pretty busy, and there were a lot of families there with little children. These kids were pretty much all quite well-behaved, and the families seemed pretty happy.

...the sight of this was apparently a crying experience for my wife. Parents actually like their kids?! They're all able to enjoy a nice breakfast out and have just an all-around pleasant morning?! What even is this world?!

You see, my wife immigrated from Canada, where they pretty straightforwardly pay people for having children. The payments are relatively substantial. Her sister is a prime example. Sister doesn't work; sister's husband works a pretty low-paying entry-level job, without a whole lot of hope in sight for significant advances anytime soon; sister and her husband already have two children, will probably be having more. Wife basically thinks that sister is just an example of a phenomenon that she thinks is common in her home country - people basically treating their kids as sources of income.

When I told wife about Hungary's schemes that have been talked about here, she immediately started thinking about how people would game it, how they'd make choices to just barely satisfy the governmental requirements, and how it would change the culture around how people view these choices. She also has gobs of experience with how employees game out the parental leave time and unemployment and so on, so she knows the way these games will be played (she's already confident that many people make choices of how to space out their kids based on how much leave you get, then how many hours you need to work again before you become eligible for another huge chunk of parental leave; you can string along several years of barely working at all if you do it right). "So, around 28-29, every woman will be figuring out when the best time is to hit up a sperm bank, given their job situation and ensuring a high probability of it working prior to 30."

I'm not going to confidently predict that there is going to be some particular unintended consequence (e.g., maybe people who might have otherwise had more than one kid just have their "gov't mandated, sperm bank one", they hate the thing, and overall fertility declines). But hot damn am I sure that there will be some unintended consequences to the culture around having kids if people go to some of the extremes of the financial incentives talked about here. Like, yes, injecting money will produce incentives that will change behavior. Will the resulting behavior be something that we like? Ohhhhh boy. We're in for a wild ride. Mostly, I'm sort of just amazed that this group generally leans right and would be incredibly quick to point out the possibility of unintended consequences for vast social engineering schemes proposed by the left, but is relatively uncritical about possible unintended consequences for vast social engineering schemes proposed to increase fertility.

I've been thinking a lot on the application of the laws. A couple stories come to mind.

First, a literal friend of a friend. We were both at a mutual friend's house for dinner one night. I didn't know him before this evening, and I never saw him again afterward. It was a while ago; I can't precisely age him; I would guess 30s. He was a black man. All I really remember is that nearly the entire evening, he was talking about how unjust he thought marijuana laws were. He expressed that, because of this belief, he thought that it was his duty to continue selling marijuana in violation of the law that he thought unjust. To the point of saying something along the lines of, "I have a child now that I want to take care of, but I will absolutely go back to jail, because I have a duty to keep selling marijuana."

I remember thinking at the time that it was just a terrible pragmatic decision, because regardless of his belief on the justness of the law, it seemed implausible that his persistent violation of it would have any remotely meaningful effect. It's still above my pay grade to have any sort of judgment on the perspective where you're convinced that a law and the means by which it is being prosecuted is unjust at its core, unfairly and unjustly applied, perhaps in a discriminatory way toward unfavorables, and then having to decide what to do about it. But it helped me understand just how much opprobrium many people can have when they see such things that they consider to be abuses of what may be otherwise legitimate political power, especially when they think that a part of the abuse is, "They wouldn't put me in jail for it if I were white."

The second example is Doug Hughes, the mailman who landed his ultralight gyrocopter on Capitol Hill. His political shtick was that he was "delivering letters" to politicians to protest campaign finance laws. But it was all over the news, a major embarrassment to the Obama administration. How could this guy just fly in to DC airspace?! It's one of the most protected airspaces in the world and there are special flight rules that must be observed in order to enter it. (He likely would not have received authorization to enter if he had asked according to procedure.)

However, those rules are just little bitty administrative rules, basically. You talk to pilots who are in the 'pilot community', and they know that you definitely take those rules seriously, because if you even accidentally break them, the minute you land, you're going to be interrogated by someone from the FAA (and possibly law enforcement) to figure out what you were up to, and the likely outcome in any event is that they're going to revoke your pilot's license.

But, uh, Doug Hughes didn't have a pilot's license for them to revoke! You don't need to have a pilot's license to fly an ultralight gyrocopter! The Powers That Be were in a bit of a pickle. They had to make an example of this guy, somehow. Their only normal recourse was to take the license that he didn't even have. Soooo, they scoured the law books, grasping for anything they could come up with. What they found was that, with the added weight of the letters, the total weight of his gyrocopter was just barely above the weight limit for ultralight aircraft, and there's a real big boy statute with real criminal felony penalties requiring a pilot's license to fly heavier aircraft. That's how they got him.

I can't help but think that if Mr. Hughes flew his slightly-overweight gyrocopter literally anywhere else, in a way that didn't bring national embarrassment to The Powers That Be, his criminal conviction would have evaporated at twenty different levels of discretion. First off, probably no one would have even known. Who the hell monitors the weight of these little guys on a regular basis? Nobody. And even if someone did notice, they might have just chuckled. "Can't believe you managed to get that beefy boi up!" Mayyyyyyyybe someone miiiiight have quietly noticed and whispered, "Hey Doug, don't do it again, or at least, don't let other people know, because I just came to the brilliant realization that it's technically illegal, that pretty cool thing I just saw you do and am otherwise giving you social props for." (It is left as an exercise for the reader to estimate the likelihood of criminal sanctions if the flight had gathered attention, but was widely viewed as being politically favorable to The Powers That Be.)

Spoilers: The jurisdiction we were in at the time of the marijuana conversation has now legalized marijuana. Recently, the FAA has basically acknowledged that weight limits have very little to do with safety and may, in fact, be detrimental to safety when it comes to regulation of small aircraft.


I recently read a couple books by William Riker, who to my knowledge, has never stepped foot on any model of the starship Enterprise. Particularly of note here is his Liberalism Against Populism, written in '87. Much of it is mathematical minutia of the the pros/cons of different voting systems and the pathologies which may follow, but in his concluding chapters, he presents a fascinating interpretation of political science/philosophy, public/social choice theory as sort of a general domain that seems to have some sense grown out of economics departments in the late 20th century.

Riker acknowledges the common refrain that economics is 'the dismal science', since it deals with allocation of scarce resources, and sort of no matter what choices you make, someone is not going to have everything they want (especially if what they want is basically everything). Of course, some people lose economically, due to a variety of factors which may or may not be under their control, but he says that social choice is the real dismal science, for at least in economics you can very often find positive sum trades sort of just sitting around all over the place. They can make things genuinely better for pretty much everyone!

In a sort of analogy, in his mind, social choice is also a study of the allocation of a scarce resource, but that scare resource is political and moral values. These are often distributed in a zero-sum fashion (think two-candidate elections). Or, as he flatly says, "Suppose that, ..., it is still the intent of each possible winner to impose some kind of external cost on the losers. Then, no matter who wins, there exists a loser who is the worse off for having participated in the political system." He contrasts economic scarcity, which means that those who cannot pay or convince a Soviet-style planning commission to allocate to them must go without, to political/moral scarcity, which "requires that the nonpossessor suffer additional punishment for nonpossession". He then leverages his long work on voting systems and 'heresthetics' to argue that it will, in fact, often lead to dissatisfaction by a majority of people. This has other implications for his political science, but I think I will stop here.


Regardless of what I think are the personal pros/cons of his strategy, the jurisdiction in which marijuana man lived eventually decided to allocate some scarce political/moral resource to him. Doug Hughes was an incredible loser in the negative sum game of obtaining scarce political/moral resources and punishing one's enemies in the process. He may eventually be vindicated by the FAA on moral grounds, though he had to pay a steep price in the meantime (as I assume marijuana man already had; I recall him saying that he would go 'back to jail' as if he had already been).

Regardless of what I think are the personal pros/cons of Trump's strategy, his case (the case of political and moral allocation, not that of his legal trial) has yet to be decided. The Powers That Be will use every tool at their disposal to deny him any allocation of political/moral value, at least for now, even if that involves scouring the books for anything, even if that means going after him for something that would have disappeared as an issue for anyone else by twenty different offramps.

Riker tells me that the only answer liberalism gives to anyone who is unhappy with this current allocation of political/moral value is to vote people out. He tells me to not worry too much, because a majority of people are usually unhappy with the allocation of political/moral value anyway. He tells me only to worry when people start thinking that they're getting an even shittier deal by participating in the political system and acknowledging it as a suitable means by which to allocate scarce political/moral value. Unfortunately, this is what I hear when I hear Megyn Kelly talk to Tucker Carlson.


Epilogue

I sometimes get angry that so many people violate so many laws in ways that genuinely hurt others. I sometimes get angry that so many of those people are never prosecuted, due to twenty different offramps. I sometimes get angry that other bullshit laws exist and that people get unjustly prosecuted under them. I sometimes get angry that the most common way to play the political game is to punish one's enemies, making the whole thing a negative sum endeavor. I might also even get angry when some political losers start to reject the entire edifice that is built on things that I sometimes hate and get angry at. I used to get more upset at that last one; ya know, the whole 'damaging to our democracy' bit. And sure, I can still see how such degradation can occur, leading to all sorts of political dysentery. But man, I am starting to lean in the direction that when everything is obvious bullshit, "I get mad about every bullshit thing I see," might not be the way. After all, as the video says, I'm just some fuckin' guy, and probabilistically, I'm highly likely to be in the dissatisfied majority most of the time.

As @07mk said below, you have absolutely thought about this at least an order of magnitude more in one paragraph than anyone on CNN has in all their lives put together. Society didn't come to their beliefs on this subject via rational scientific exploration and explanation. They did so through pure cultural power and intimidation. "You don't want to be an X-ophobe? Then mouth these words and make sure not to think about them too much." Two examples come to mind.

First, I was in grad school at the time. Hung out with a bunch of other overly-educated folks, but at least we're mostly all technical people who value rigor and stuff, not like those fru-frus on the other side of campus. Anyway, I had been taking some neuroscience classes, and so I'd been thinking a lot about how good arguments are constructed in this space and had seen a variety of examples. So, when the topic of sexuality comes up at the bar, I ever so gently and ever so carefully express the slightest of possible concerns that I've been seeing all this really interesting work in neuroscience, and I'm just not quite sure I've really actually personally seen all that much conclusive work on sexuality that entirely supports Dogmatic Position. You know, so, surely it's out there, and someone can probably link me to it or something.

I was expecting, or I guess at least just hoping for, some kind of rational response that either brought to light some form of evidence or argument that was relevant. Maybe a, "Huh, I'll have to actually go through the literature, and see what I can find before I make up my mind." Nah. You get stared at like you're an alien. Like they can't possibly believe that you'd even entertain the idea... not even the idea that Dogmatic Position isn't true... but that you'd even entertain the idea that Dogmatic Position isn't trivially true and needs no evidence and why would you even think about trying to gather evidence on this topic.

The second example is the APA's brief in Obergefell. Here, we had the most prestigious group of experts with the opportunity to make the absolute best scientific case for Dogmatic Position. If it were so abundantly clear from mounds of literature, surely they could at least start us down the path of understanding how the argument/evidence works. You know what they brought? An opinion poll. I shit you not. They also took a review that said, "Research into conversion therapy is shit-tier and tells us basically nothing," and converted it into a form of, "Conversion therapy doesn't seem to work," but otherwise that was it. An opinion poll and research that we think is so bad that we can't really get anything out of it. That's their best scientific evidence for Dogmatic Position.

Moving forward to the Year of Our Lord 2023, very few people actually bother defending Dogmatic Position anymore. Fewer still even attempt to bring actual scientific evidence. The vast vast majority still view Dogmatic Position as just unquestionable first truth, and if you're questioning it, it must be because you have evil right wing political ends.

So before any of those people pounce on my comment, I'll leave you with a third example. I also took a queer theory course back when. I was seeing the beginnings of the woke thing, but didn't know what it was about, wondered if there was some real academic core to it, figured I'd have the best chance of finding some interesting academic core if I just went straight to the academics. In any event, when it came to the question of "biological determinism", my prof said flatly that she was agnostic. So, if you're about to rush to accuse me of evil right wing political ends, please instead formulate your comment as accusing her of having evil right wing political ends.

Secrecy in Voting

Why have it? What's it for? I've told the story of the "Australian ballot" here before:

When Australia was colonized by the Brits, they used it as a penal colony. Of course, they didn't go full Lord of the Flies with the convicts, but sent good, upstanding Brits to run the place and maintain good order. After serving out their sentences, many convicts did have the option of returning to Britain, but lots of them chose to stay. They were free citizens, but obviously, their jibs were cut a bit differently than the better class of good, upstanding Brits who were sent to run the place. The convicts were even free to run for elected office, and some even did. Yet somehow, confusingly, even as time went on and there were many more freed convicts than there were good, upstanding Brits, none of these convicts ever won any elections. Maybe everyone just realized that it was better if good, upstanding Brits continued running the place.

Other folks disagreed, and they managed to implement the 'Australian ballot', where each individual's vote would be totally, completely secret. Suddenly, magically, freed convicts began winning elections and were able to curtail some of the harshest abuses curious practices of the good, upstanding Brits.

Fundamentally, this is a story of coercion. If someone is able to learn how you're going to vote or how you voted, they can apply coercion to get you to change your vote or try to inflict punishments on you after-the-fact in retaliation for voting the "wrong way". Some people are also worried about bribes, but that's a more minor concern in my view. Critically, in order to perform coercion/bribing, they need to be able to discover who you actually vote for, so as to properly verify whether you should be punished or paid for doing the deed "poorly" or "well". Naturally, if someone is going to apply coercion to guide your vote, they're probably willing to apply coercion to get you to provide proof.

There is a reason why people who are working on digital elections really care about a property known as "receipt freeness", that is, that there is no possible way that anyone, even the voter herself, possesses any information whatsoever which could be used as a receipt to prove how a person voted. The ideal would be for the government to be able to publicize an encrypted database which cannot in any way be used to demonstrate how any person voted, but that each individual can take with them a piece of information which can be combined with this database to verify that their vote was correctly counted (yet still not reveal how they voted).

In any event, the linked opinion from Arizona.

The Secrecy Clause states, "All elections by the people shall be by ballot, or by such other method as may be prescribed by law; Provided that secrecy in voting shall be preserved."

...

When the Arizona Constitution was adopted, the definitions of "secrecy" included "the state or quality of being hidden; concealment[.]" Secrecy, New Websterian Dictionary, 735 (1912). "Preserve" definitions included "to keep from injury; defend; uphold; save; keep in a sound state[.]" Preserve, New Websterian Dictionary, 646. Thus, the Secrecy Clause's meaning is clear: when providing for voting by ballot or any other method, the legislature must uphold voters' ability to conceal their choices. The constitution does not mandate any particular method for preserving secrecy in voting.

"voters' ability to conceal their choices". They have shifted from 'inability to reveal' to 'ability to conceal'. Why have it? What's it for?

Arizona's mail-in voting laws preserve secrecy in voting by requiring voters to ensure they fill out their ballot in secret and seal the ballot in an envelope that does not disclose the voters' choices. Section 16-548(A) provides:

The early voter shall make and sign the affidavit and shall then mark his ballot in such a manner that his vote cannot be seen.

...

Plaintiffs contend that because mail-in voters may photograph their ballot and post it on the internet, Arizona laws do not preserve secrecy in voting. Plaintiffs point to § 16-515(G), which states, "Notwithstanding § 16-1018, a person may not take photographs or videos while within the seventy-five foot limit" around polling locations. Section 16-1018 makes it a class two misdemeanor for a person to "[s]how[ ] another voter's ballot to any person after it is prepared for voting in such a manner as to reveal the contents, except to an authorized person lawfully assisting the voter," but "[a] voter who makes available an image of the voter's own ballot by posting on the internet or in some other electronic medium is deemed to have consented to retransmittal of that image and that retransmittal does not constitute a violation of this section."

We do not read § 16-1018(A)(4) as failing to preserve secrecy in mail-in voting. Section 16-1018(A)(4) merely provides a defense to the crime of showing another's ballot to any person after it is prepared. The defense applies when a person shows another voter's ballot if the voter who filled out that ballot posted the image online. And the legislature's decision not to prohibit a mail-in voter from showing her own marked ballot to another, whether in person or online, does not violate the Secrecy Clause because the legislature has commanded mail-in voters to "mark [her] ballot in such a manner that [her] vote cannot be seen."

Ah yes, the legislature has commanded that it not be seen. Except by the entire internet. Or literally anyone else that she chooses to show (or is coerced into showing) it to. I have almost no words except again, "Why have it? What's it for?" The court here seems to embrace a position that is completely ignorant of even the possibility of coercion. Or maybe it's not the purpose of secrecy that they fail to understand; maybe it's the purpose of photography. Photography is meant to allow a thing to be seen by someone at a time/place other than the original moment/location, even if the original object is long gone or destroyed. Taking a photograph of a thing and then showing it to someone else literally has the purpose of making that thing become "seen" by the someone else.

But photography is honestly a silly aside. Does anyone believe that there is a meaningful distinction between a voter showing a coercer/briber their ballot directly versus a photo of their ballot? Play this out in the absurd: A holds B at gunpoint, telling B to vote for candidate C. B marks down the ballot, and begins to reach out to show her work. "NO! Don't show it to me! That would be illegal. Instead, take out your phone; take a picture of it; show me the picture. That's totally legal and totally cool."

Haranguing about photography is clearly beside the point. The point is coercion! Preventing coercion is why we have secrecy in voting! Preventing coercion is what it's for! And one neat trick to 100% prevent it is to make it 100% impossible for anyone else to discover who you voted for - even if you want to show them. As evidenced by the entire body of literature on receipt-freeness, this is a thing that has been abundantly clear to the tech community, and those guys are usually some of the most boneheaded and slowest to understand history/politics.

Maybe one last attempt at words. This feels like watching a real life version of "catastrophic forgetting" in AI. How can people suddenly just have no clue what the whole point of this entire thing was, especially because you were just using it in all this work?

Major NYT opinion piece dropped this week. At the time of my clicking on it, it was under the headline "Born This Way? Born Which Way?" It is a tour de force of Current Thinking on all things sex and gender, covering trans issues as well as sexuality. Given that the title is so evocative concering the topic of my recent AAQC, I feel like I can't help but comment on the current state of affairs. Let's start with the history of thinking on sexuality, since that's the closest link.

For gays and lesbians, social acceptance and legal protection came as Americans learned to see sexual orientation as an innate and immutable characteristic. When Gallup first polled on the topic in 1977, just 13 percent of Americans thought gay and lesbian people were born that way. Now roughly half do, and in many ways it hardly seems to matter anymore. The frenzied search for a “gay gene,” a very 1990s preoccupation, has petered out. Believing gay people had no choice but to be gay was a critical way station on the road to accepting homosexuality as just another way of being in the world, and no one talks much about it anymore.

And later:

...like many queer people, I had many different romantic entanglements in my youth, and had I not met my wife in college it is not impossible to imagine that I might have ended up on another path. I certainly did not experience myself as being born any particular way.

Among people of my generation and younger, it isn’t all that uncommon for women who were once married to men to later in life end up in partnerships with women, and I certainly have known men in gay relationships who wound up in straight ones and vice versa. These people seldom describe themselves as having “lived a lie” in their previous relationships. I think most of us know intuitively that sexual orientation is not binary, and is subject to change over the course of our lives.

Finally:

We ended up with the born-this-way model because of the tension between the seeking of rights for an embattled minority and the broader search for liberation. But this tension is ultimately dialectical — it contains the seeds of its own destruction.

She words it differently, but the conclusion is basically the same as what I had said - it was importantcritical to force people to believe in Dogmatic Position so that political victories could be won, but in the Year of Our Lord 2023, basically no one even bothers defending it anymore; they don't have to! The political victories have already been enshrined.

Unfortunately, that's about all that the article really says about the "born this way" narrative and the political history around it. Fortunately, it hits on quite a few other notes that are highly related to things I've thought about and said for a while. The article opens:

When I was in sixth grade, I made a decision that changed the course of my life. I decided not to try out for the middle school swim team. I know that might not sound like a big deal, but it was. As a grade schooler I was a standout swimmer — strong shoulders and back, and well-muscled legs that powered me through the water with ease and speed. I was disciplined, obsessive. My form was excellent. My coach saw potential.

Had I stuck with it, my life might have turned out pretty different. I might have been a popular jock rather than a lonely weirdo. I might have become a varsity athlete who won admission to a top college rather than a barely graduated teenager who had to take remedial math at a community college to scrape my way into a not-very-competitive school.

And soon after hits the high note:

We allow children to make irreversible decisions about their lives all the time, ideally with the guidance and support of the communities that care for them. Sometimes they regret those decisions. The stakes vary, but they are real. So what are we saying, really, when we worry that a child will regret this particular decision, the decision to transition? And how is it different, really, from the decision I made to quit competitive swimming? To many people — I am guessing most — this question is absurd. How could you possibly compare something as fundamental and consequential to one’s life as gender to something that seems comparatively trivial, competitive sport?

Man, I can't even blockquote it without thinking about how many domains this thinking touches on. I'm sure it's been remarked on here, and I feel like there was an SSC/ACT post or some other significant post here where people ruminated on life choices, regret, and the human condition of our walk through a garden of forking paths, where every choice we make closes off an infinity of alternate possible realities. Like, this is so core to the the human condition that it's hard to imagine subjects that it doesn't touch on. Nevertheless, I can't help but think about the hot button ones - abortion, consent, child sex, and economics.

Abortion

Commonly, in discussions of abortion, a divide appears concerning what sex is about, how important it is, whether it's sacred or whatever, etc. I feel like a common perspective that is expressed by pro-choice folks is that it is wayyy less important/sacred than they think their opponents think it is. This opinion piece talks of competitive swimming, but I recall people saying that sex is like a tennis game. It's just a fun recreational activity that a couple of people show up to do together; they both consent to playing tennis; they just have some amount of fun; then nothing particularly interesting happens. In the era of ubiquitous birth control, they think that sex is totally just like this.

This is used to argue that abortion should be totally fine, and the only people who disagree are some crazy folks who still think sex has some meaning or implies some responsibilities/consequences and apparently want to punish women for basically playing a game of tennis.

Consent to sexual relations

We start to see some cracks in the full-on sex-is-tennis position already when it comes to consent to sexual relations. Imagine your boss really loves tennis and decides that he wants to have some team-building out on the court. There's plenty of perceived pressure to play. Maybe you don't particularly like it, but you feel like you should just suck it up and play. It's not that bad. Maybe you could even learn to kinda like it. Besides, you likely have other parts of you job that you like even less (friggin' TPS reports are the worst). Lots of people might think this is kind of a stupid thing to be part of a job, perhaps somewhat unprofessional. Who knows? I hear that some people feel like they have to play golf to make that sale, and they don't seem to think it's terribly unprofessional.

Regardless of how annoying/stupid/unprofessional you think it is, basically no one would argue that it should be criminal. But we absolutely would if it was sex! It seems to be significantly different.

Child sex

When it comes to the question of whether children can consent to sexual relations, the dominant position is that it is just trivial that they cannot. I mean, sure, they can consent to playing tennis just fine, but sex is completely and totally different. Why? I've steeped myself in the academic philosophy literature on this topic, and while it's a thousand times better than the responses you'll get from regular Joe, it still comes in seriously lacking in my mind.

Westen doesn't take a super strong position on the topic, but likely grounds it in what he calls the 'knowledge prong' of what counts as valid consent. A person needs to have sufficient knowledge of... something... related to what sex is, what it means, what the consequences could be, the cultural context... I'm not exactly sure what. I don't think he did the best job of really digging in to details here. This is perhaps the most fruitful line of inquiry for future academic work for those who want to salvage a consent-only sexual ethic, but right now it's seriously lacking. Any work will definitely need to distinguish from tennis, because I see kids out learning tennis at our local courts somewhat regularly, and they can hardly be said to understand the risks/cultural context/etc. of tennis any more than could be said for sex.

Wertheimer, on the other hand, doesn't even attempt a theoretical explanation for why children cannot consent. Instead, he views it as simply an empirical question of whether, in a particular society, children tend to be, on net, harmed by sex. The opinion piece writes:

[A]s categories, we experience [race and gender identity] in large part through the perceptions that others have of us, based largely on our outward appearances.

A disciple of Wertheimer might say that a large part of how children perceive sex, and whether they perceive it as harmful or not, may depend on the perceptions others have of it.

Of course, either of these approaches opens up all sorts of cultural engineering possibilities. If we team up the "sex is like tennis" folks with the "comprehensive sex education as early as possible" folks, it's easy to imagine how society could change to one where children learn the requisite knowledge and are not, on net, harmed by the sex that they do consent to. Some folks might cheer on this result, saying that society would be immeasurably improved to the point that it unlocks this new world of possible good things... but the "it is trivially true that children cannot possibly consent to sex" crowd would certainly disagree.

Economics

I don't have a better subtitle for this section, but my thoughts here are background shaded by the free market, Marginal Revolution style economics, which emphasizes that it's important to let people make choices, even ones that they end up deeply regretting. "Capitalism is not a profit system; it's a profit and loss system," they say. You have to let people choose to try things that may succeed and make them a boatload of money... but which may also fail and lose them a boadload of money. This is often justified by placing a possible governing agent in a position of ignorance - you just don't know ahead of time which choices are going to be spectacular failures and which are going to be spectacular successes. Pushing in an even more libertarian direction, many folks want to say that we should just let people do the most harmful of drugs, even though we can be 99.99% sure that it is destined to end in pain and hardship. The article wants to have a sense of this for individual gender choices. 'You know what? Even if they regret it, we need to let them choose, because we're in a position of ignorance.' The article begins concluding with:

I understand the impulse to protect children from regret. The fantasy of limitless possibility is alluring — who wouldn’t want that for their child? To forestall, for as long as possible, throwing the switches that will determine your destination in life, is tempting. But a life without choosing is not a human life.

Hits a bit different after a section on child sex, though.

Closing Thoughts

I don't have a nice tidy bow to put on this package. I have my personal beliefs1, but I don't have a nice clean way to just directly put together a story connecting these things in a way that will please any particular reader with their own inclinations on the various questions involved. Mostly, it just really stands out to me that lots of people have completely contradictory opinions, at their conceptual core, when we try to apply them to all of the above problem domains. I don't think it's "just the outgroup", either. I think we need careful work and reflection across problem sets to help people understand where their positions are sounding hypocritical and why there are serious, huge problems here that are fundamental to the human condition. Reductive slogans aren't going to work. "Shut up and mouth these politically-acceptable words or you're an X-ophobe," isn't going to work.

1 - If you must know, I think the transgender ideology is near incoherent philosophically and anti-science biologically; I think abortion is wrong regardless of whether sex is like tennis; I don't subscribe to a consent-only sexual ethic and therefore don't think the question is of all that much import for whether children should be able to have sex; I generally lean pro-profit-and-loss capitalism and less drugs.

a big fan of Julian Assange

Man, this is a great cultural example of how suddenly the perspective changed, and the extent of that change. As I've said here before, the entire narrative has changed. It used to be that "information wants to be free". It used to be that "sunlight is the best disinfectant". It used to be that these things held the rich and the powerful to account. Then, the rich and powerful of The Party was the ox which got gored. Now, information wants to be mal-information. The sun must be blotted out. Most of all, the suddenness of this transformation must not be recognized. The suddenness of this transformation is the justification which must still underlie all of Trump-Russia, which underlies why Trump is not just a political actor we disagree with; he is a foreign operative sent to subvert our democracy. Of course this narrative dissolves when you notice the suddenness of this transformation; therefore, the suddenness of this transformation cannot be noticed, and these things must be memoryholed.

« D'être un exemple pour d'autres »

I happen to know someone who works in management at a rather large multi-national, and they shared a copy of their internal comms strategy for pride month. It was quite interesting in general, but one aspect in particular may be of interest here.

They distinguished between their internal comms and public comms. If employees asked about their plans for pride month, they would talk about the various internal activities/resources/whatever they had set up for it, but the story on public comms was different. "Due to the unprecedented backlash in the US market," they wouldn't be doing/saying anything publicly. Their "stakeholders" have decided that it wasn't worth the risk, and even though they totally totally TOTALLY support everything about pride, they just feel like they have to protect other equities too. Ya know, like, continuing to make money.

They emphasized that this was for the US market only, and that other localities would make decisions locally. Insert twitter meme about various companies having rainbow logos on their US twitter accounts, but not on their "[Company] Middle East" twitter accounts.

I chalk up points for two things. 1) The backlash is actually having an effect, at least for now, this year. 2) The theory that these things have been done so far in large part not because the market cared, but because employees cared. The classic example is that if you're a tech company in the Bay area, you're not really asking, "Should we signal support for this because it will improve our perception in the market?" You're asking, "How many of our employees will revolt if we don't signal support for this?"

Now that the market is showing signs of actually caring about this a little bit, they're rushing to make a distinction: do what they can to continue to placate their internal bands of radicals while not being publicly perceived as political. I'm left with two questions: 1) How long will this distinction be tenable? Perhaps that depends on how strongly the market continues to backlash against overt pride support (i.e., can the right take another scalp next year). 2) Is there sufficient internal appetite in any companies to revolt against the internal shit? If the prior theory was, "They're listening to the market," and this shift in the market response is actually generating a shift in public comms, and if the current theory is, "They're still listening to employees at least enough for internal efforts," then perhaps some companies could well be primed for an internal backlash that actually results in changes there, too.

I don't think I expect (2) to be probabilistically super common, but from what I'm hearing, lots of upper management folks who really just want to make money actually know that woke radicals in their ranks are a serious threat... and really are gradually working on, uh, marginalizing them, to the point that if they have an excuse, any excuse, to move them out without inciting too much leftist backlash, they'll absolutely take it.

The transcript of the oral argument in Citizens United gets a little lengthy for a full blockquote of the relevant section here, but this summary really does get at the essense of how it went down:

In one of the more memorable exchanges, Justice Alito asked if the "government's position . . . [would] allow[] the banning of a book if it's published by a corporation?" Stewart candidly replied, "the electioneering communication restrictions . . . could have been applied to additional media as well." Even a book. Justice Alito was taken aback by the answer: "That's pretty incredible. You think that if a book was published, a campaign biography that was the functional equivalent of express advocacy, that could be banned?" The answer was yes.

[In the full transcript, other justices piled on to really pin him down that he really was actually claiming the ability to ban such books.]

The government changed its position six months later when the case was re-argued. Justice Ginsburg asked Elena Kagan, the Solicitor General and future-Justice, "if Congress could say 'no TV and radio ads,' could it also say 'no newspaper ads, no campaign biographies'? Last time the answer was, yes, 'Congress could, but it didn't.' Is that still the government's answer?" Kagan answered, "The government's answer has changed." There was audible laughter.

There's a saying that you usually can't win a case in the Supreme Court based on oral arguments, but you can lose one. There are many details (e.g., the procedural posture was inherently weird in that they asked for a reargument) that I will gloss over, but this sure seemed like one of those moments where the government may have gone a long way to losing a case based on their capacious response in oral arguments. I just finished listening to the social media cases this morning, and this colloquy from the Florida argument really stuck out and reminded me of the days of old, also from Alito:

JUSTICE ALITO: [...] does Gmail have a First Amendment right to delete, let's say, Tucker Carlson's or Rachel Maddow's Gmail accounts if they don't agree with her -- his or her viewpoints?

MR. CLEMENT: They -- they might be able to do that, Your Honor.

Quite capacious, indeed! Again, Justices Roberts and Gorsuch piled on a bit to get him to really spell out how they could discriminate, even for direct messages.

These cases have allllll sorts of details and issues (e.g., it's a preliminary injunction on a facial challenge, which took up the lion's share of the argument time), but however the Court deals with it, I cannot imagine that it will be an across-the-board victory for the challengers. I cannot imagine five members of the Court will sign off on saying that the Constitution guarantees GMail the right to refuse private communications service based solely on their dislike of an individual's politics. The best I think the challengers could hope for is some vague kicking of the can back down, maybe giving in on a temporary injunction in order to develop a better record, but maybe having a classic Kavanaugh concurrence where he says some form of, "...and if you come back here saying that the result you came up with would Constitutionalize allowing GMail to refuse service solely on their dislike of an individual's politics, we will absolutely rule against you on the merits."

Sure enough, when Solicitor General Prelogar for the federal gov't entered the chat and Alito asked her if she agreed with the challengers' position on email services, she flatly disagreed with them. No one may ever know if she had actually game-planned this conversation or expected to have to explicitly disagree with them... or if she just was smart enough to have read the room and knew that whatever she came up with, she couldn't agree with them.

I can't imagine trying to predict exactly what the Court will come up with... there were a lot of indications that went the other way, too, and this one factor certainly isn't going to necessarily lead to a broad ruling in the other direction, but I also can't shake the feeling that we're really starting to see the 90s internet consensus finally cracking and crumbling. By that, I mean the consensus that was always bought and paid for by powerful internet companies who have held the line that they can do absolutely anything they want and cannot be held accountable for anything they do. They're the important part of the internet, and without them, they imagine that the entire 21st century economy will come to a halt. But it is only them, because they never really believed the propaganda around Net Neutrality; they never actually thought that it was a serious concern that maybe ISPs would start kicking folks off the net because of politics (at the time when there were precisely zero examples of this); that was just a play to try to reduce their costs at the expense of infrastructure companies. They're the ones who should be allowed to kick you off the net because of politics. As they dig their hooks deeper into every aspect of your internet experience, where you use your Google device to connect to your Google internet service, and only interact with the Google AI who tailors your entire experience, it will all be shaped at their whim, to their political preferences. Maybe, just maybe, we'll avoid that dystopia.

But what you really came here for is the memes, and the Texas Solicitor General at least tried to bring them for you. First, a shout out to all the lurkers out there! We love you guys!

That's when I say you look at the text of the statute, their theory would mean that even if you just want to lurk and just listen and see what other people are saying, they can kick you off for any reason at all. So if you have somebody who had never posted anything or their speech is identical to the speech of somebody else, their theory is: Well, we can kick you off.

Has anyone ever acknowledged the existence of lurkers in front of the Supreme Court before? Second, he tried describing the need for internet companies that allow individuals to control their own private communications, and that if the line is that if private companies provide the service, they can do literally anything they want, inject/reject whatever politics they want, versus if gov't provides it, then all that stuff ("censorship") is forbidden, then he basically said that we'd need to spin up a gigantic government internet 'company' to do that stuff if we want it without censorship. It was a little hard to follow, and his line certainly didn't land perfectly, but at least he tried:

So, for me, the answer is, for these kind of things like telephones or telegraphs or voluntary communications on the next big telephone/telegraph machine, those kind of private communications have to be able to exist somewhere. You know, the expression like, you know, sir, this is a Wendy's.

As much as I have a strong desire to be able to respond to stuff like the latest Gemini hamfisted diversity-in-image-generation with, "Sir, this is a Wendy's," and that they just need to fuck right off with their politics in products that could provide the world incredible mundane technological benefits, we're probably going to have to muddle on with pretty powerful politicized internet companies even after these cases. The only current alternative of giving all that power to government may be the only thing that's worse. So, I guess, here's to rooting for it not being too much of a hash!

Just yesterday, I mentioned that a variety of more rural Canadians that I met on my last visit to the area all expressed some form of concern about their "culture changing" with respect to significant immigration. I didn't have great examples, because I'm still mostly an outsider to them.

This morning, my wife shared this with me. The Moncton city hall has, for the last twenty years, displayed a large menorah around Hanukkah. That tradition ends this year. The city cited "separation of church and state" as the driver of their change of course, as if something in the legal landscape has changed in the last twenty years concerning public displays of religious symbols. Spoiler: nothing in the legal landscape concerning separation of church and state has changed in Canada in the last twenty years concerning public displays of religious symbols. The city is getting mostly derided in social media, and a common talking point is that they're putting out this claim while, at the very same moment, prominently displaying all sorts of Christmas decorations.

So what has changed? Here is where I have a little bit of insider exposure. I don't have public sources for this, and so I'm not actually even sure of how accurate it is, but it's the story "on the street". Basically, there's not that many Jews in the area, anyway, maybe a couple few hundred, but they've been there for a long time. Part of the community. Part of the culture. On the other hand, the sense was that circa ten years ago, there was almost no Muslim presence whatsoever. I was told that ten years ago, the only mosque in the area was really just a small house that had been repurposed. Since then, massive amounts of immigration from Francophone North Africa. They've come with a predominant religion and, well, different cultural understandings. This is what seems to have changed.

Obviously, the cherry on top of what's changed is October 7. It's tempting to think that that is the only thing that's changed, and even if they didn't have all the immigration in the past several years, the city of Moncton would have made the same choice. However, I can't help but be reminded of the old quote about how you go broke two ways: first, slowly, then second, all at once. It's hard to detangle the two.

EDIT: I realized after posting that I wanted to mention something else that was in my mind, but never figured out how to include it. It's that, culturally, they're bloody Canadians! Their culture is obscenely polite and accepting of others, other cultures, and multiculturalism generally. They're more than happy to let people do all sorts of their own cultural things, and general tolerance skews quite high. They're really of the "we can all get along" mindset. This is one of those things that seems to be cracking as they struggle with new situations that they find themselves in, and seems to me to be one of the reasons why they're so confused about these changes occurring in their own midst.

Observe the uncanny uniformity of ideological positions on pretty much all social issues in most large newspapers, most top universities, most large corporations.

I've loved Peter Thiel's most recent line on this: "What's the opposite of diversity? University."

a flawed model of how humans operate. That are humans view of the world is hopelessly tied to cultural consumption, media and so on. So our inputs from culture and media needs to be controlled at all costs so we don't end up making the world worse by being exposed to dangerous ideas cultural and/or media content. This is the quintessential post-modernistic thought process that if they stuff the "the message" in everything it will create a better world. But we already did this experiment with the totalitarian states of the 20th century and people still thought differently even when they were force fed with their culture and media with the right way of thinking. It didn't work and it is not going to work this time either even if we have more powerful tools.

I'm thinking of the line that is something like, "Cultural consensus can stay irrational longer than you can stay alive." Kolmogorov can have a hope, belief, or dream that one day the absurdist influence of Pravda comes crashing down while he ducks his head and quietly works on math. Kolmogorov also died almost exactly two years before the Berlin Wall fell. In the meantime, the death grip of force cultural conformity will continue to run amok.

In some ways, it's sort of difficult to believe until you've personally experienced it. I remember back in the slightly-pre-Obergefell days, one night out at the bar, the topic came up. I expressed the slightest amount of, "Well, just looking at the science, especially when comparing it to the standards of biological science that I'm seeing in the classroom about other behavior neuroscience topics, I'm not quite sure it's slam-dunk settled that sexual orientation is purely biological, that people are 'born that way'." What was shocking to me was that it was almost as if no one had even considered the possibility! Like, it was clearly so obviously true... who would even go about trying to gather regular scientific evidence in order to justify what was supposed to be a scientific conclusion? It's frankly striking to see how strong a social consensus can be even when it's primarily been pushed by particular policy advocates with access to strong media tools. Now that the prior policy fight is dead and buried, even the existence of such a forced consensus has been memory holed, as the cultural forces are geared toward a new policy fight. Irrationality builds upon irrationality, and even if it eventually all comes crashing down, it may be too late for many of us... and it may come crashing down violently and painfully.

This is relevant to much of the discussion here.

Last year, after Elon Musk acquired Twitter and used it to voice his own political and ideological views without a filter, President Biden gave federal agencies a greenlight to go after him. During a press conference at the White House, President Biden stood at a podium adorned with the official seal of the President of the United States, and expressed his view that Elon Musk “is worth being looked at.”1 When pressed by a reporter to explain how the government would look into Elon Musk, President Biden remarked: “There’s a lot of ways.”2 There certainly are. The Department of Justice, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have all initiated investigations into Elon Musk or his businesses.

Today, the Federal Communications Commission adds itself to the growing list of administrative agencies that are taking action against Elon Musk’s businesses. I am not the first to notice a pattern here. Two months ago, The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote that “the volume of government investigations into his businesses makes us wonder if the Biden Administration is targeting him for regulatory harassment.”3 After all, the editorial board added, Elon Musk has become “Progressive Enemy No. 1.” Today’s decision certainly fits the Biden Administration’s pattern of regulatory harassment. Indeed, the Commission’s decision today to revoke a 2020 award of $885 million to Elon Musk’s Starlink—an award that Starlink secured after agreeing to provide high-speed Internet service to over 640,000 rural homes and businesses across 35 states—is a decision that cannot be explained by any objective application of law, facts, or policy.

Those are real agencies bringing real claims and making real administrative judgments that will be backed by the full force of the United States of America. They are also total bullshit and not real.

I think this is right, and I think the usual justification for why it would be beneficial in increasing output is often related to situations with significant fixed costs and small marginal costs. Buying a plane/operating a flight has significant fixed costs and low marginal costs. Another standard example is a drug company selling a pill in Africa for a tenth of the price they sell it for in America. Drug development has high fixed costs, while production of the pills often has low marginal costs. The key question is, "Would not being able to price discriminate lead to market exit?" In the drug case, if a company couldn't price discriminate between America/Africa (i.e., they had to choose one price everywhere), they're simply not going to sell drugs in Africa. They're going to exit the market. If an airline can't price discriminate at all, then some routes are going to become unprofitable, and they're just not going to offer the flights (and not buy the aircraft to fly the routes). I think this is essentially your idea that they're willing to sell African pills/cheap flights conditional on being able to price discriminate with other transactions. But in both of these cases, I think it's important to note that the price they're willing to give to the "poorer" folks is still above the marginal cost of production. This is obviously true, because otherwise they wouldn't sell a seat to a poorer person or a pill to an African, even with price discrimination.

A couple other salient differences between these examples are 1) monopoly power, and 2) the nature of the price discrimination. On (1), the drug example really only applies to drugs that are patented (and thus, the producers have monopoly power). For example, some countries don't respect patents of US drug companies, and those consumers get generic pills at the (low) marginal cost of production. Once a regular drug goes off-patent, no one really argues for the benefit of price discrimination, because everyone ends up enjoying paying the (low) marginal cost of production! Both in the US and Africa! (Remember, both sets of consumers were paying above the marginal cost of production during the period of monopoly + price discrimination.) The point of difference here is that while airlines have some significant regulatory and other barriers to entry, the market for air travel is much more competitive than that of a patented drug. Part of the question really boils down to how much "cartel-like" control one actually thinks universities/hospitals/whatever actually have. (We could probably argue about this another time; is a pretty rich conversation.)

Concerning (2), I think there is a significant difference in the nature of the price discrimination. Drugs in US/Africa is in a meaningful sense, I think, targeted at general income patterns by regional area. That is short of the very individualized income data that universities/hospitals are able to use. The price discrimination will be a little "less perfect". Moreover, I think that there is a conceptual difference between a company simply being able to look at incomes (whether abstracted over a region or individualized) as opposed to traditional means of price discrimination. Like I mentioned in the OP, all companies want to price discriminate. They want to know incomes. They want to know everything that is going to correlate with willingness-to-pay. But usually, they have to fall back on some other sort of weak correlate. "Vacation travelers tend to book further in advance than business travelers, and the latter tend to have higher willingness-to-pay." "Retirees are more able to view a 2pm matinee at the theater on a week day, and they tend to have lower willingness-to-pay." It may in some sense be correlated with income, but they're actually targeting something else. I also think it's meaningful if the method involved includes actually giving people a different product. Sure, selling a business class ticket for $2k may help make it profitable to run a flight that also includes some $100 seats, but they have to at least, like, try to make that business class seat better in some way. Some incentive for the person to choose to pay $2k rather than just, "Whelp, we magically know your income, so you're gonna have to pay more for the same thing, because fuck you, that's why."

Bringing it back to universities (maybe I'll do healthcare another day), I think they are remarkably more cartel-like than most people understand. They control the accreditation boards that determine who is allowed to sell education. They control processes that require universities to "show a need" for opening up a new program even within an existing university (at least sometimes)! They went knives out in regulatory processes against for-profit colleges, MOOCs, etc. (notwithstanding other legitimate concerns that may exist with those things). You should hear the stories of various tech people/billionaires/etc. who have tried to go after the academia cartel. They give up, because the cartel is stronger than you think. We've bolstered it by subsidizing demand and restricting supply. That's the first problem. Then, I don't think there's any real charge that they will exit the market if they can't price discriminate. While their marginal costs are pretty low, their fixed costs don't really correlate with market exit in the same way that say, not buying a plane to fly a route or not bringing a drug to market does. They have no natural analog to simply not selling drugs in Africa if they're unable to price discriminate. And finally, they've always been able to "price discriminate" by offering a different product. Business class seats are like living in the fancy new dorm building. I don't know that anyone really cares about it that much. Those consumers are genuinely getting additional consumer surplus out of the deal. It is specifically the, "We've magic'ed (by force of government) into existence a new way to just take the surplus from you, not by giving you something else you want or by providing more things to more people, but because we vaguely threatened 'poor people' enough that the gov't now tells us how much money you make," that is a problem.

No one would accept this in any other industry that hasn't already been mammothly screwed up. No one thinks that when you go to the grocery store, or go to buy a TV, a refrigerator, or car, or anything else, that you should first have to just give them all your financial information so that they can tailor your price. Everyone realizes that if the starting point is one of those regular, well-functioning, competitive markets, there would be no benefit to such a thing; it would be a pure transfer of surplus from consumers to producers. Everyone realizes that apples/TVs/refrigerators/cars are already sold at the marginal cost of production, and that adding income-based price discrimination isn't going to magically make producers sell them below the marginal cost of production to poor people. It's only after we have completely screwed up a market that this starts even being a thinkable proposition.

Canada doesn't use the new nitrogen hypoxia method. Canada uses the "old" lethal injection protocol that has been horribly cruel for decades, at least since it has been adopted in the US for capital punishment. Prior to adoption by the US for capital punishment, lethal injection was the "new" humane way of killing someone, and it was only the barbarous Americans who were still killing people via electric chair, which was the "old" protocol. At least, the electric chair was the "old", barbarous method only after the US adopted it for capital punishment. Before that, it was the "new" humane way of killing someone, and it was only the barbarous Americans who were still killing people via firing squad, which was the "old" protocol. Before that, ....

The culture war about euthanasia in Canada has been roaring a bit, almost a decade after they began implementing the program. However, I'm not particularly interested in the current Canadian culture war on this topic; instead, I'm curious about a related topic in the US culture war.

I saw this chart being bandied about, describing the procedure. I hadn't really thought about how the procedure actually works. It seems that you can either choose a route like this, where a series of chemicals are injected by a doctor, or a route where you self-administer some oral drugs. My first thought for this route was, "That sounds a lot like what they use in the US for capital punishment." My Duck-Duck-fu quickly hit my lack of knowledge of pharmacology as I was trying to figure out if they were actually the same drugs or not. It seems like they're at least quite similar. From here, they list midazolam, propofol, and rocuronium as being used in MAID. Some examples from my searching includes things from Wikipedia like, for midazolam:

The drug has been introduced for use in executions by lethal injection in certain jurisdictions in the United States in combination with other drugs. It was introduced to replace pentobarbital after the latter's manufacturer disallowed that drug's use for executions.

For propofol:

The US state of Missouri added propofol to its execution protocol in April 2012. However, Governor Jay Nixon halted the first execution by the administration of a lethal dose of propofol in October 2013 following threats from the European Union to limit the drug's export if it were used for that purpose. The United Kingdom had already banned the export of medicines or veterinary medicines containing propofol to the United States.

For rocuronium, I can't even figure out if it's the same thing as rocuronium bromide or if they're different, but while Wikipedia doesn't have an article for the former, it has for the latter:

On July 27, 2012, the U.S. state of Virginia replaced pancuronium bromide, one of the three drugs used in execution by lethal injection, with rocuronium bromide.

On 3 October 2016, the U.S. state of Ohio announced that it would resume executions on January 12, 2017, using a combination of midazolam, rocuronium bromide, and potassium chloride. Prior to this, the last execution in Ohio was in January 2014.

On August 24, 2017, the U.S. state of Florida executed Mark James Asay using a combination of etomidate, rocuronium bromide, and potassium acetate.

I followed the litigation in the US some years back around the death penalty, and I was aware that there was a concerted effort to pressure drug manufacturers to stop selling whatever drugs were used to states who would use them for executions. I also remember many of the arguments being that such injections constituted cruel and unusual treatment, particularly focusing on the X% or whatever risk that something went wrong or something didn't work quite right for this person or that person. (As an aside, literally none of the Canadian websites I've seen on MAID say a single word about any risk of things not going swimmingly.)

My question is if anyone is familiar with more recent developments in the US. Have there been any reasonably big cases that are more recent (than probably 5-10yrs ago)? In any of those cases, was a US state able to successfully point to Canada's program in order to argue that the risk was low and that it should not constitute cruel/unusual punishment? Are there actual meaningful differences in the drugs used that have been argued in court? (Are those differences due to the pressure on drug manufacturers?) Have the anti-death penalty advocates just given up on that argument and focused their efforts more on pressuring the manufacturers? Basically, if we were to draw a "territory control map" for the US litigation/culture war, what does the current state look like?

I mean, Re: Hillary, destruction of evidence is a pretty automatic charge. Can you imagine Trump not being charged with it? Not to mention the 1001 charges (also apparently seen here, according to reporting), and the OIG report quoted FBI agents who were dumbstruck as to why such charges weren't brought against folks, because they were dead-to-rights. But nope; that stuff is reserved for the likes of Flynn and Trump... the folks who need to be removed.

Possibly more interesting for actual culture war analysis is just observing the public narrative shift. Back in the days before it was fashionable to prosecute Trump and anyone related to Trump, when the possible charges were against Hillary, it was a grave and serious thing to prosecute politicians, especially when they had possible elections in front of them. "That's the stuff of banana republics!" they said. "That's, like, what Putin does!" they said. It was "deeply dangerous for democracy". Whether or not our democracy was legitimate was supposedly hanging in the balance, depending upon whether their preferred candidate was charged with a crime. You don't hear that anymore. For good or for bad, fair and just or unfair and unjust, it's a change in the narrative. Whether this change can be easily flip-flopped on in another 5-10 years... or whether it will be persistent, possibly leading to endless tit-for-tat, I don't know.

Drug prices have always been a tiny part of it. The big ones are the obvious cartel-like behavior, restricting the supply of trained doctors and approved facilities. But one of the biggest issues is still price transparency. It's what makes this market feel different to people. Compare to complaints that housing is "unaffordable". Well, the market for housing is abundantly transparent. In most places, people can just go look at the market prices, and they'll see a spectrum of prices from quite high to remarkably low. And they'll notice that when folks complain about "unaffordable housing", they really mean that they just want newer, nicer, bigger housing in better locations for less money. Moreover, because the market is transparent, they can see just how much local government housing policy can restrict/enable supply, pushing prices up/down. So the movement has rightly been able to focus on the underlying issue of restricted supply.

In healthcare, the shell game of price hiding is so advanced, people can't even notice what's going on. The process is, "People go about normal life; sometimes, that involves going to the doctor; poof! Some amount of money is gone. How much? Who knows? Maybe nobody can know." That's what's plaguing the PBMs - everything is predicated on playing "hide the paper". If they keep everyone in the dark about what the numbers mean, they can play four square all the way home to piles of money. And it's what's plaguing the hospitals, too. Of course they want to charge high "facility fees"; these are almost certainly hidden fees! Hidden fees rub a lot of people the wrong way. They feel like when you're in one of those countries where the guy acts like because you touched his product, the culturally-mandated thing is that you've already bought it and have to pay for it. What's the price? You didn't know, could be anything! But you're either a sucker for the paying the number he pulls out of his ass or you're a dick for arguing back.

Healthcare is entirely about hiding every fee possible. So while many people may have experienced a healthcare purchase that turned out to be a little cheaper than their wild-ass guess of what it might be, they've probably also experienced the opposite. And you know they're going to 1000% remember the time they felt they got screwed over wayyyyy more, even if they thought they got okay deals most of the rest of the time. People want a "deal" 100% of the time. They want some amount of "consumer surplus". That's kind of the definition. We turn down buying stuff every day that doesn't give us consumer surplus; we don't say those things are "unaffordable". They just don't bring me, personally, sufficient value right now. But for every single trade I willingly engage in, even if I don't think I got a "great" deal, I think I got more value than I spent. To have a transaction... and then to find out later that it was more expensive than you thought... enough more expensive that, had you known, you wouldn't have agreed to the transaction in the first place? That pisses people off. That makes people say that healthcare is "unaffordable". (That is probably what causes people to go bankrupt; most people don't willingly engage in many transactions that they know will bankrupt them; they have to be blindsided into it.)

I'm becoming more and more obstinate on this point for healthcare. The shell game is too entrenched. The "let's force prices onto the internet" tack didn't work. They're still too good at making it impossible to understand or impossible to access/figure out at the time that you need it. Nobody's going to be sitting in a doctor's office, trying to decide what to do, and say, "Gimme a second, I need to look up on the internet what the price is here and at other locations and.... oh shit, I need to write a JSON parser to figure that out?" Nah. At this point, I can't imagine there's anything we can do besides simply mandate that every single provider of healthcare services must give every single patient a written price prior to performing the service. (Assuming, of course, they're conscious, etc.)

What is administrative burden in research for?

I think about this in a variety of domains, but it came up again when one of my tech news aggregators pointed to this paper. The idea is using LLMs to generate and evaluate protocols for biology experiments. I think the obvious key concern is related to well-known tradeoffs that people have been brought up in other contexts. Sometimes, it gets reduced to, "Well, people were concerned that with automated spell-checkers, then people will forget how to spell, but that's a silly problem, because even if they forget how to spell, their output that is augmented by the spell-checker will be plenty productive."

I wonder if there are limits to this reasoning. I'm thinking of two topics that I recall Matt Levine writing about (I can't find links at the moment; since Money Stuff always has multiple topics in each letter and he's written about similar topics that use similar words a bunch of times, I can't quickly find them).

One topic I recall is him talking about 'defensive' board meetings. The way I recall it is to suppose that a company puts in their public disclosures that they "consider cybersecurity risks". This doesn't necessarily mean that they do anything about cybersecurity risks, but they have to consider them. The way this plays out is that the board has to put an agenda item for one of their meetings to talk about cybersecurity risks. For an hour or whatever, the board has to talk about the general topic of cybersecurity. This talking can be at a high level of generality, and they don't have to really decide to do anything specific, so long as they have the official minutes that say, in writing, that they "considered" it. Without this, they might be liable for securities fraud. With it, they still might be extremely vulnerable and eventually lose a bunch of money when they're exploited (since they just talked and didn't do anything), but at least when that happens, they won't also get hit with a shareholder suit for securities fraud. (Really, Matt Levine would say, they'll absolutely get hit with a shareholder suit for securities fraud, but they'll be able to point to the minutes to defend themselves.)

The second topic I recall is him talking about where the value lies in corporate contract negotiation. He said that most times, you just start from the "typical" contract. Maybe something you've used in the past. You just pull that old contract off the shelf, change some particulars, then put it forward as a starting point. Then, the negotiations are often about just little modifications, and the phrase, "That's standard," is a pretty solid weapon against any modifications. He then talked about how a firm that does these negotiations in bulk as a service can start to sneak new provisions in around the edges in some contracts, so that they can later point to those prior contracts and say, "That's standard." Having the ability to set the "default" can have value.

So, biology. Science. Writing protocols is complicated, annoying, and time-intensive. Scott has written before about how infuriating the IRB process can be. Even with just that, there were questions about what the IRB process is for, and whether the current level of scrutiny is too lax, too strict, or about right.

Applying LLMs will potentially greatly decrease the barrier for newer researchers (say, grad students) to be able to generate piles of administrative style paperwork, saying all the proper words about what is "supposed" to be done, checking off every box that the IRB or whatever would ask for. But I do have to wonder... will it lead to short-cutting? "Sure, the LLM told us that we needed to have these thirty pages of boilerplate text, so we submitted these thirty pages of boilerplate text, but I mean, who actually does all of that stuff?!" Do they even take the time to read the entirety of the document? I can't imagine they're going to pay as close attention as they might have if they had to painstakingly go through the process of figuring out what the requirements were and why they were necessary (or coming to the personal conclusion that it was a dumb requirement that was necessary for the sake of being necessary). At least if they went through the process, they have to think about it and consider what it was that they were planning to do. This could lead to even worse situations than a board "considering" cybersecurity; they don't even need meeting notes to demonstrate that they "considered" the details of the protocol appropriately; the protocol itself is the written document that they theoretically took things into consideration in an assumed-to-be serious way.

This could also entrench silly requirements. You need to provide the subjects with pencils instead of pens? "That's standard." Who is going to be able to do the yeoman's job of subtly shifting the default to something that's, I don't know, not stupid?

I imagine all sorts of dispositions by particular researchers. There are obviously current researchers who just don't give a damn about doing things the right way, even to the point of outright fraud. There are obviously current researchers who really do care about doing things the "right way", to the point of being so frustrated with how convoluted the "right way" can be that they just give up on the whole she-bang (a la Scott). Which factors become more common? What becomes the prevalent way of doing things, and what are the likely widespread failure modes? Mostly, I worry that it could make things worse in both directions: needing large piles of paper to check off every box will lead to both short-cutting by inferior researchers, possibly producing even more shit-tier research (if that problem wasn't bad enough already; also, since they have the official documents, maybe it'll be in a form that is even harder to discover and criticize) and warding off honest, intelligent would-be researchers like Scott.

I don't know. Lowering the barrier can obviously also have positive effects of helping new researchers just 'magically' get a protocol that actually does make sense, and they can get on with producing units of science when they otherwise would have been stuck with a shit-tier protocol... but will we have enough of that to overcome these other effects?

Big Peter Thiel interview with John Gray H/T MarginalRevolution

This hits quite a few topics, but one cluster I'd pull out is science/achievement/religion/wokeness:

[JG:] Part of the resistance to your analysis of science is a kind of quasi-religious conception of the salvific possibilities of science. Science can do what religion hasn’t done, which is to actually change worldly life in a way which rids it of its deepest contradictions. And for some people, if they gave up that faith in science, they would be left with nihilism, or left with despair, or left with unbearable anxiety.

PT: Yeah, although there’s a very complicated history of science. In some ways it was a by-product of Christianity, in some ways it was in opposition to Christianity. And certainly in its healthy, ambitious, early modern forms, whether it was a substitute or a complement to Christianity, it was supposed to be a vehicle for comparable transformation. The indefinite prolongation of human life was an early modern science project in which people still believed in the 17th and 18th centuries. There was a sub-movement within the revolutionary Soviet politics in the 1920s called Cosmism, where a part of the project of the revolution had to be to physically resurrect all dead human beings, because if science didn’t do that it would be inferior to Christianity.

[...] So there is this anti-Christian or derivative from Christianity, very ambitious version of science. And of course, there is also a more defeatist version of science, where science actually tells us about limits and things you cannot do. To use a literary example, when Hamlet’s evil mother, Gertrude, says that all that lives must die, the question one must ask is, is that a law of nature? Or is this just a rationalization for the rottenness that is Denmark? And certainly the early modern conception was that you wanted to transcend this, both in a Christian or a scientific form. By late modernity, as science decayed, that sort of ambition is only on the fringes of science, not the mainstream.

...

One particular example of science’s slide from early modern ambition into late modern torpor is the climate change debate. If one took climate change seriously, there are all kinds of progressive science things one could do. You could be pushing for the construction of hundreds of new nuclear reactors. You could be pushing for nuclear fusion. But in practice, we don’t lean into that. We’re instead told that we should ride bicycles. So much of science today has this Luddite feeling.

The theme is that science used to be ambitious, especially ambitious in thinking that it would easily replace religion in all aspects, even in hope. I don't think he's claiming here that science has directly stalled out technologically, but the way the culture views it and uses it is uninspired and uninspiring. He seems to extend this decline to the science of social technology:

You know, McKinsey was a real thing in 1985 in the United States. If you hired a consultant they actually helped you improve your company, because the companies were badly run. At this point McKinsey is a total racket, it’s just all fake. The Reagan and Thatcher administrations empowered McKinsey because they allowed more companies to be acquired, more M&A activity to happen. It was a somewhat brutal but very powerful reorganization of society that was possible and in fact the right thing to do in the 1980s. At this point, McKinsey is not ever going to be anything other than a super corrupt, fake racket in 2023.

I think that toward the end, he possibly comes to some sort of root of it:

one of my colleagues says that institutions have embedded growth obligations, EGOs, in short. A healthy institution has exponential growth. A healthy, exponentially growing company, for example, creates more jobs and everybody can get promoted. Other institutions have their equivalents. And then at some point, the growth stops, and you have a choice. You can become more honest and say, well, you know, the university isn’t growing anymore. There’ll be very few faculty slots available. If you’re in a PhD program, we’re gonna make sure that 80% of the students drop out of the program within six months so they don’t waste their time. Or, the thing that I think unfortunately happens a great deal, is you just lie and the and the institutions become sociopathic. They pretend that the growth is still going on and then it’s only years and years later that people figure out that there are no jobs.

To tie it back to wokeness, wokeness is designed to distract from and cope with this structural reality. Say you have 10 graduate students in a chemistry program and there’s a job for only one of them at the end. You’re engaged in a Malthusian struggle, fistfights over beakers and Bunsen burners. Then somebody says something slightly racist or slightly inappropriate. What a relief – you can throw that one person off the overcrowded bus! That kind of phenomenon is perfectly natural, and could be avoided with more growth.

That is, I think he is saying that the problem with society and science stems (STEMs?) not from the screwed up incentive to publish ever more just to make number go up, but from the fact that people just didn't take seriously the idea that number don't go up (of faculty), which could be the fundamental driver for why there is the screwed up incentive to publish ever more just to make number go up. That this core problem drove the messed up incentive system, made the whole thing go sociopathic, generating apathy/lack of ambition (you can't have that wide-eyed of an optimistic ambition within the muck of a clearly sociopathic endeavor), and ultimately giving birth to extremely degenerate behavior like wokeness.

I think some here would say that the only reason why number don't go up (of faculty) is a problem is because society has this strange idea that everyone is completely equal in terms of potential/capability, so they think there's no reason why we couldn't have vastly higher quantities of faculty-capable people. But I'm not sure whether that's the case or if we're genuinely dealing with a weird numbers problem. Literally this morning, I saw a new video from a top chess grandmaster, talking about how the rating system is messed up post-COVID. How a ton of young kids across the world poured obscene amounts of their lives into online chess during that time, due to quarantine/addition/general rise in popularity, and they genuinely got really good at chess. But their skill isn't reflected by the traditional "over the board" rating, because they may just not have played enough games in those settings to have it adjust properly.

I do lament that the vast majority of what gets published is totally worthless, but I'm wishy-washy on whether the fundamental driver is that less capable people are getting into these positions or if it's almost purely a result of incentive structure. In the end, I think it's probably both, but let me sketch it out. This is basically an attempt to steelman the possibility that, say, the 85th percentile of folks who could have even plausibly thought about pursuing a career in academia actually has gotten to be a lot better than they were in the past. Then, since total faculty numbers are stagnant, it wasn't as easy to just look at traditional measures and pick out the highest quality folks (akin to how you can't necessarily just look at OTB chess rating nowadays), but since you couldn't just wait and let the rating system self-correct over time, because, uh, you don't have a self-correcting rating system like ELO for academics, they had to go hard in on shit like just making some number or other go up. Then, even though the quantity of reasonable-tier candidates (and their general quality) may be higher, Goodhart's law still takes over, and you end up selecting the ones that are just better at gaming your metric or stabbing each other in the back (and they focus their efforts on gaming metrics/backstabbing, so that even if they're actually more capable, their output becomes generally worse, which would explain how many crap papers are out there). Apathy, lack of ambition, and dysfunction follow.

(I still don't know whether I actually think the 85th percentile of potential faculty actually has gone up, or just people really want to believe in the absence of an actually good measure.)

This is probably what I think was most lacking from the 3min clip I saw. Should have gone straight to reversed hypotheticals or had a bank of actual, real world cases where they policed mere opinions. Start off with the most basic reversed hypothetical: "Would calling for the genocide of African Americans be a violation to the campus code of conduct?" Then move down the chain, even all the way to the meme, "Would displaying a poster saying, 'It's okay to be white,' be a violation of the campus code of conduct?" Get them on record. Double bonus points would be if they could point to actual examples on those campuses. In fact, that the questioner did not move to actual examples on those campuses of speech being policed makes me lean slightly more toward thinking that, in reality, the universities may be ever so slightly better on this score than I would have thought before, but that's perhaps only an epsilon movement, because I think that if I did take the time to dig in to past cases, we'd likely be able to show definite hypocrisy.

Weight Loss (...yes, again...)

I listen to a variety of podcasts, and I generally do what I can to avoid listening to ads along the way, even if that's just manually skipping ahead through them. But occasionally, my hands are busy with something else, and I just have to deal. In any event, last week, I heard an ad for GOLO, a weight-loss program.

I'm not at 'current episode' on all of my podcasts; I'm listening to back catalog for some of them. I didn't think to go check the date on it, and I don't even remember which podcast it was in at this point, so I don't know if it was a few years old or brand new, but at whatever time it was, they were touting it as a "new approach". Forbes' review of GOLO says 2023 on it, so presumably it's pretty recent.

I was curious about what the Kids These Days are doing, and you may have seen me here before talking about weight loss, so I decided to check it out. I was sooooo ready to hate it. After checking it out, though, in some sense, it actually pleases me a fair amount. In another sense, it illustrates quite well a phenomenon I've been seeing in terms of our society's collective psychology about the topic.

What's GOLO about? From their website... insulin resistance! Muscle loss! These are the bad buzzwords. Metabolic efficiency! Immunity Health! Hormone Balance! These are the good buzzwords. Plus, they have a magic supplement! It's easy! Just take one capsule with each meal. It's in a paragraph that starts with "The Science Behind GOLO", in bold and everything. The Science (TM) is right there! They even shit on CICO, helpfully pointing out in all caps:

YOU DON’T NEED TO COUNT CALORIES, COUNT POINTS OR FOLLOW AN APP. THE TRUTH IS, LOW-CALORIE, LOW-FAT APPROACHES DON’T WORK.

Let's dive in, see what's really going on. Obvious first place to start is their supplement; what's in it? 7 plant extracts and 3 minerals, of which, best as I can tell, chromium is the star of their show. Of course, best as science can tell, there is just the barest degree of plausibility, and Examine concludes by pointing out:

Anyone wishing to supplement chromium should be aware that chromium supplementation is not associated with any reliable benefits on markers of glucose metabolism.

Ok, so if their magic suppliment isn't exactly Ozempic, what do they have going on? Gotta dig into 'More Information' on their site.... then be careful! Don't fall into the trap of clicking on any of the distractions, even the one that promises to tell you what their 'GOLO For Life Plan' is. Gotta go to the FAQ. That's where you've gotta dig down into the question about what the GOLO For Life Plan is. It helpfully states:

The GOLO For Life Plan combines the right foods together to help manage and optimize glucose and insulin levels while creating a thermogenic effect. The GOLO For Life Plan improves weight loss in two ways:

  • Minimizing or eliminating muscle loss and maximizing fat loss
  • Providing proper nutrition that includes healthy fats and carbohydrates which eliminates nutritional imbalances and promotes steady weight loss and better health.

On the GOLO For Life Plan, you can eat more food and lose weight without the obstacles you may have faced with other diets. You will be eating between 1300 and 1800 calories each day, and will:

  • Stay full and energized
  • Keep insulin steady throughout the day
  • Give your body proper nutrition
  • Reduce hunger and cravings
  • Learn how to eat to promote weight loss
  • Learn how to maintain your weight when you reach your goals

I tried to be helpful and cross out all the noise that isn't relevant for us at this point. What is the real key to a fancy new diet for weight loss that has all the buzzwords that people use when they say that CICO is garbage? It was CICO all along! There are more telltale signs that this is just a recycling of what we've known for a long time. 1300-1800 is a pretty wide range, so what's going on? Two more items further down in the FAQ, under How is the GOLO For Life Plan Personalized?, we see:

The GOLO For Life Plan is based on your energy needs. We help you determine the right amount of food that you need, to lose on average, 1-2 pounds per week.

That Forbes article fills in some more details:

While everyone has the same food guidelines, your specific caloric intake recommendation is based on your gender, age, current weight and activity level.

The government of Canada has helpfully published basically exactly this sort of thing on their website for years. We've known how to do this for years. Weknowdis. Moreover, the real, actual science has confirmed for decades that to a pretty darn good level of approximation, 500cal/day from your TDEE is right about a 1lb/wk weight loss/gain. Weknowdis.

Forbes says, "Programs range from 30 to 90 days," but I can't find solid details on the GOLO website. Most of the examples are people who did stuff for 6mo-1yr. Best I can tell, they're basically just selling the supplement, and then I guess giving away the meal planning to put you in the right calorie range. So, for a bit, with the Forbes wording, I was wondering if they were actually going to have some trick to try to get you to do it for 1-3mo, then 'cycle off', but try to figure out how to get you to just go back to maintenance caloric intake, then say that you should start another 1-3mo cycle. Maybe that's buried somewhere in the planning tool they're giving away with every purchase of the supplement. Final thing to point out, which I couldn't really find in detail on the GOLO site, Forbes says:

GOLO also provides eating guidelines, encouraging you to eat more whole foods (including fruits, vegetables, meats, eggs and grains) while avoiding sugar and processed foods.

In the end, what have they done here? It actually almost makes me proud of capitalism. They've found a way to package and monetize the bog standard, traditional advice for losing weight. You could just listen to the CICO people, the honest doctors, the fitness people, etc., who tell you the same basic advice. Stop eating total crap like piles of dessert all the time. Stop drinking big gulps of straight sugar calories, no matter whether they're soda, juice, or whatever other trendy beverage is happening right now. Eat at about a 500cal/day deficit to shoot for 1lb/wk of weight loss, eat regular foods, and maybe if you're feeling physical/psychological effects after getting somewhat deep into a cut, go back to maintenance for a bit, and then start again.

But the packaging. Ohhhh the packaging! Insulin resistance! Metabolic efficiency! Immunity Health! Hormone Balance! CICO SUCKS! They do what they can to try to meet people where they are. To try to get them used to the idea that they're shooting for about a pound a week, so it'll be longer than other people promise (though, of course, they say 1-2lb/wk, just to get your brain to think it could be twice as fast). And of course, the cherry on top, a supplement that probably doesn't really do anything is the mechanism by which they monetize. Hell, after people lose the weight, I bet the GOLO For Life thing basically steers them toward how to stay at maintenance for the rest of time... but you probably better keep buying/taking their supplement, just to make sure you don't ruin all your gainz! It's a thing of sheer beauty, designed to bob and weave around all the CICO bashers who are going to scream from the rooftops that CICO doesn't work and trash your weight loss program if it even hints at the idea that CICO is what's going on rather than repeating the buzzwords and bowing at the god of, "It's not your fault, it's... check cue card... insulin resistance!"

In the end, I can't help but love it. Could you have listened to me tell you basically all the same underlying facts? Sure. Could you find a plethora of communities or official government public health documents that outline how you can do all this same stuff, but for free? Yup. But man, we're too dry in the delivery, and we tend to be abrasive to the folks who want to believe that there is some other magic going on in the world. I can't help but think of how Matt Levine might put it. The market wants the bog standard advice that works and that is backed by science, but it also doesn't want it to sound like that. It wants to hear some buzzwords, platitudes, shitting on CICO, and having a magic supplement. That's an arbitrage opportunity, and GOLO seems to have filled it.

EDIT: Sigh, I tried so hard to get the strikethroughs to work inside the bulletpoints. It displays correctly in the comment preview (and still displays correctly in the preview as I'm editing). But it's broken in the actual comment. @ZorbaTHut Help?

Frankly, hearing this makes me trust the developers less. A solid reason to trust, for example, Signal, is because they have straight bitten the bullet of saying, "Our software may end up helping deplorables at times, but we're still utterly committed to it, and nothing else is as important to this organization as this one thing." It's a commitment that helps me be comfortable that they're not going to roll over and sneak shady shit into the code if, like, I don't know, some Canadian truckers protest, the Canadian gov't declares an emergency, and the narrative is that they are the spawn of Satan and Hitler's gay love, and oh, if we could just peek in to their files, we'll stop the next holocaust.

I don't know that I trust Syncthing to do that anymore. I now really worry that they may be compromised... or at least that the snowball of their personnel is rolling downhill, ejecting anyone not on board with the narrative enough, on its way to being fully compromised.

This leaves me unsettled. I love their software. I use it everywhere. I might not yet be "too committed to pull out", but I'm considering revamping some things that might push me even closer to that line. Yet now, I sort of want to pull out. There's probably not a great alternative yet, I'm guessing. But is there any way for me, as a regular user, to affirmatively signal that I really really want them to make this commitment and cut the other shit out? Anything stronger than just "not donate"? Is there an alternate project that has such a commitment and which is close to being as good that I can donate to (maybe not even use yet if it's not there yet)? Anything?

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.

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?