felis-parenthesis
No bio...
User ID: 660
felis-parenthesis
8mo ago
But the language of "adding" rather than "topping up" has erased the concept of already has enough fluoride in it naturally. The idea is missing from the discourse. Lots of ordinary people have naturally occurring fluoride in their drinking water and have no idea that it has always been like that. Dr Nerd's third attempt at making his point will make not make sense to those people and they will ignore him.
We can tell that the idea of already has enough fluoride in it naturally has been erased from the discourse, simply by listening out for the missing follow-up questions. When some-one is on the media, arguing against fluoridation on the grounds that the recommended level is a health hazard, the interviewer questions them. The obvious line of questioning is "What about places with naturally occurring fluoridation? Do you advocate removing it? How? Are the health problems actually showing up? There have been multiple life times for them to appear!" But the obvious questions don't occur to the interviewer. The concepts have somehow gotten erased :-(
felis-parenthesis
11mo ago
The positives have to be weighed against the negatives.
The anti-immigration position starts with endorsing the claim that when Chopin moved from Warsaw to Paris, that benefited the French, and when Marc Isambard Brunel fled France and ended up in England, that benefited England. What makes it the anti position is the additional claim that you can tell whether Chopin can play the piano; you don't have to admit half the population of Warsaw to get the musician. And you can tell that Brunel knew about civil engineering; you don't have to admit any Jacobins to get your tunnel under the Thames.
So no, you don't have to weigh positives and negatives. Let the positives in, keep the negatives out.
The core of the pro-immigration position is "You cannot tell whether Chopin can play the piano. If you want the positives, you have to accept the negatives, so weigh them and choose."
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
injectable aficionados call “low trust”
My speculations about the meaning here are baseless. Can somebody clue me in? I cannot even tell whether "injectables" is botox or heroin.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
In 2009 I suggested Saving forums from themselves with shared hierarchical white lists Linking to archived page: project name Outer Circle. It was discussed on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=920110 My health deteriorated. Nobody else tried implementing the ideas.
Where do I even go in 10 years?
That allows for planning ahead and maybe writing your own version of Outer Circle. The core idea is
Current approaches fail because they try to create a single forum, which requires agreement on what is good.
Shared hierarchical white-lists are a mechanism for allowing "multiple forums" to peacefully coexist with the same "comment base". You don't see shitty comments because you don't white-list them. The shitty commentators don't try to ban you because they never white-list long boring intellectuals and don't know that you exist. But there is overlap. The forums have the potential to reach critical mass, with enough commentators to sustain interest. And "freedom of speech" benefits from all content being opt-in. Every-one can ban any-one for any-reason, and that ban doesn't extend beyond their personal version of the forum.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
You have misplaced the decimal point. 112000/3500000 = 0.032 which is 3.2%
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
There is a pragmatic version of the argument about epistemic hygiene that is summed up in this cartoon.
Pragmatic arguments make me uncomfortable, nearly as uncomfortable as the replication crisis does.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
The line about living with the Amish misses the depth of the technology stack. Every-one, including the Amish, benefit from access to high carbon steels. All the chisels and saws that carpenters use in a low-tech wooden life-style depend on heat treated steels that retain their cutting edge. Making the chisels and saws depends on hardened high carbon steel being harder than normalised high carbon steel, sufficiently harder that you can use files and hacksaws to form the blanks for your chisels and saws before you harden them in their turn with more heat treatment. It is all very delicate, depending on chemistry and metallurgy to get quench hardening to work right ("Silver steel" has added chromium to improve through hardening. Metallurgists need microscopes to see what is happening with the grains in the steel). (Things have moved on. Now-a-days you heat treat steel parts before cutting them to shape using carbide tooling,...)
I wondered if the Amish use cement. Maybe just lime mortar. It is a tough question. Yes, and attention to price and efficiency seduces you, so that you end up tied to industrial cement making. No, and your building techniques are in some ways pre-Roman; who wants to go back that far?
We are mostly ignorant of the long history of our technology stack and use phrases such as "back to nature" in ways that do no withstand scrutiny
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
I'm reading a biography of Oliver Cromwell by John Buchan titled simply Cromwell. I don't really have the prerequisite knowledge of English History. Buchan drops names and I am like: who? But Wikipedia to the rescue. I type "Pym" into the search bar and navigating the disambiguation page to John Pym turns out to be easy.
Why am I reading about political turmoil and civil war? Because the book was only 50p in the Cat Protection League charity shop. Definitely nothing to do with contemporary resonances or grim forebodings.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
I suspect that the view of science as disunified and pluralistic is an illusion caused by zooming in too close. Older, rival ways of knowing get neglected and forgotten. That should create the impression of a loss of intellectual diversity, but we actually zoom in until the limited, remaining intellectual diversity fills the field of view.
I first rediscovered older perspectives reading about the Spanish Armada of 1588. Garrett Mattingly wrote 421 pages for his book The Defeat of the Spanish Armada. He gives a largely materialist account in which the superior upwind performance of English ships allows them to stay up wind of the Spanish and pound the Spanish from long range with their superior canon. At 583 pages, Neil Hanson gets to include more on Spanish thinking in his book: The Confident Hope of a Miracle, the true story of the Spanish Armada. And the thinking is religious and pious.
The Spanish did have some hard headed military men, but religion and piety also had a say in naval matters. If you had tried to warn a Spanish noble about English technical superiority and tactical advantage he might have replied with the authentic 1580's version of this
That is not how this works, that is not how any of it works. The wind blows at God's command. If we pray ardently, if we are right with God, he will grant us fair winds. Second to God's blessing come our own courage and faith. You make much of minor points such as the English being able to pull their muzzles back inside their hulls for reloading, but such matters trail a poor third behind God's will and man's courage and determination.
Second, I was discombobulated by reading that Hobbes was viewed with suspicion in his own time. I imagined that the throne-and-altar guys would love him. God had divinely appointed Kings and there was Hobbes justifying God's wisdom to doubters: of course we need a King. Without a King we will have a war of all against all and life will be nasty, brutish, and short. Yet his contemporaries found Hobbes' perspective mechanistic, materialist, in a word: atheistic. Not the right way to think about the world at all.
Third, in The Discarded Images, C. S. Lewis attempts to explain the Medieval world view to the modern mind. He selects some earlier work he regards as seminal, include the commentary on Somnium Scipionis by Macrobius. Macrobius divides dreams into five species, three veridicial, and two which have 'no divination' in them.
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Somnium: truths veiled in an allegorical form
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Visio: direct, literal prevision of the future
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Oraculum: the dreamers parents or other grave and venerable person openly declares the future
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Insomnium: daily cares intruding on sleep
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Visum: garbled trash, including nightmares
I cannot believe there was ever a time when every-one took Visio seriously. Dreams must so often fail to come true that many would notice their limitations as a way of knowledge. On the other hand, I assume that Macrobius took dreams seriously, and others followed his lead. What must it have been like to grow up in a world in which the reliability of dreams was accepted by the adults around you and that way of thinking was metaphorically "in the water supply"? It would be hard to see the point of science. Much better to have a good nights sleep and hope, in the morning, to interpret the allegory of Somnium.
There were so many better ways of knowing things than science. You could pray to God. You could study scripture. You could dream.
None of that actually works. It fails hard enough that it is hard in 2023 to imagine taking any of it seriously, yet I believe that people did so. If we zoom out far enough to include such ideas in our field of view, Science shrinks to a small and particular kind of epistemology. Does it have an essence? In the zoomed out view, internal details are too small to be seen and, yes, science has a nerdy essence.
felis-parenthesis
2yr ago
The common thread is some people thinking that laws are self-acting. People deep inside the first world bubble look around and see a surface appearance that fits nicely with laws being self-acting. One can explain this away, but the explanation must never-the-less explain why it looks that way, even though it isn't. Here is my attempt, focusing on incentive compatibility and Magic Special People, the MSP's.
Utopia, version one. There is an excellent rule book. Its excellence lies in how nice the world would be if people followed the rules. Its downfall is the lack of enforcement mechanisms. People break the rules and the utopia fails.
Utopia version two. A mostly free-market system. Most rules are incentive compatible. People obey those rules because it is in their interests to do so. But most isn't enough. Some necessary rules get broken and the utopia fails.
Utopia version three. Further compromise with Moloch. All the rules are incentive compatible. People fleeing the society say "Those were not compromises, they were surrenders." Version three turns out to be Hobbes' war of all against all. Works as planned, but is a dystopia.
Utopia version four. Built on version two. Yes, some rules are not naturally incentive compatible, but there is a police force. Break the rule and your punishment is worse than your gain from breaking the rule. So the rules are artificially incentive compatible. I'll use police as a synecdoche for police, courts, prisons, etc. There not just a rule book for the ordinary citizen. There is a rule book for the police. Some of it is incentive compatible. Some of the policemen believe in the utopia and follow all of the rule book for the police, even though it is an uphill struggle. But there are not enough of them, and there is no police-police enforcing the rule book that the police are supposed to follow. Too many doughnuts are eaten. Too few laws are enforced. The utopia fails.
Utopia version five. An Ourobos built on version four. The police-inspectors supervise the police, making sure that the police follow the rules. The common people watch the police-inpsectors and can vote them out of office. This is the basic idea of representative democracy. The record is mixed. The USSR had a constitution very like the American one, but with much less success. There is an extra, unrecognised ingredient. Most version five utopias fail quickly. Some last as long as supplies of the missing ingredient hold up.
Utopia version six. Ourobos + Magic Special People. Turn aside from contemplating the Ourobos and recall that utopia version four didn't fail as quickly as expected. Some of the policemen believe in it and went against their incentives out of religious conviction. There really are Magic Special People like that, just not enough off them. Notice the hierarchical structure of version five. Ordinary folk, police, police-inspectors. All but the top level face artificial incentives. The pyramid narrows towards the top. If society has 2 or 3 % MSPs, they could occupy the top level and make it work. If we sprinkle some fairy dust on society to get the MSPs to the top we would have a viable utopia.
How long would utopia version six last? People get old and die. Where is the new crop of Magic Special People to come from?
Perhaps from cultural transmission. Some MSP are teachers, encouraging children to cultivate and grow their inner MSP. So long as this is respected there is hope for continuity. But if the culture asks "If you are so smart, how come you aren't rich?" and mocks the self-sacrifice required to make cultural transmission happen, the supply of new, young MSP's will dwindle and the utopia fall.
Perhaps there is a genetic element. Some women seems to have a rather paleo-lithic taste in men, preferring those who win fights and grab an unfair share of resources for their own children. MSP's with their obsessions with justice, rules, fairness, and self-sacrifice, are not sexy and Magic Specialness is slowly bred out of the population, causing a type six utopia to fail.
Perhaps I'm understating the issue with magic fairly dust. Maybe MSP's are elbowed aside by grifters, and the top of the social heirarchy gets filled will muggles, who follow their incentives and the utopia fails.
Before answering my question about why it looks like the law is self-acting, I want to fill in some of the details of what life in a type six utopia is like.
There are ladies and gentleman. Some people are capable of understanding how society works and the need for rules, and are able to make and keep gentlemen's agreements about following the necessary rules. They lack the ruthlessness and self-sacrifice to count as Magic Special People, but provided the MSPs maintain order in society as a whole, the gentle folk have no need of MSPs within their bubble. Within their bubble, law is effectively self-acting.
There are rough folk. They push boundaries and break rules. They are sometimes caught and punished. Too seldom and things escalate and utopia fails. Too much? Is there a too much? It is a more subtle issue of the expensive of policing, and the corruption that results if police are granted too much latitude. There is also an issue that the more laws society has, the more police society needs, and the more MSPs society needs to supervise the police. MSPs are a scare resource; expand the need until society runs out of them and watch the utopia fail.
In between gentle and rough are ordinary folk, by far the most numerous. They have aspirations to be genteel. They want to be ladies and gentlemen, but when it comes to keeping gentlemen's agreements they find themselves hard pressed by tempation. They want to be street smart, not a mug or a mark. Not the one still trying to be a gentleman when every-thing has gone to shit and it is time to play for rough, to play for keeps.
The ordinary folk have rich inner lives, filled with psychological drama, which leads to the key distinction between the ordinary folk and the rough folk. Managing the rough folk requires that the police are efficient enough to keep the expected value of criminal activity negative. Managing the ordinary folk only requires the police to do their job occasionally. There is an inner struggle. Will the aspiration to be genteel win? Will the aspiration to be street smart win? It is enough that the gentle side can point to one or two middle class criminals caught and shamed. The street smart side might start figuring the odds but the gentle side scolds that as shameful in its self.
In the good times, the ordinary folk are kind of, somewhat in the same bubble as the ladies and gentlemen who honour their agreements and can see law as self-acting. Come the bad times and ordinary folk will flip to being street smart and things will go down hill fast and hard.
And that is my story of how society works, and how it comes to appear to nice middle class people that the law is self-acting, even though it really isn't.
felis-parenthesis
2yr ago
The ban on gain of function research in America is an important data point. Americans who wanted to do the research found ways to funnel money to China to do it there. An important question is whether the supreme leadership in China permitted this. My guess is that they didn't. Fauci just teamed up with people at a similar level in China who also wanted to do the research. If a high level Chinese researcher wants Chinese funding, they have to get into the details with their Chinese boss. What do they say? Perhaps "The Americans are scared to do this dangerous research, it gives us a chance to get ahead." My guess is that is way to lose all your funding. Getting ahead of Americans is good, but taking stupid risks, risks so stupid that even the Americans have declined, is very bad. If a high level Chinese researcher wants permission from his boss to accept American money, he can probably sell it as "Its just boring public health stuff." The level of scrutiny is lower for money being paid in than for money being paid out.
My guess is that Fauci had the money, but not permission. His Chinese counterparts had didn't have the money, so there was no point to asking for permission. But Fauci could give them the money, so they didn't have to ask for permission. Basically, big players, one level down from the top, routed around their own governments; both the American ban, and the ban the Chinese government would probably have imposed if requests for funding had pushed the issue all the way to the top.
I suspect that the Chinese over-reaction is partly a freak-out as the top Chinese officials realize that they have been by-passed, and panic at the implications of a problem caused by research that they would have vetoed if they had known the details.
My understanding of the way the world works is that if the top people in governments around the world agree to ban AI research, there is a chance that they will all do so sincerely. But that still won't work, because officials at the next level down control large sums of money and have considerable discretion delegated to them; they will just do AI research on their own authority. Another data point for this is the Iran-Contra Affair.
TLDR deep state evil mad scientists will do government backed AI research, even if Presidents and Prime Ministers are completely on board with banning it.
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
Racism is effectively the rejection of individual variance/merit in favor of group variance/merit.
"Racism" has changed so much over the past fifty years that the "Racist" and "Anti-racist" positions have swapped. It used to be that teachers were racist and didn't let the Black children into the Advanced Placement classes because "Blacks are stupid". Back then the anti-racist position emphasized individual variance/merit. The clever children go in the top stream and the stupid children go in the bottom stream. Ideally the stupid children benefit from being kept out of the top stream; it is miserable and harmful to be in a class for which you are unprepared and which leaves you behind.
But one notices that the top streams are White or East Asian or Brahmin. That drives a re-alignment. Accepting individual variance/merit is the new racist position. Modern anti-racism looks to the statistics for groups, and expects all groups to be represented according to head count, regardless of individual merit. (and there is the extra, weird twist where Black under-representation is the fault of Whites, because Whites are bad (and, if they object to this condemnation, fragile (which oddly enough, earns them mockery not gentle handling)))
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
You should read patriots.win. I'm guessing that it is peak MAGA. And yet they engage in lively debates, with comments calling out Donald when he makes mistakes, and getting upvotes.
Unfortunately, bad appointments has been one of Trump's glaring weak points. 28 upvotes, 12 hours ago
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
I’m very much in favour of anything that limits a government’s power
That cuts both ways. Do you limit government power by permitting the government to accumulate a reserve army of brutal thugs, or by preventing this by murdering the nascent reserve army in its crib?
I've mentioned Communist revolutionaries. See https://theworthyhouse.com/2024/11/19/on-the-1956-hungarian-revolution/ for an interesting, horse-shoe twist
The chief instrument of this terror was the secret police—the ÁVO, an acronym for Államvédelmi Osztály, Department of State Protection.
It filled its ranks primarily with two disparate types of people—hardcore Communists, many or mostly Jews resentful towards non-Jewish Hungarians (again of which more later), and former Arrow Cross toughs, usually from the countryside, whose past could be held over them and whose predilections toward violence were of use to the new regime.
But one could read about Oskar Dirlewanger and where he found the men to staff the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirlewanger_Brigade
Coming up to date,
The Wagner Group has been recruiting large numbers of prisoners for Putin's war in Ukraine.
https://www.newsweek.com/inside-wagner-group-criminals-contractors-putins-war-1770392
I must stop writing this comment before I sink too deeply into despair, both about where government power comes from, and the level of counter-ruthlessness needed to oppose it.
felis-parenthesis
4mo ago
I cannot get the link to work. I'm expecting something formatted like
I'm seeing
https://old.reddit.com/r/ArchitecturalRevival/s/2Ax2KXHCWr
which takes me to a submission page. Guessing that the "s" is for submission, I hand edit the "s" to "comments"
https://old.reddit.com/r/ArchitecturalRevival/comments/2Ax2KXHCWr
but that just gets me "PAGE NOT FOUND"
felis-parenthesis
5mo ago
Perhaps the "fundamental logic" at issue is geography.
Think about the viability of solar power for providing electricity to power air-conditioning in Arizona. Peak generation is around noon. The air is still heating up, so I guess that peak demand is around 2 or 3 pm. A bit of a mismatch. Curing that only needs two or three hours of storage. Overprovisioning might be cheaper than storage, there is still plenty of sunshine at 3 pm. The occasional cloudy days reduce the output of solar power plants, but those days are cooler reducing the power needed. It looks to me that this will work well and cheaply, and contribute to people saying that solar power is economically viable.
But I live in Scotland. Long days and some sun shine in summer. Short days and thick dark clouds in winter. The demand for power is for space heating, not air conditioning, and is in winter. I pay attention when I see reports of exciting new technologies for grid scale energy storage, but it all seems to be half day storage; keep the electricity on over night. The resource - summer sunshine - is six months out of synchronization with the requirement. Solar power, to generate electricity to run heat pumps to keep homes warm in Scotland is beyond the reach of current technology. Suitable grid scale storage doesn't exist, and huge overprovisioning would be fabulously expensive.
I favor nuclear power for Scotland. And people in Arizona should make their own choice based on how things really are in Arizona.
The anti-nuclear power argument seems to be "solar is cheap, therefore no nuclear". Prod a bit and it seems to be just missing the geographical factor. Putting geography in unsympathetically and it becomes "solar in cheap in certain circumstances, therefore no-one may have nuclear, and people in the wrong circumstance must freeze to death in winter."
Another contender for "fundamental logic" is that many technologies have an early dangerous stage.
The medieval cathedral builders had collapses. Ship stability wasn't properly understood leading to capsizes, even of giant prestige warships. Steam engines were indirectly dangerous because their high pressure boilers would explode. Railway trains had lots of disasters before signalling got sorted out. There is also an interesting technology progression with making braking systems fail safe, with the fail safe version of vacuum breaking getting displaced by Westinghouse's fail safe version of air brakes. The Tay Bridge disaster isn't really a railway story, it is about structural engineers not knowing about wind loading. Civil aviation started off really dangerous and is now very safe.
So it is odd to give up on nuclear power when you can look at the details of accidents, such as Chernobyl, and say: we don't build them like that any more, we are past the dangerous stage. We also understand key parts of the sociology. Nuclear power was cloakatively about providing electricity to civilians, but really about creating plutonium for nuclear weapons, so corners were cut on safety in the rush to Armageddon. Today we know about gotchas such as Wigner Energy and this time around is 100% about providing electrical power. I think that the safety issues really are in the past.
felis-parenthesis
11mo ago
Here is how I try to make the concept of Free Speech coherent, at least for this narrow topic. Free Speech needs to be a graded concept, with levels of speech.
Let us set up a little context. Mr Red-one exercises his first level right to free speech. Mr Blue-two beats up Mr Red-one and boasts about it. Mr Red-one decides to stay quiet. That is a clear infringement of Mr Red-one's right to free speech.
Mr Red-three exercises his first level right to free speech. Mr Blue-four says "You had better shut your trap, or you will get a beating, like Mr Red-one." This is second level speech. Is it covered and protected by the concept of free speech? Mr Red-five makes a public fuss about what Mr Blue-four said, trying to persuade Mr Blue-four's employer to dismiss him. This is third level speech. First level is political policy discussion. Second level is using speech to deprive others of their first level speech rights. Third level is using speech to deprive others of their second level speech rights.
I think it is coherent to say
- First level good
- Second level bad
- Third level good again
Could we say that the first and second level are both good? I see this as the incoherence that @FCfromSSC is concerned about. Some people think that free speech absolutism requires us to uphold second level speech. But that has it backwards. Since second level speech rights trash first level speech rights, upholding second level rights is going soft on free speech. There is a real conflict, but we have to uphold the first level and therefore we must disparage the second level.
What of the complication of saying that the third level is back to being good again? It really is a complication. It might be neater superficially to say that the third level is also bad. But that is to make the mistake of the lazy school teacher who doesn't make the effort to find out who is the bully and who is the victim that hit back. The first level is the one that we are trying to defend, so we object to the second level, but consistency leads to a ripple effect, with the third level good again, least we go soft on our objection to the second level, and end up weak in our defense of the first level.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
1812
- aggroland is USA
- weakland is Canada
- moralland is UK
- timidland is Russia, which had a secret agreement with the UK (between the fifth coalition and the sixth) but only against Napoleon. No Russian troops to help the UK push USA out of Canada, so an example of an isolating alliance
Alternatively
1812
- aggroland is USA
- weakland is Tecumseh Confederacy
- moralland is Canada
- timidland is UK, who is in a chaining alliance and defends Canada against USA
1894
- aggroland is Italy
- weakland is Eritrea
- moralland is Ethiopia coming to the aid of an Eritrean rebellion against Italian rule, triggering the First Italo-Ethiopian War
- timidland is Russia. "The Russian support for Ethiopia led to a Russian Red Cross mission, though conceived as a medical support for the Ethiopian troops it arrived too late for the actual fighting,..."
1914
- aggroland is the Austro-Hungarian Empire
- weakland is Serbia
- moralland is Russia
- timidland is France, who is in a chaining alliance and comes to Russia's aid after Russia gets attacked for sticking up for Serbia (the actual history has Germany knowing that France will stick up for Russia, and getting its retaliation in first)
Additionally
1914
- aggroland is Germany
- weakland is Belgium
- moralland is UK
- timidland is USA, which ends up fighting on the British side in the end
1935
- aggroland is Italy
- weakland is Ethiopia
- moralland is Germany who supplied weapons to Ethiopia for the Second Italo-Ethiopian War
- timidland is UK which agreed with Germany, condemned Italy (reversing its 1925 secret agreement encouraging Italy), and ended up doing nothing
- timidland is Japan which mumbled a bit in support of Ethiopia, but ended up doing nothing.
1939
- aggroland is Germany
- aggroland is Russia (remember the secret protocol of the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact
- weakland is Poland
- moralland is UK
- timidland is USA, whose internal politics prevented any kind of alliance to back UK in supporting Poland, but ended up fighting.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
You might prefer this earlier version. It offers no real world examples.
Notice the problem with earlier version: it is too abstract. It gives the reader no reason to care. Of course we care deeply, but to get specific is to bog down due to the high emotion of those specific cases.
And then what? The traditional language of "defensive alliance" will automatically derail the discussion because it elides the vital distinction between chaining alliances and isolating alliances.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
My thoughts meandered to a financial analogy, prompted by the phrase "zero lower bound". One sees the phrase "zero lower bound" in the context of macroeconomics and interest rates. Governments like to stimulate the economy by cutting interest rates, but once they are cut to zero, they cannot go any lower. They have reached the zero lower bound.
Ordinary men have a similar problem with reducing the amount of rape they do. They are on board with the message "Don't rape" and would like to help women by raping less, but they are already at the zero lower bound. To do less, they would have to find a way to go negative and unrape. Ordinary men just aren't in charge and cannot actually do anything, just like ordinary men dislike money printing and inflation, but aren't consulted and cannot say "No!".
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
It has come to a point where I have to face an awkward alternative: Either most people I know are wrong (including learned men and experts) or I am insane.
I'm going to treat this as a request for an explanation of what is going on in the heads of the learned men and experts.
They are trapped in a language game, made toxic by linguistic poverty. My explanation will involve coining two neologisms and deploying them in a two stage explanation.
semi-grift Contrasts with the existing word grift. Grifters get prosecuted. But some grift-like enterprises do more good than harm. Even when individual practitioners do more harm than good, they still don't get prosecuted, because society doesn't want the chilling effect on the others, doing more good than harm and producing (in the case of psychiatry) a very substantial net benefit. Call those pro-social grifts semi-grifts.
turbo-real Are bricks real? Drop one on your foot and the pain will tell you: Yes, absolutely real! Are centers of gravity real? Put your brick on the table with the center of gravity over the edge. When it falls off and lands on your foot, the pain will tell you, err, what exactly? The center of gravity is too abstract to be absolutely real, yet the pain insists that centers of gravity are of such practical importance that they could only be one degree less real: turbo-real.
stage one The vocabulary of the elite includes semi-grift and turbo-real. You ask a member of the elite whether psychopathology exists. You persist. Eventually, when you are both naked in the hot tub, he decides that you are not wearing a wire, and the noise of the bubbles and water jets will hide the conversation from prying microphones. He levels with you: psychiatry is a semi-grift, psychopathology is not turbo-real.
Why the precautions? He explains that if he is overhead saying "psychopathology is not turbo-real" the normie eaves dropper will look up turbo-real in the elite-to-normie dictionary and find that it means that psychopathology does not exist. Then the normie eaves dropper will translate the other way. Since the normie term "exist" smushes together both turbo-real and semi-grift, translating back to elite speak from exist also hits semi-grift. Psychopathology is not even a semi-grift, it must be a grift, it must be banned and grifters prosecuted. Your elite informant is terrified of the disaster that would be caused and that is why he is so cagey. end of stage one
Now we must confront the impossibility the conversation above. semi-grift and turbo-real are my neologisms. No-one can give you the answer above because they don't have those words.
stage two In reality the elite suffer the same linguistic poverty as the normies. They have only one word, exist, which they decorate with elaborate qualifiers, hoping to distinguish strong forms of existence, such as being turbo-real, from weak-forms of existence, such as being merely a semi-grift. They know that their single word conceals a real distinction, that they grasp towards. They know that the stakes are high and being misunderstood by normies would be a disaster. Fearing that their struggle to be understood correctly might fail, they clam up.
This is where you end up bashing your head against a brick wall. The learned men and experts are surely clever enough to see that psychopathology is not turbo-real (though you use the word exist). But they will not come out and say it. Sometimes they fob you off by saying "Of course psychopathology exists" but that only adds to your confusion, because you can read people well enough to tell that they don't really mean it (or don't exactly mean it, or don't fully mean it, or something; there is definitely something hidden and wrong). The experts hear your questions. They smell disaster in the air. They don't have the words to articulate the actual difficulty, so they clam up, leaving you doubting your sanity. end of stage two
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
That is a brilliant analysis. Trying to put it in my own words so that I can steal it, I realise that there is a British NHS way of framing it.
The three founding principles of the NHS are that: one, it is funded out of general taxation; two, free at the point of use; three, treatment is based on clinical need, regardless of the ability to pay. The fourth principle was silent; one didn't say out loud. The NHS didn't ask why the patient needed treatment. No-one was refused treatment because their illness was their own stupid fault.
There have always been worrywart who feared that the silence wouldn't hold. Treating liver disease and type II diabetes is expensive. Why is the tax payer on the hook for peoples' drunkenness and gluttony? The question gets asked and used to justify the government intervening in peoples lives, making alcohol harder to get to spare peoples livers, and making fatty food harder to get in the hope of shrinking their waist lines. Both to save the NHS money. Both current UK public policy.
The previous paragraph is very British. An alternative response to the very same question, uses the issue to justify cutting the funding to the NHS. Fund treatment for illnesses that strike at random, but stop subsidizing bad lifestyle choices.
I'm struggling to find the right words to describe this framework,...
Me too. Here is my attempt:
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tight budget paternalism The government has the obligation to raise taxes to pay for rescuing people from the bad consequences of unwise choices AND the power to limit peoples choices by punishing expensively bad choices, with the aim of discouraging them.
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no budget freedom The government protects people from others who would tell them: No! Bansturbators tolerate this in return for not having to pay for rescuing people from the consequences of their own bad choices.
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budget busting freedom The government has the obligation to raise taxes to pay for rescuing people from the bad consequences of unwise choices. Bad choices multiply and get worse until the money runs out.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
Think about this in terms of the external audit of a public company.
A public company has its own accountants. They may notice money going missing, track it down, and report the employee to the police for fraud.
As a public company it must also submit to and pay for an external audit. The external audit is not looking for fraud. The external audit is auditing the internal controls and the procedures. Are the internal controls sufficient (if the procedures are followed) to stop money going missing? Are the procedures being followed? It gets a little tricky because a big business is inevitably full of minor lapses and edge cases. The external auditors will not qualify the companies accounts unless the weaknesses of internal controls and breaches of procedure are material.
However, if there are material weaknesses, the external auditors will qualify the accounts, saying that they cannot be fully relied upon because blah blah. This is a big deal. Remember that the external auditors are not looking for fraud. Looking for fraud that is really there is often futile; the fraud only took place because lax procedures that were not even followed, provided an opportunity to get away with fraud. Once the accounts have been qualified the company takes measures (perhaps under a new board of directors) to remedy the problems.
The weaknesses of internal controls and the failures to follow procedures are treated as dispositive. It is presumed that there was fraud and action is taken to prevent it. It would be wrong to say that people don't care about the facts or whether fraud actually happened. If perchance fraud can be found there will be efforts to identify the perpetrators and prosecute them. But there is an acceptance that finding material weaknesses in procedures is as "we found fraud" as it gets.
Perhaps some-one will claim "Sure there are problems with the procedures that might in theory have allowed fraud to go undetected, but no fraud was proven, so I'm content that no fraud happened and no action is required." But where money is at stake, this is naive and silly.
The core of @Hlynka's claim is that votes are as valuable as money, so the same presumption of fraud applies.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
I thought that terrible wars, leaving society short of men, were common in history. Indeed, I thought that was the origin story of polygamy in Islam. The followers of Mohammad had lost too many men waging Jihad. Sticking with monogamy would leave women without husbands and slow down rebuilding the population of warriors. So Mohammad declared that a man could have up to four wives.
The birth rate remains 50:50 (Is it actually 51% boys, 49% girls? I think it is not exactly 50:50, with some built-in compensation for slightly different death rates) so it is not exactly your hypothetical. Worse, I'm talking about societies very different to our own, so it is hard to know the relevance of the comparision.
My analysis of this kind of proposal is based on what I call the riddle of the flute children. The ordinary concern is that power is abused. The riddle of the flute children is that power is fought for. The optimum amount of Government power is less than you think, because it is only the survivors of the fighting that live to suffer the abuse.
The idea that you mention takes the lid off a power honey pot of such extraordinary sweetness that opening it will attract more hornets than wasps and lead to fighting on the scale of the Thirty Years War. I think that the Thirty Years War is the appropriate comparison because it too was about which value system, Protestant or Catholic, was to be the sole value system, regardless of parental wishes.
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