Shrike
10mo ago
Hmm. It seems this is an area of at least some some contention, with some research (e.g. a Mensa survey, which obviously is based on a self-selected sample) suggesting a higher correlation, but most research suggesting IQ is protective.
There's also some evidence suggesting a genetic correlation between autism and high intelligence.
My guess is that (to the degree that IQ is genetic) is that it's probably possible to "overselect" for it to the detriment of other good things (although IIRC we also know that e.g. autism is probably at a minimum correlated with other factors, such as older parents and maternal fever during pregnancy).
Higher IQ leads to better life outcomes which leads to better mental health.
In my personal experience I have observed that the connection between high IQ, good life outcomes, and mental health is not strictly linear. But that's anecdotal and a very small sample size.
Shrike
10mo ago
Isn't intelligence correlated with mental illness?
That seems like a big tradeoff.
Shrike
10mo ago
Gonna be extremely funny if building stuff on Mars and then shipping them all the way to Earth ends up being cheaper than shipping them from somewhere on Earth due to the longshoreman union and the Jones Act.
Shrike
10mo ago
I think it depends on the specific question we're looking at – for instance, I could see rural/urban being much more predictive than political affiliation for guessing if someone hunts or fishes. But on the other hand, for another example, a lot of benefits are provided by religion, independent of conservatism, so some of what I describe above is differences in religious belief – but it also seems like together they are a very potent combination (for instance religious conservatives are less likely to report they are mentally ill than equally religious liberals; see my third link above.)
But overall, since rural areas are more conservative than urban areas, I think it shakes out to being close to the same if we're just curious about Team Red and Team Blue.
I'm glad you're asking these sorts of questions, though. Personally, I think there's more than two (or three) "tribes" in America, and there's a lot of interesting work to be done untangling them.
For example, Skibboleth could argue (and he might be right, although I suspect, at least by some metrics, that there are many more hunters and fishermen in the United States than insurance salesmen) that a conservative is more likely to be an insurance salesman than a hunter or an angler. But that doesn't stop the hunter-fisher breakdown from skewing red. And while some people are interested only in the degree to which Red Tribe is comprised of hunters and anglers, I think it's interesting to ask what Hunter and Angler Tribe looks like. The United States is a big place, with room for more than two teams.
Shrike
10mo ago
I could just as easily ask where you see that.
Right here, in mainstream polling: a majority of Republicans have a firearm in their household. About 25% of Democrats do. (Independents just below 50/50).
Right here, in mainstream consulting research: Republicans outnumber Democrats by more than 2:1 among respondents in a poll of hunters and anglers.
Right here, in mainstream social science: conservatives live happier, more fulfilled lives, with fewer divorces, less mental illness.
I think that gross polling averages like this often obscure more interesting dynamics. But there's a reason that conservatives have the "rugged individualism" discourse that Supah mentions - they are more likely to have an inner locus of control.
Shrike
10mo ago
Yep, that definitely makes sense to me. I think the point of failure there is "Okay, how do we prevent someone from backdooring the entire system and just filling in fake data?" And while I suspect there are answers to that, I'm not sure they are answers everyone will buy in a low-trust environment.
This doesn't mean interventions like this aren't worth doing, though. Perhaps that's precisely what's needed to end Voter Fraud Discourse, I don't know. I just expect that simply rolling some fancy whiz-bang foolproof and fast voter counter Rube Goldberg machine won't by itself be enough to Save Democracy – you'll need to prove that it works, and that might take many election cycles.
Shrike
10mo ago
It seems worth asking if some people already thought democracy in the United States is dying and Trump was just the right man to pin the message on.
Anyway, I understand why people get all het up about him. Put it very simply, I think he says things you "aren't supposed to say" and so him getting elected means the system "doesn't work." ("The system" is supposed to punish people like him.) People get emotional about the thought of sharing a country with people who would vote for him. The fact that people will vote for him suggests that democracy is broken because a sufficient number of people are stupid/evil or there's some sort of election rigging being perpetrated. (This isn't what I think, but I think it's a reasonable-if-reductionistic model).
But also, I don't think it's true that Trump getting elected means nothing happens. For instance, if Trump wins he's going to keep chipping away at the federal judiciary, which is where the left made a lot of their political gains since the Second World War. He's probably going to try to run foreign policy a little bit differently. It seems reasonable to assume that "the economy" will perform better. His cabinet nominees are going to run their departments differently. He's going to veto/not veto laws that might be significant. Whether or not you view that as good or bad is a matter of perspective, I guess. But I don't think it's right to suggest that Trump being in office will be a nothing burger, even if it may also be wrong to suggest that Trump being in office means the end of democracy, the United States, and civilization.
Shrike
10mo ago
At the end of the day it's very hard, in my mind, to square the anonymous ballot with election security, since the only way to be 100% certain that someone voted for a person in an environment where fraud is possible is to ask them.
I'm sure smart people can come up with a system using cryptography that preserves anonymity and ~guarantees secure elections, but most people won't be able to verify the security of the system themselves, so it's not actually helpful.
A slightly lower-IQ (and easier to understand) solution might just be to make all voting in-person and have a video feed that keeps a running headcount, and tally the voter headcount with the votes at the end of the day, or something like that. (I actually imagine similar measures are already used, though, but I've never looked into it.)
But at the end of the day I think the problem is more vibes-related. This is detached from whether or not the vibes are onto something or not – you can have a situation where lots of voter fraud doesn't cause a legitimacy crisis because it's not suspected in a high-trust environment, and you can have a system where there's a crisis of legitimacy because people suspect that elections are being rigged even if their security is airtight.
I'm not sure there's a way to fix a vibes problem quickly. I suspect the only way out of that is through.
Shrike
10mo ago
I really don't think there was anything in my post that suggests that adopting voter ID laws will Make The Problem Go Away, but I do agree(?) with you that my use of voter ID was imprecise at best. (I'd say the pause in the election count was worse for Election Integrity Vibes than the state of voter ID laws – most people don't care to grok the nuances of voter ID law but they are impatient to know who won the election.)
Shrike
10mo ago
I think that a lot of people are under the impression that "wait until everything goes back to normal" is a viable strategy for dealing with whatever their pet problem happens to be.
I think the fundamental problem with that is confusing the symptom for the cause. It's certainly possible that Trump is uniquely causal of this voter ID thing. But I wouldn't bet on it going away after he dies. And I think the basic skepticism of election integrity (on the right, but also on the left from time to time) predates his POTUS run.
I don't think things are going "back to normal," if there ever was such a thing.
Shrike
10mo ago
In the past, my understanding is that vote-rigging was done by partisan machines in certain jurisdictions. I have the vague intuition that there could be quid-pro-quo deals involved (e.g. the machine agrees to stuff ballots in exchange for getting city contracts, or whatever.)
If I somehow knew that there was industrial-scale voter fraud (say, via a mathematical analysis, or it came to me in a dream) but I wasn't sure exactly how, I would presume something similar was occurring, which would be (part of) why one party wasn't in power constantly - the power of the machine(s) to commit fraud was limited and territorial, and their willingness to do so was contingent on other factors that might not always be in place (e.g. kickbacks, connections, etc.)
I should add that my historical knowledge is sketchy here, and the question of modern fraud isn't something I've really researched or have strong opinions on. It just seems like, based on what I know of how fraud worked in the United States in the past, we should expect it to work differently than top-down ballot-rigging. For instance, last year there was a (judicially recognized) stolen primary election that apparently worked via absentee ballot box stuffing. That's very different than the local political party just counting the votes however they want, which is what I presume happens in at least some "democratic" states abroad (although I'm sure it's possible that bottom-up voter fraud happens in places like e.g. Russia as well/instead of top-down finger-on-the-count type fraud).
Shrike
10mo ago
Prolly worth pointing out that the people involved in the making of a movie gets paid regardless of how well the movie does. If it loses "the studio" money people who are paid up front could care less, financially. Same goes of anyone who isn't fired or docked after going on live TV and telling people not to watch their studio's film.
It is true that in theory this does not account for residuals, however. But I've heard some things indicating that residuals have been gutted relatively recently - if that's true it makes all the more sense that the people actually making the movie would be indifferent to the success of the film (or possibly even actively hostile to it).
Shrike
10mo ago
they're willing to take a flyer on extremely low-odds, high-payoff ideas sometimes.
Yep, I 100% agree with this, and am glad someone is doing so.
didn't work out.
Well, admittedly there's some contention on this point.
notable that all of those top secret programs did eventually come to light.
I...am very skeptical of this logic. Imagine if you were the director of the CIA and someone told you you didn't need to worry about Russian spies because all of them that you were aware of had been uncovered eventually!
But anyway, to my point: the government's definitely done far-out research like this. I broadly agree there's not solid evidence they've hit any real "physics-defying" breakthroughs, just that they've looked for them. (However if they found them, I'd obviously expect them to lock it down very tightly.)
Well, I guess in theory, if you have a sufficiently broad understanding of physics, nothing can violate physics.
But yeah the government has conducted various covert research endeavors on things in the ballpark of what you mention. The Navy got a patent that included gravity manipulation technology in 2018 and the US military/defense industrial complex has been researching "antigravity" for decades.
Edit-to-add: as an aside, it's interesting to ask if the fact that the government has put effort into tilting at these particular windmills indicates a belief inside certain corners of the US military-industrial complex that these things are possible, perhaps itself due to observing UFOs/UAPs. Food for conspiratorial thought for the so inclined!
Shrike
10mo ago
An extremely funny but prosaic explanation for a lot of this stuff is that the government just keeps lying about aliens to conceal their totally mundane projects and occasionally people within the government get fooled and the story gets out of hand and it's embarrassing to admit how much you lied/got fooled, so...
An even funnier and scarier version of this is that this and the "aliens are real and can hurt you" theories are true and the people who know about the aliens actually prefer alien stories to circulate anyway since it's helpful for people to peel back the layer and find that the "real" story is that the aliens are just a cover for the next stealth bomber or whatever.
Shrike
10mo ago
We know about all their high-tech research projects
Well...yes, but I feel compelled to point out that, because of this, we know that some of these projects do involve work to make super-advanced aircraft that seem to defy physics (and perhaps more relevantly to a lot of UFO sightings, to make it seem like there are objects, including possibly physics-defying ones, where none exist – that's electromagnetic warfare for ya!)
Shrike
10mo ago
While I don't think you're wrong wrong about this, at least not in terms of popular perception, the shift of UFOs from the tangible to the esoteric began during the Cold War. The Raelians were founded in the 70s (and apparently the first "UFO religion" in the 1950s.) I think the dynamic you're describing is more that it took a few decades for pop culture to catch up to the "cutting edge" of "UFO research" (however you want to define it.)
From what I can tell, it's extremely common for people who start out on the tangible nuts-and-bolts angle to go very quickly down the esoteric pipeline (see Vallee and even Hynek!) But as Spielberg explained to Vallee while making Close Encounters of the Third Kind, that's harder to explain to an audience. (Of course then he caved in the fourth Indiana Jones movie.)
Shrike
10mo ago
I also imagine a lot of people think (sometimes correctly!) that they can sit down with their daughter/son and steer them through the rocks. "Hey look, people will tell you this and that, or pressure you to do X and Y you should do this and that and if you do Y but not X you'll be fine." And probably a fair share of "your mom and I fooled around before we got re/married and look at us, we're doing ~fine" – even if it's not said aloud. (I care a lot about no premarital sex but I think at a society-wide level even paying no premarital sex lip service and winking a bit at it in practice does a lot of useful work in making people think twice.)
Of course, an open question (to many, anyway) is how many of their parents have college degrees. Wouldn't be super surprised if a fair share of dads were never in a frat because they are sitting on half a million dollars they made doing lawn care or HVAC contracting or something that doesn't require a college degree since they graduated high school.
Shrike
10mo ago
Broadly agree, but it is worth noting that as far as I can tell past drug experimentation is not a hard bar to entering the police force, and being convicted of crimes is not a guaranteed bar to continuing to serve on a police force.
Shrike
10mo ago
The odds of this are astronomically low
They might be, for you, depending on where you live, but I suspect they aren't as low as you think. I come from a background much the same as you, but I had a family member get cited for hunting with an illegal shotgun. Game warden jumped the fence onto private property to inspect the firearm (a search with no warrant or probable cause, which ordinarily would be extremely unlawful but game wardens get special dispensation to violate normal Constitutional precepts.) Did my family member have a blocker installed in the tube (the typical way of ensuring compliance)? Yes. Was he hunting with more shells than legally allowed? No. Was the warden able to force an extra shell in because the blocker was slightly too short? Yes.
The amount of "trouble" the warden had to go through to issue a ticket for ~no reason was considerable (and frankly I think he put himself in actual physical danger by jumping people's fences like that, you don't know what's on the other side) but cops and prosecutors are incentivized to "catch" people. Expanding the circle a bit wider to issues I have much less knowledge about, I had a classmate at college whose friend went to prison for rape. Girl later copped to lying about it. Did my classmate's friend get out of prison? Nope (and as far as I know there were no legal consequences for the accuser, either, but I didn't keep up with the story).
Is this all anecdata? Sure. I could pull up real data, but I think you'd claim that it was poisoned by specious anti-cop organizations. And I might not even disagree with you on that. I've even had fairly good experiences with law enforcement types, and I'm not about to go on an unhinged anti-cop rant. I just don't think police and prosecutors are really different from anyone else.
my rejection of slippery slope arguments about harsh justice
Well, I'm not arguing against harsh justice. I'm fine with executing murderers. I'd be okay if we executed more people (a lot more people). If we can be confident that the right people have been caught for the right crimes, I have no problem with harsh justice. If you want to argue that a single bad prosecutor shouldn't automatically result in release of a prisoner, that's fine – and my understanding is that it doesn't; retrials exist for a reason – but I suspect pragmatically the reason accused criminals so often walk due to prosecutorial misconduct is that past prosecutorial misconduct is an excellent way to introduce doubt in the mind of the jury on retrial. (Perhaps some actual lawyers here can weigh in.)
I do trust the justice system to keep the welfare of normal law-abiding people in mind, and to appreciate the natural disincentives against corruption and malice built into the psyche of conscientious and intelligent individuals.
I don't think that police officers – whose reporting is what prosecutors and judges rely on – are particularly conscientious or intelligent – probably on average less intelligent than college graduates. In my personal experiences speaking to people in the military and law enforcement (and related careers, such as firefighting) I get the impression or "vibe" that what you might call petty corruption is fairly commonplace. Prosecutors I would guess are probably more intelligent than police officers (law school filter) but that does not make them any less corrupt than other intelligent individuals (see the long catalogue of PhDs who keep getting busted for outright fraud despite every reason not to commit outright fraud.)
My point here isn't that cops and prosecutors are bad people. They're probably slightly better than average levels of badness. But they're people people and you can't just trust to their natural disincentives against corruption and malice.
my politics can seize it
I don't think that's how these sorts of things work. Whose politics is in control of the FBI? No, the answer isn't "woke," the answer is "the FBI." Whose politics is in control of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department? The answer isn't "woke," the answer (apparently) is "literal organized criminal gangs."
What I think people often fail to consider is that all power structures develop their own interests and they pursue them independent of what the people nominally in charge of them believe. And it is in the best interest of society to properly align prosecutors (and cops) to exercise basic competence, to actually catch the right people, and to avoid imprisoning innocent ones.
Shrike
10mo ago
In part because (in the US, anyway) we prioritize innocent men going free over guilty men going to jail. Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice; sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from incompetence; if a prosecutor does something sufficiently malicious or incompetent like "refusing to disclose exculpatory evidence" it creates a credible concern the accused is innocent and the prosecutor is framing him. The "what if I" question can be flipped on its head: what if you or a loved one was railroaded by the state? Obviously a single murderer going free on a technicality is bad, but a bad prosecutor prosecuting the wrong person is worse, since it casts the entire legal system into question (bad for society) and lets a single murderer go free (bad for justice and society) and potentially puts the wrong person in prison (bad for that person, at a minimum).
Now, I'm not a pro-releasing-murderers-to-kill-again guy. Obviously the goal here should be competent prosecution that
- doesn't prosecute innocent people
- does successfully prosecute guilty people
But I think there's a good reason for tossing (or, perhaps less problematically, retrying) cases if the prosecution is bad enough. ETA: I also sometimes suspect that bad prosecutors get off too easily by just having their cases tossed, so perhaps there's room to improve the status quo by creating additional negative incentives for prosecutorial misconduct.
Shrike
11mo ago
I'm about 99% certain this robot is just a very expensive and fancy remote-controlled car. I don't think this incident has any bearing at all on AI, since no AI was involved.
However, on that note, I doubt there will be tens of millions of robots walking around anytime soon, even if (especially if) they are smarter than people...because if they are smarter than humans it will be much, much cheaper and more profitable just to connect them to the internet and have them do email and managerial jobs.
Shrike
11mo ago
Nah, I don't believe that either side was that smart.
On the one hand, I'm inclined to believe you! Everyone overestimates government competence.
On the other hand, here's some excerpts from a 2019 RAND report:
Eastern Ukraine is already a significant drain on Russian resources, exacerbated by the accompanying Western sanctions. Increasing U.S. military aid would certainly drive up the Russian costs, but doing so could also increase the loss of Ukrainian lives and territory or result in a disadvantageous peace settlement. This would generally be seen as a serious setback for U.S. policy.
The option of expanding U.S. military aid to Ukraine has to be evaluated principally on whether doing so could help end the conflict in the Donbass on acceptable terms rather than simply on costs it imposes on Moscow. Boosting U.S. aid as part of a broader diplomatic strategy to advance a settlement might well make sense, but calibrating the level of assistance to produce the desired effect while avoiding a damaging counter-escalation would be challenging.
Obviously RAND hedges their bets here, and I don't mean to claim that they were clairvoyant, or anything. But while Western analysts underestimated Ukrainian resolve, RAND was able to correctly point out the very serious downsides to sending Ukraine more weapons well before the escalation of the conflict. And then...we sent them more weapons...and the war escalated exactly as RAND predicted it could.
Now, supposing that you are a member of the US diplomatic-security apparatus that is concerned about Russian strength (and, let's say, sharing the common belief that Ukraine will not stand up to Russian might), but also nursing the unspoken (but very defensible) belief that a united Europe with an independent foreign policy is more of a threat to the United States over the long term than Russia will ever be. Just going off of this report, all of the things that RAND outlines as "risks" might look to you like "benefits," since you suspect that Russia invading and annexing more of Ukraine will "spook" Europe and increase diplomatic pressure on Germany to stop placing nice with Russia. Now increasing military aid looks like a win-win: you either weaken Russia or you spook Europe and with any luck you manage to thread the needle and do both by making the Russians look boorish and violent without them actually committing. And, as a strategist, an option where the worst plausible scenario has hidden benefits is a good option.
Things, in this postulation, DON'T go to plan: you're not omni-competent, the needle isn't threaded, Putin actually invades instead of just suffering from the weapons you've been shipping to Ukraine. How do you spin that situation?
I think what we've seen out of DC is consonant with that – pressuring Europe to give away their arsenal to Ukraine and buy American-made weapons systems instead.
Now, to your point, I don't even know that it requires the level of conscious thought I've put into it, just a sort of self-advantage-maximalizing sensibility, to get the most for the least. Maybe there's no grand strategy, just a sort of shrewd subconscious impulse. But I do find it very interesting that the "US diplomatic and military failure" DOES seem to have turned out in a way to have maximized US leverage over Europe and weakened them considerably. We replaced reliance on Russia for natural gas with reliance on the United States. We persuaded our NATO allies to give away, what, 500 tanks (many in service) while we have a few thousand Abrams in storage, of which we sent...1% (31). (Incidentally, I believe the reason given for not using more Abrams was that the logistics tail was too long. And while I do believe the logistics tail would be long, if we take this at face value it seems to suggest that we wouldn't be able to support Abrams in Europe during a conflict with Russia, which seems...problematic if true!)
So while I'm very uncertain as to how much of what has developed was planned, and I definitely agree that neither side was smart enough to correctly foresee the exact twists and turns of all these events, the extent to which it's undercut Europe to the benefit of the US is worth asking questions about, I think, but I rarely see it discussed.
Shrike
11mo ago
Ukraine was an embarrassingly easy target...Every other country that Russia wants to fuck with is much more dangerous than Ukraine.
Pre-war, I assumed this would be true because of the EXTREMELY mediocre showing of Ukraine during the Russian invasion of Crimea. But (pretty obviously) the Ukrainians did a lot of work between then and the second Russian invasion.
And if you set aside the question of Ukrainian morale, I don't think they are an embarrassingly easy target at all, on paper. They had a very large inherited ground army, and a large population pool. They're more on the level of Poland, not a softer target (say) Estonia or Latvia or even a medium-hard target like Finland. It's true from what I can tell that their weapon modernization was fairly meh and that their air force in particular was probably lackluster (but see also Poland, which is still flying Su-17s!) but the fundamentals (lots of tanks, artillery, warm bodies) go a long way with proper morale. I think that, e.g. non-US NATO would have struggled to invade Ukraine the same way Russia did.
What exactly were the Dems and GOP supposed to do about this? Candidates are selected ~democratically (I suppose it's fair to criticize the Democrats for just...skipping that step this election cycle); Trump developed a huge base in the GOP; "wokeness" has a decent base in the Democrat party. And many GOP "adults in the room" DID criticize Trump, and got ran out of the party for their troubles.
Let me try to answer my own question:
I think the effort to head off Trump needed to happen in the primaries for the 2016, and it needed to take on the form of some of those 1,492 GOP candidates dropping out earlier to consolidate the anti-Trump base of support, and it needed to take on the form of denouncing the foreign policy misadventures of the Bush-Obama years (which were becoming unpopular, but were still often not criticized in the GOP in 2016.) But it's not the fault of "the Republicans" that this happened; they couldn't force candidates to drop out on the optimal timelines any more than they could force Trump not to throw his hat in the ring.
Heading off wokeness, I think, is easier – Democrat elites could have been criticizing wokeness the same way that Republican elites often criticized Trump. But I think this risked seriously weakening the party. We see, now, that the party is critically divided over Israel/Palestine; attacking "wokeness" 4 or 8 years ago (particularly when it was on the ascent) would have run a similar risk, I think.
I guess my point here is that to the extent that it's the fault of "the Republicans" or "the Democrats" it's really just the fault of "the American people" for voting for them. Maybe this is your point.
I'm certainly interested in the potential upsides of RETVRNing to a time when the people didn't have much of a voice in major party's political choices. But until that happens, "the party" will be very much at the mercy of the voters.
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