ControlsFreak
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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.
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.
ControlsFreak
10mo ago
« 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.
STATUS GAMES
When people talk about "status games" 'round these parts, they're normally referring to our obsession with relative social status and the games that we play in order to increase it. However, this morning, I listened to oral arguments in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, a case about a municipal ordinance, from a town in Oregon, prohibiting people from sleeping in public, at least with some 'aggravating' factor, like having a blanket. Of course, as is probably traditional for me at this point, I hardly even want to talk about the specifics of this case, at least not concerning homelessness. Instead, I'd like to jump off into questions of categories (which, uh, I guess are made for man?), agency, and the games we play with categories like 'status'.
The background is a 1962 case, Robinson v. California, referred to in all blockquotes from the Court as just "Robinson", which considered
A California statute makes it a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment for any person to "be addicted to the use of narcotics," and, in sustaining petitioner's conviction thereunder, the California courts construed the statute as making the "status" of narcotic addiction a criminal offense for which the offender may be prosecuted "at any time before he reforms," even though he has never used or possessed any narcotics within the State and has not been guilty of any antisocial behavior there.
SCOTUS held:
As so construed and applied, the statute inflicts a cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments.
Details aren't the most important, but a vague sense of that backdrop is. If someone is "addicted to narcotics", that's considered just a "status", not actual behavior or conduct that can be regulated by the state.
This status/conduct categorical divide has a long history of being quite confusing, and this confusion was on full display at the Court. A Ctrl+F of the transcript shows 121 mentions of the word "status", and many of them are trying to figure out what counts. I collected more blockquotes than I could possibly clean up or feel comfortable bombarding TheMotte with, so I'll try to be sparing. First off, Justice Kagan asking questions of Ms. Evangelis, who is arguing on behalf of the city:
JUSTICE KAGAN: So can I talk about that, Ms. Kapur? So taking Robinson as a given, could you criminalize the status of homelessness?
MS. EVANGELIS: Well, I have a couple points to that.
JUSTICE KAGAN: It's just a simple question.
MS. EVANGELIS: So Robinson doesn't address that and I think it's completely distinguishable. So Robinson was a --
JUSTICE KAGAN: Could you criminalize the status of homelessness?
MS. EVANGELIS: Well, I don't think that homelessness is a status like drug addiction, and Robinson only stands for that.
JUSTICE KAGAN: Well, homelessness is a status. It's the status of not having a home.
MS. EVANGELIS: I actually -- I disagree with that, Justice Kagan, because it is so fluid, it's so different. People experiencing homelessness might be one day without shelter, the next day with. The federal definition contemplates various forms.
JUSTICE KAGAN: At the period with which -- in the period where -- where you don't have a home and you are homeless, is that a status?
MS. EVANGELIS: No.
There is a bit of meandering that I'll omit, but it comes back to:
MS. EVANGELIS: The statute does not say anything about homelessness. It's a generally applicable law. One more -- it -- it's very important that it applies to everyone, even --
JUSTICE KAGAN: Yeah, I -- I got that.
MS. EVANGELIS: -- people who are camping.
JUSTICE KAGAN: But it's a single person with a blanket.
MS. EVANGELIS: And --
JUSTICE KAGAN: You don't have to have a tent. You don't have to have a camp. It's a single person with a blanket.
MS. EVANGELIS: And sleeping in conduct is considered -- excuse me, sleeping in public is considered conduct. And this Court -- this Court in Clark discussed that, that that is conduct. Also, the federal regulations --
JUSTICE KAGAN: Well, sleeping is --
MS. EVANGELIS: -- are very --
JUSTICE KAGAN: -- a biological necessity. It's sort of like breathing. I mean, you could say breathing is conduct too, but, presumably, you would not think that it's okay to criminalize breathing in public.
MS. EVANGELIS: I would like to point to the federal regulations which I brought up.
JUSTICE KAGAN: And for a homeless person who has no place to go, sleeping in public is kind of like breathing in public.
and finally:
JUSTICE KAGAN: -- I'll tell you the truth, Ms. Kapur. I think that this is -- this is a super-hard policy problem for all municipalities. And if you were to come in here and you were to say, you know, we need certain protections to keep our streets safe and we can't have, you know, people sleeping anyplace that they want and we can't have, you know, tent cities cropping up, I mean, that would create one set of issues. But your ordinance goes way beyond that. Your ordinance says as to a person -- and I understand that you think it's generally applicable, but we only come up with this problem for a person who is homeless, who has the status of homelessness, who has no other place to sleep, and your statute says that person cannot take himself and himself only and, you know, can't take a blanket and sleep someplace without it being a crime. And -- and -- and that's, you know -- well, it just seems like Robinson. It seems like you're criminalizing a status.
Kagan may be the smartest of the liberal Justices, so it's probably no surprise that I think she got the closest to a conceptualization of status that is friendly to the left in this case. Unsurprisingly, though, "Republicans Pounce". Justice Gorsuch said that, "[T]he distinction between status and conduct is a slippery one and that they're often closely related," and had what was perhaps the most comprehensive exchange on the topic with Mr. Kneedler, who is the Deputy Solicitor General, weighing in on the case on behalf of the federal government, who was technically supporting neither party, but is obviously in practice representing the equities of the Biden administration portion of the left.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Mr. Kneedler, I want to probe this a little bit further because it -- it does seem to me the status/conduct distinction is very tricky. And I had thought that Robinson, after Powell, really was just limited to status. And now you're saying, well, there's some conduct that's effectively equated to status and -- but you're saying involuntary drug use, you can regulate that conduct. That doesn't qualify as status. You're saying compulsive alcohol use, you can regulate that conduct in public. Public drunkenness, even if it's involuntary, that doesn't qualify as status, right?
MR. KNEEDLER: Right.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: You're saying you can regulate somebody who is hungry and has no other choice but to steal. You can regulate that conduct even though it's a basic human necessity, and that doesn't come under the -- under the status side of the line, right?
MR. KNEEDLER: Yes.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Okay. But, when it comes to homelessness, which is a terribly difficult problem, you're saying that's different and -- because there are no beds available for them to go to in Grants Pass. What -- what about someone who has a mental health problem that prohibits them -- they cannot sleep in -- in a shelter. Are they allowed to sleep outside or not? Is that status or conduct that's regulable?
MR. KNEEDLER: I -- I think the -- the question would be whether that shelter is available.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: It's available.
MR. KNEEDLER: Well, no, available to the individual.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: It's available to the individual.
MR. KNEEDLER: But --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: It's just because of their mental health problem, they cannot do it.
MR. KNEEDLER: I -- I think there might be -- I mean, that's -- the mental health problem --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Status or conduct?
MR. KNEEDLER: The mental health situation is itself a status.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Right, I know that.
MR. KNEEDLER: Yes. But -- but if the
JUSTICE GORSUCH: It has this further knock-on effect on conduct. Is that regulable
MR. KNEEDLER: I -- I --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: -- by the state or not?
MR. KNEEDLER: -- I -- I think that -- I think if the --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: All the -- you know, alcohol, drug use --
MR. KNEEDLER: Right, right.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: -- they have problems too and that that -- and -- and -- but you're saying that conduct is regulable. How about with respect to this pervasive problem of -- of persons with mental health problems?
MR. KNEEDLER: I -- I think, in a particular situation, if the -- if the -- if the person would engage in violent conduct as --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: No, no, no, don't mess with my hypothetical, counsel.
(Laughter.)
JUSTICE GORSUCH: I like my hypothetical. I know you don't. It's a hard one, and that's why I'm asking it. I'm just trying to understand --
MR. KNEEDLER: I -- I --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: -- the limits of your line.
MR. KNEEDLER: I think it would depend on how serious the offense was on the -- on the individual.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: It's -- it's -- it's a very serious effect. The mental health problem is serious, but there are beds available.
MR. KNEEDLER: Well, what I was trying to say, it would depend on how serious being required in -- to -- to go into that facility was on the person's mental -- if it would make his mental health situation a lot worse, then that may not be something that's --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: So that's status -- that falls on the status side?
MR. KNEEDLER: Well, I -- I -- I -- I guess you could put it that way, but I -- I guess what I'm saying is that --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: I -- that's what I'm wondering. I don't -- I'm asking you.
MR. KNEEDLER: Well -- JUSTICE GORSUCH: I really am just trying to figure out --
MR. KNEEDLER: No. You could view that as status or --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: You're asking us to extend Robinson, and I'm asking how far?
MR. KNEEDLER: Well, what I was going to say, you could -- you could think of it as status, but I think another way to think about it, and this is our point about an individualized determination, is that place realistically available to that person because --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: It is in the sense that the bed is available --
MR. KNEEDLER: I know that it's --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: -- but not because of their personal circumstances.
MR. KNEEDLER: Right. Right. And that's -- and that's my point. It -- it's available in a physical sense. It may be available to somebody else, but requiring an individualized determination might include whether that person could cope in that setting. That's the only --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: So that -- so that might be an Eighth Amendment violation?
MR. KNEEDLER: Because it may not -- yes, because it's not available.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: So that's an -- it's an Eighth Amendment violation to require people to access available beds in the jurisdiction in which they live because of their mental health problems?
MR. KNEEDLER: If -- if going there would -- would --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: How about if they have a substance abuse problem and they can't use those substances in the shelter? Is that an Eighth Amendment --
MR. KNEEDLER: That is -- that is not a -- that is not a sufficient --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Why? Why? They're addicted to drugs, they cannot use them in the shelter. That's one of the rules.
MR. KNEEDLER: Well, if they -- if they -- if it's the shelter's rule, then they have no -- they -- they -- they can't go there if they're -- if they're addicted. That's not -- that's not --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: So that's an Eighth -- that's an Eighth Amendment violation?
MR. KNEEDLER: Well, no, the -- the -- the Eighth Amendment violation is prohibiting sleeping outside because the only shelter that is available --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Is not really available to that person?
MR. KNEEDLER: -- won't take them -- won't take them, yes. And that's an individualized determination.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Same thing with the alcoholic?
MR. KNEEDLER: Yes.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Okay. So the alcoholic has an Eighth Amendment right to sleep outside even though there's a bed available?
MR. KNEEDLER: If -- if the only shelter in town won't take him, then I think he's in exactly -- he's in the same -- he's in the same condition. And there can be all sorts of reasons, and the City doesn't normally --
...
JUSTICE GORSUCH: How about if there are no public bathroom facilities? Can -- do people have an Eighth Amendment right to defecate and urinate outdoors?
MR. KNEEDLER: No, we -- we --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Is that conduct or is that status?
MR. KNEEDLER: I -- it's, obviously, there -- there is conduct there and we are not suggesting that cities can't enforce their --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Why not, if there are no public facilities available to homeless persons?
MR. KNEEDLER: The -- the -- that situation, you know, candidly, has never arisen. And whether or not there -- I mean, in the litigation as I've seen. But no one is suggesting and we're not suggesting that public urination and defecation laws cannot be enforced because there are very substantial public health reasons for that.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Well, there are substantial public health reasons with drug use, with alcohol, and with all these other things too.
MR. KNEEDLER: And they can all be --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: And you're saying the Eighth Amendment overrides those. Why not in this circumstance right now?
MR. KNEEDLER: No, I'm not -- I'm not saying the Eighth Amendment overrides the laws against drug use.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Oh, I know that.
MR. KNEEDLER: Oh, I'm sorry.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: I know that.
MR. KNEEDLER: No, I misunderstood what you --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: That one -- that one the government wants to keep. I got that.
MR. KNEEDLER: No, I misunderstood your question. Sorry.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Yeah. Last one. How about -- how about fires outdoors? I know you say time, place, and manner, but is there an Eighth Amendment right to cook outdoors?
MR. KNEEDLER: No. I -- I -- I -- I think what -- what --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: That's -- that's an incident -- a human necessity every person has to do.
MR. KNEEDLER: But this -- but this is one -- this is one of those things that, you know, is taken care of on the ground as a practical matter. There are restaurants where someone can go. There are --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Well, no, no, we're talking about homeless people.
MR. KNEEDLER: No.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: They're not going to go spend money at a restaurant necessarily. Let's --
MR. KNEEDLER: Well, there -- there may be inexpensive places. Some people get --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Let's say there isn't, okay?
MR. KNEEDLER: And --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Let's say that there is no reasonable --
MR. KNEEDLER: And -- and the local community --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Do they have a right to cook? They have a right to eat, don't they?
MR. KNEEDLER: They have -- they have a right to eat, a right to cook if it entails having a fire, which I think it -- it -- it probably -- it probably would, but -- but, as I said, the -- the -- the eating, the feeding is taken care of in most communities by nonprofits and churches stepping forward --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: But if there isn't
MR. KNEEDLER: -- as they have for 200 years.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: -- but, if there isn't, there's an Eighth Amendment right to have a fire?
MR. KNEEDLER: No, no, we are not saying there's an Eighth Amendment --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Well, I thought you just said there was.
MR. KNEEDLER: Well, there -- there's food that you can eat without cooking it. I mean, they -- and they could could get a handout from the -- from a -- from an individual that, you know, people can beg for money. I mean, there are -- there are ways that this works out in practice.
Oof, that was long and covered a lot. Gorsuch would go on to suggest that the Court should just push the case back the State for a "necessity" analysis and not "get into the status/conduct stuff that -- that Robinson seems to invite." Roberts, meanwhile, went after immutability in a colloquy with Ms. Corkran, representing the class of homeless people challenging the law.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: A number of us, I think, are having difficulty with the distinction between status and conduct. You'll acknowledge, won't you, that in those terms, there's a difference between being addicted to drugs and being homeless? In other words, someone who's homeless can immediately become not homeless, right, if they find shelter.
Someone who is addicted to drugs, it's not so -- so easy. It seems to me that in Robinson, it's much easier to understand the drug addiction as an ongoing status, while, here, I think it is different because you can move into and out of and into and out of the status, as you would put it, as being homeless.
MS. CORKRAN: Yeah. So it's interesting, we today understand addiction as an immutable status. In Robinson, the Court suggested that someone might be recovered and no longer have the status of addiction. So the Robinson Court wasn't thinking about addiction as something that couldn't change over time.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Well, that may limit the applicability of Robinson to a different situation, but what is the -- I mean, what is the analytic approach to deciding whether something's a status or a situation of conduct?
MS. CORKRAN: So the question is a status is something that a person is when they're not doing anything. So being addicted, having cancer, being poor, are all statuses that you have apart from any conduct.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Having cancer is not the same as being homeless, right? I mean, maybe I'm just repeating myself because homelessness can -- you -- you can remove the homeless status in an instant if you move to a shelter or situations otherwise change. And, of course, it can be moved the other way as well if you're kicked out of the shelter or whatever. So that is a distinction from all these other things that have been labeled status, isn't it?
MS. CORKRAN: I -- I don't think so because, you know, a cancer patient can go into remission, they no longer have that status. I don't think -- I mean, I don't think there's any question that being poor is a status. It's something you are apart from anything you do. It's a status that can change over time, and at that point, you wouldn't be a part of the class, but I don't think it changes the fact that it is a status. And what Robinson found so offensive about status-based conduct --
But it would take Justice Jackson to blow up our first real bombshell of the argument, following up on the Roberts' discussion of immutability:
JUSTICE JACKSON: Can a person go from being addicted to drugs to not being addicted to drugs?
MS. CORKRAN: So I think under common -- as we think about it in terms of modern medicine, the answer is no. But the Robinson Court certainly thought that was the case, right? Sixty years ago, we didn't have the same understanding of addiction as we do now.
JUSTICE JACKSON: So your view of Robinson is that it doesn't really matter, the permanency of the condition; it's still a status?
MS. CORKRAN: Right. The Robinson Court did not think that the permanency mattered because it thought that addiction was a status that could change.
In summary, the Robinson Court was actually wrong on the facts. They thought that people could go from being addicted to drugs to not being addicted to drugs. So, they clearly didn't care all that much about permanency. But BOOM goes the claim that, apparently the New Correct Lefty Science has determined that people don't ever transition from being addicted to drugs to not being addicted to drugs. I guess I heard it here first. My years of shouting at clouds that Scott pointed out that basically all honest alcoholism rehabilitation studies fail to outperform a placebo and that narcotics rehabilitation studies don't even use measures like "stops taking narcotics" in favor of measures like "causes trouble for other people while using narcotics somewhat less often" is finally being adopted! (Frankly, in far stronger form that I would have even stated. I wouldn't say that people can't stop being addicted to drugs; just that we can't magically impose a "treatment" regime that is going to result in them stopping.) Wow! Was the failure of Oregon's decriminalization experiment so spectacular that we're no longer going to have endless claims that we can make everything completely legal, so long as we pray to the god of providing "treatment" (without any serious consideration of how this is going to happen or whether it will actually do anything)? I can hardly believe it.
As amazing as this concession to Justice Jackson was, Alito somehow at least comes close:
JUSTICE ALITO: Well, see, the problem is that once you move away from the definition that makes the inquiry basically tautological, then you get into the question of assessing the closeness of the connection between the status and the conduct. And you do run into problems with the person who's a kleptomania -- a kleptomaniac or a person who suffers from pedophilia. So how do you distinguish that? How does the Court assess how close the connection has to be?
MS. CORKRAN: So -- so, for both of those categories, the -- the -- the status is defined -- I don't know if status is the right word there -- being a pedophilia or having pedophilia is defined by the urge that you have, not by your conduct, and acting on that urge. So, if someone were to act on that urge, that tight causal nexus on why they didn't have access to shelter, then they would be outside of our claim.
What's this?!?! A distinction between "having an urge" and conduct?!? In the realm of sexuality? Say it isn't so! How many times can The Lefties That Be just boldly admit that the entire slew of homosexual behavior to gay marriage cases were based on a fundamental lie?!
The more cynical among us might observe that status/conduct games seem to be yet another way that folks run away from agency, shielding anything that they like in terms of it "being who you are" or things that just "happen to you". There is no real theory here, and most attempts to justify it are pretty philosophically incoherent. It doesn't seem like the Court is going to buy this particular extension of The Game, but why wouldn't they try? They've had all these other victories, including effectively banning Christian groups from campuses, by substituting "status" in for "conduct/belief". Why are the Status Games so powerful?
A big reason why Medicare spending grows so rapidly is because US healthcare spending in general is growing rapidly and Medicare covers a population (old people) that tend to be much sicker than average.
This one is pretty shocking, and I didn't realize until my mother got cancer right around her retirement age. It pushed her retirement date a little earlier than she had originally planned, which was a little annoying to her, but probably for the best. In any event, she asks me to help her look through some financial stuff, because even though she's normally pretty good with that sorta stuff, "chemo brain" is a bitch, as is just aging in general. When she was able to get on to Medicare was my first real exposure to how the system works, what it costs (I'm not even sure if I really had much of a grasp on which parts were truly free and which parts you had to pay extra for), what all the options are, etc. I shouldn't have been surprised that it had similar terms to normal health insurance, with things like premiums, out-of-pocket maximums, etc. What I was definitely surprised about was just how shockingly cheap it was, with incredibly low maxes. Like, simply insane. Like, better than the best monetary value I've seen out of even the top tier, most expensive insurance I've ever been offered by an employer, with premiums significantly lower than I've see out of even the bottom tier, most cut rate insurance I've ever been offered by an employer. That was when I realized just how massive of a wealth transfer the program is from young to old. It was also when I realized how the incentives worked. Out-of-pocket maxes so low that if you have literally anything happen to you in a year, then you simply do not even have to consider the price of any other medical service that you might think about consuming.
That's when it sort of clicked, why the large conglomerate that is managing her care has bundled in everything imaginable into what seems to be their "cancer package". If you can squint your eyes and think that it might be helpful for the cancer, for managing or recovering from the chemo, whatever, it's part of their package. They'll pay for Ubers to your appointments, every therapy under the sun (physical, occupational, mental, etc.), even your gym membership (at their extra fancy, extra expensive gym that just so happens to be a part of the conglomerate). Feel like you're not sleeping the best? We'll send you to some sleep specialists, do the full workup. Not fully happy with a rapid recovery of mental faculties from chemo? We'll give you some brain scans, a variety of tests, and surely, more weekly therapy of various sorts. The list goes on. It's a good thing that she's retired now, because she has basically a full-time job just managing and going to all of the myriad of possible appointments and offerings they provide in their neatly-packaged conglomerate, and all of the expenses can be justified in some way or another with respect to the cancer or side effects from the treatment, or something.
On the one hand, cool that she can get so much attention to get every month of vitality possible; I really do value the additional time spent with her, especially with her still being able to be as clear-minded and engaging as she is. Moreover, cool that she doesn't have to constantly worry about money. She hadn't really saved as much for retirement as she would have liked, and pre-retirement, I really got the sense that she was kinda constantly worried about it and how things were going to work out. Now that all the paperwork has been done and the numbers are on the table, she can see how it's going to work, that it's going to be okay, and that she no longer has to worry about it. On the other hand, hot damn, that means that she (and we, by extension) literally do not even have to think for a millisecond about a cost-benefit ratio for literally any possible option within their menu. From her perspective, it is all literally completely and totally free. There is not a single moment where she has to think, "How much tangible benefit do I think this is going to provide for me, and how much do I really value that benefit, to the point of being willing to give up some amount of my own resources for it?" If anything, the only thing that she trades off is just the time of going to the thing and doing it, but of course, she's retired now and has a lot of time in the week. So if she assesses that the tangible benefit has any decent probability of being literally any value more than epsilon>0, why not? How much does it 'cost'? Who knows? Who cares? It doesn't come out of my pocket. I personally benefit from this, because 100% guaranteed that if there was any real expense, she'd be leaning on me to help figure out what's worth it and how to make the finances work. A nice burden off my shoulders, too. I can see the 'cost' now, but damn if the incentives don't do their best at making me apathetic, just because then I don't have to think about that stuff.
A couple final scattered thoughts. First, there was a moment where I thought, "Damn, I don't always sleep the best, and I've had some recurring sleep problems before. It would be nice if I could get a full workup and see if we could fix it. But that would be suuuuuper expensive, and I don't know that I can justify it, given the solid probability that they're not actually going to be able to help me in the end even after I wrack up huge bills." And even some jealousy that she can just go do that for free. I also sort of wonder, society-wide, if we'd be serving our population's health and productivity better if we did stuff like figure out people's sleep problems and fix them when they're young and have many years for those benefits to accrue, rather than make it prohibitively expensive for most of your life and then free right near the end.
Second, I almost wanted to make an analogy to the public school system. People often joke that the school system is mostly a daycare, with incidental ability to help educate children, primarily for the purpose of freeing up parents from having to take care of them. It almost is like getting hooked into one of these big health programs while on medicare is like that. "We'll take your elderly parents, give them constant care, keep them busy coming to appointments and such, and make sure they're at least doing alright," and it's not that genuine medical care isn't there (like how genuine education is not absent from public schools), but that it's more minor or incidental. "We make it so that you don't have to worry about your parent most of the time," just like, "We make it so that you don't have to worry about your child most of the time." A useful service, yes, with some amount of real value, for sure. Like I said, I realized that I genuinely benefit from it in that way. But how effective is it? How costly is it? How efficient compared to possible alternatives? Who knows? Who cares? The bureaucrats and the unions and the conglomerates control all that and don't really want you to know the answers even if you did want to know. All the incentives are just about perfect, so long as the whole thing doesn't blow up spectacularly at some point, and so long as the schools aren't so ineffective that China eats our technological lunch and conquers us via warfare.
ControlsFreak
4mo ago
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.
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
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, ....
ControlsFreak
10mo ago
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.
ControlsFreak
11mo ago
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.)
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
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?
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
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.)
ControlsFreak
4mo ago
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?
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.
ControlsFreak
9d ago
I have always preferred calling them "micro-aggravations". Yes, it's a real thing, but it really says more about the aggravatee's psychology and what they find annoying/unpleasant than it does about anything that can be properly called "aggression". One can still care deeply about reducing their impacts, even on a society-wide basis, but I think this terminology more appropriately captures the concepts that they use to describe the phenomenon and avoids the horrific conflation with literal violence that plagues the rest of the associated political movement.
ControlsFreak
8mo ago
Meta suggestion: there should be room for this.
The reason why the community jettisoned the BLR was because it was too easy to have drive-by link dropping to dunk on the outgroup. Not having a BLR paired with a requirement to have a substantial top-level post effectively stopped this problem. However, there is some news that is so blatantly and obviously going to be the topic of water cooler talk, if only people could find where the water cooler is. It's the topic on the front of every news outlet, absolutely core ground to anything considered the culture war, at the highest levels of American government, which is the most powerful and influential institution on earth. It is going to be a topic here one way or another. Posts like this are just putting the water cooler out.
I think there is asymptotic precedent for this. Consider the limit of stories that were the story in the past. Elections. Riots. Those various things. Rather than declare that no one can say anything around the water cooler until one person has a lengthy, unique, insightful essay, this place will, in fact, just put a water cooler out in the form of a megathread. When the mods post a megathread, they're not generally pairing it with an interesting top-level comment - they're putting out the water cooler for the conversation that is going to happen.
There is a spectrum between "lazy drive-by dunks on the outgroup from obscure blog", "obvious water cooler topics that are on the front of every newspaper", and "obvious water cooler topics that are on the front of every newspaper and which would otherwise overwhelm the thread." I contend that megathreads are only used for the latter category, but their secondary function is extremely useful for the middle category, too.
Given the premise that it's just putting out the water cooler, I would actually prefer that the top-level comment be a short, completely neutral description of the major news item, like this comment. If we wait for an in-depth comment, then the entire following thread will be colored by the perspective of the OP. You'd need an additional top-level comment to start any offshoot perspectives on the main topic, which fractures the discussion, possibly having other topics sandwiched in between the top-level threads. This way, you can have multiple second-level comments that have more effort, but also allow for conversations with different focuses.
One concern is that loosening this rule opens up a "race to post". I don't see that that's much of a problem, practically. But even so, maybe we could have an in-between mod action that isn't quite opening a megathread, but is opening a "mini-megathread" on topics that are of this sort.
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
If you're worried that this will lead to lax academic standards or shoddy research practices, I'd reassure you that academic standards have never been laxer and shoddy research is absolutely everywhere, and the existence of review boards and similar apparatchik-filled bodies does nothing to curb these. If anything, by preventing basic research being done by anything except those with insider connections and a taste for bureaucracy, they make the problem worse. Similarly, academia is decreasingly valuable for delivering basic research; the incentive structures have been too rotten for too long, and almost no-one produces content with actual value.
Whew, lots of thoughts. Let's start with total agreement that academic standards have never been laxer, that shoddy research is absolutely everywhere, review boards and such have done nothing to curb it, and that almost no one produces content with actual value. Moreover, I would agree that the incentive structures have been too rotten for too long, and I think that this is a huge driver of the previous four items. "Publish or perish" has creeped ever earlier, and I've actually stopped going to conferences, due to the flood of interestingly-titled talks that end up being, "So, I'm an undergrad, and this is really preliminary work, and... [total garbage]." The undergrads feel like they have to publish bullshit in order to get into grad school, the grad students feel like they have to publish bullshit to get a post-doc, the post-docs feel like they have to publish bullshit to get a professorship, and the assistant professors feel like they have to publish bullshit to get tenure (after tenure, paths tend to bifurcate a bit more, it seems), so the assistant professors are more than happy to push everyone down the chain to go ahead and publish their bullshit (so long as his/her name is on it, so it adds to a count on Google Scholar). It is all for the sake of number go up rather than advancing knowledge.
This trend has been decades long, but I would argue that it has also been exacerbated by one particular huge drop in barrier to submission - the rise of China. I don't know if they've really subscribed to our fucked up incentive structure, because I just don't know as much about how their unis work, but the regional flood has gone global. Not to say that there is zero good work coming from there (I finally recommended acceptance of my first paper from a Chinese group, but it's unsurprising that it was an exceptional case, as the main guy in that group is good enough that he's now taken a position at an excellent Western uni), but the quantity of folks pushing out the quantity of digital ink from there is astounding, and the vast majority of it is undergrad-tier bullshit. It really makes me pause when you say:
If anything, by preventing basic research being done by anything except those with insider connections and a taste for bureaucracy, they make the problem worse.
I really go back and forth in my head. Does having a sort of mental rule that nearly automatically rules out all Chinese work help? Probably so, like 99% of the time. Does having a sort of mental rule that if the first author is an undergrad from a low-tier uni, it's probably shit help? Probably so, like 99% of the time. I joke sometimes that I've never even seen a contemporary masters thesis that was at all interesting (there are some legendary ones from the past, by legit giants in their fields). Having some form of statistically-informed heuristic realllly saves a lot of time and effort that would otherwise be 99% wasted. This sort of "credential chauvinism" obviously won't stop the flood; incentive structures for conferences/journals are also fucked up enough that there's zero chance any will adopt a position of basically, "If you're an undergrad or from a Chinese university, your submission will basically be auto-denied." But they're adopted very pragmatically, almost out of necessity, by the good researchers who just don't have that much time to waste. (I know the irony of writing this in a bloody comment on a rando internet forum.)
My personal strategy is basically defection/free-riding. I've cultivated a network of really talented profs who I personally know, have personally spoken with enough to know how they think, with a not-insignificant percentage of them being assistant profs. They basically feel forced by their incentive structures to wade through all of the crap and constantly engage with all the conferences and reviewing and editing and shit... and they like magically filter through it all and bring up the small number of diamonds in the rough. Is it the best-tuned filter? Possibly not. Might I gain some additional insight by wading through more of it actively? Possibly. But damn if I'm going to ever feel like the cost/benefit tradeoff is going to be worth it anytime soon. But the nature of defection/free-riding is that not everyone can do it without catastrophic consequences.
Getting back to the point of LLMs, this is what I'm worried about. Sure, it'll make it harder for dyed-in-the-wool bureaucrat-and-nothing-more folks, but it'll also make it harder for us. It'll be Eternal September for academia. What possible filters can stand?
Meanwhile I expect harder fields like biomed and material sciences to (continue to) be supercharged by the capabilities of ML, with the comparative ineffectiveness of institutional research being shown up by insights from DeepMind et al.
I don't have as much to say on the social sciences bit, and you may well be perfectly on point there. For harder sciences, I'm really not sure where this will go. Traditional work has been extremely structured in form, whereas I do subscribe to the Nick Weaver School of ML in Research, which is, "ML is great for when you want to model something that you have a good reason to think is structured, but you have no idea how to model it, and you're okay with it being fabulously wrong some percentage of the time." Biomed and materials science are perfectly positioned to reap the gains of this. Those areas in particular have fantastically complicated underlying structures, and at least the experimental folks don't much care how we get a half-decent idea of what to try to build, so long as each iteration doesn't take too much time, we can just try a bunch of them and see what works out. Huge potential for big experimental gains, and a decent chance that experimental gains will subsequently push the theory part forward around those new lodestones. My view of the trends in institutional research has been that they've gone full steam ahead at trying to embrace it for every problem under the sun, even when it doesn't make much sense. But for every work that gets accelerated, every wonder material that gets developed, how many shit-tier "ML" papers will be submitted/published in the field that turn out to just be awful, obnoxious noise? (While this last paragraph is similar in a concern about the flood of crap, it's a bit distinct as it's less focused specifically on the administrative side of the crap production/evaluation.)
ControlsFreak
11mo ago
I've been thinking more and more about Robin Hanson talking about how the public basically said "no" to the nuclear energy revolution. He was making analogy to the possibility that the public might say "no" to the AI revolution, wondering what that might mean. In any event, he said something along the lines of, "Imagine if the public hadn't said 'no' to the nuclear energy revolution. Would energy be a tenth of the price today in the alternate timeline than it is in the real one? How would your life be different?" It's the "hidden costs", the "hidden timeline". @functor could have kept his apartment at 23C and paid like a Euro more.
Any organized competitive activity will certainly require a set of rules (and will inspire a corresponding set of rules lawyers). Those rules almost always include some element of eligibility ("This is a human running race; horses cannot enter; humans aided by segways cannot enter...").
Which brings to my mind an analogy that might be useful to get more left-leaning folks thinking about the topic differently: the special olympics/paralympics. I have no idea what rules they use, but I am 100% confident that they must have some set of eligibility rules. At some point, people sat down and said, "No, your specific condition does not qualify you to participate in the special olympics/paralympics." Any such set of rules is invariably going to have edge cases. (It's invariably going to inspire a set of rules lawyers, too.) There are going to be people who think it's unfair that they're not allowed to compete. There are going to be people who think it's unfair that someone else is allowed to compete. I think everyone can be aboard the train this far.
First off, I cannot possibly fathom someone on the left agreeing to a proposed rule of, "Anyone who self-identifies as 'special' is automatically eligible." This at least gets them into the right ballpark and out of the bailey.
Then, the motte about burden-of-proof shifting. The much harder position to crack is the claim, "We just need you to provide extensive peer-reviewed evidence that this person would have a competitive advantage." Here is where they set up a hundred foot wall and say, "If you can't crack this, we're back to the bailey of self-identification." However, again, let's go back to the special olympics/paralympics. There is an absolute myriad of specific situations/conditions that someone might think should qualify them for the special olympics/paralympics. It would be an utterly impossible standard to say, "Whelp, if you can't bring metareviews of peer-reviewed research showing that this particular condition, experienced by like 100 people on the planet (99 of which aren't competitive in the sport in question), does not unfairly situate them with respect to the other competitors, then you have to just go back to accepting everyone who self-identifies as 'special'."
Perhaps I'm wrong. If anyone here is "pro self-identification in women's sports" and also "pro self-identification in special olympics/paralympics" on the same grounds of requiring this type of peer-reviewed evidence, I'm all ears.
As an interesting note, I learned recently that the best bench pressers in the world, by the typical measure used, are all in the special olympicsparalympics. This is because the typical measure used is a ratio of weight lifted to bodyweight (or essentially this using weight classes). And, well, the people who max out this metric are all some form of leg amputee or other condition that results in extremely underdeveloped legs. They don't get the same "leg drive" strength that other lifters get, but the simple fact that they're not "wasting" bodyweight on a part of the body which isn't that useful for the bench press is more than enough to make up for it. I imagine that powerlifting federations don't have to go out of their way to exclude these people, because they probably are just happy doing what they're doing and have no need to jump into a powerlifting meet. Powerlifters are supposed to squat and deadlift, too, which they just can't do, so they probably don't bother, because all they'd be accomplishing is putting their name at the top of the bench board and everyone else being annoyed, mentally ignoring them, thinking, "Well, of course, there's that guy, but I set the real top bench number." Politics is dumb, though, and I sort of view the whole drive to require trans eligibility as politically-motivated; it would be akin to a political movement to do something dumb like try to wreck powerlifting federations with amputees just because your politics tells you to be an asshole.
ControlsFreak
5mo ago
I believe the phrase they usually like to use is "stochastic terrorism". At least, they like to use it when it can be used against their enemies.
ControlsFreak
10mo ago
The Democratic National Committee, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Hillary Clinton's campaign manager were hacked into, and their internal communications were released in a manner designed to politically disadvantage her, and advantage her electoral opponent, Donald Trump. Given those crimes, and Donald Trump's public support and encouragement of them (including the famous "Russia, if you're listening" quip, as well as 100+ references to Wikileaks in his stump speeches) there's very obviously reason to follow up seriously with a look at the Trump campaign.
This is 100% not probable cause or legitimate grounds on which to premise an investigation into the Trump campaign. That is why none of the reports from the "investigations into the investigation" found that any of the investigations were predicated on this... it would be literally illegal to do such a thing. Instead, they relied on other grounds.
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.
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