naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
I’m surprised you can get a quality contribution for an empirical claim that you flatly refuse to supply evidence for.
You are welcome to respond to AAQCs, here or elsewhere, but grumping about someone else's award because their comment doesn't reinforce your preferred narrative is obnoxious at best.
I could find zero evidence from any organization that Hamas utilized pre-teen child soldiers in the past decade.
This is a mod-hatted warning, and we generally don't dip into substance on that, but Google gave me this (PDF warning) pretty readily, and it was far from the only thing Google gave me on Hamas child soldiers. I have no particular opinion on the reliability of the sources etc. and I'm not going to get into it with you, but your emphasis on "pre-teen" and the way you referenced "the past decade" while quoting Dean referencing "the last few decades" suggest very strongly to my mind that you are not engaging charitably, or even just honestly.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
Are the AAQC's not reviewed? I assumed mods looked at the reports and used discretion to make a cut.
Yes, something like 200-300 comments are nominated each month. Most of them are plausibly "quality." I read all of them, but the curation process is primarily driver by user sentiment--nominations are the number one thing, nobody gets an AAQC without at least one other user nominating them (and the mods rarely nominate anyone).
After user sentiment has been accounted for, the selection involves a lot of throwing stuff out before opting stuff in; I toss out obviously rule-breaking posts, or stuff that was clearly nominated as a joke. Eventually I get down to a reasonable number of posts to read them over again and think about what each one does. I try to get through the queue weekly but realistically I end up doing most of the work at the end of each month.
I have always regarded the AAQC process as a very important "carrot" for the community, and one of the best things to come out of the old SSC subreddit. I don't do nearly as much content moderation or community participation as I used to, for what are probably pretty predictable life-related reasons. But it's important to me that the AAQCs get done, which I suppose is why I have now been curating them for almost four years. (For contrast: when I took over, counting the AAQC reports from the SSC subreddit, the AAQC report had existed for about 3.5 years.)
But I would not be able to curate them at all if Zorba hadn't created a bespoke queuing system for the process. I think people underestimate just how much our little community depends on the technical prowess of a few key, committed individuals. The work I do, could be done by just about anyone; what makes me useful is that I am willing to actually and consistently do it. The work Zorba does, I wouldn't even know how to begin doing.
I disagree because if the vote on the side you actually like cannot win, not only are you not getting what you want, but often moving the country in the opposite direction.
I honestly don't understand how anyone could actually believe this. Sure, it's a common argument. But the only effect it has en masse is to ensure that people who don't like either party, never have any impact at all. And responding as if I just didn't understand the math is insane, because the whole point is that if you understand math at all, you already know that your vote is exceedingly unlikely to matter.
I'm sorry if I sound like a broken record, but I've lost track now of how many people I have to remind of this:
Your vote is more than 99.9% likely to make no difference at all.
The idea that your vote might bring about your preferred policies is mathematically absurd. For the same reasons, the idea that your vote might "mov[e] the country in the opposite direction" is also absurd. Indeed, it is more absurd, since the major American political parties agree on more than the disagree on (e.g., neither is monarchist, neither is communist [yet], etc.). Whether you vote, or do not vote, and who or what you vote for, will very nearly never alter the outcome of an election.
"But if enough people believe that..."
It doesn't make any difference! Yes, strategically, you want as many people who agree with you, to believe their vote makes a difference and to cast it accordingly. Yes, strategically, you want as many people who disagree with you to believe their vote makes no difference and thus stay home from the polls or vote in a way that does not otherwise hurt your desires. But statistically, if a lot of people understand that their vote doesn't matter, they are very likely to be more-or-less evenly distributed across both "sides!" Furthermore, you probably have no influence over the voters of either "side" anyway, so talking about voting in this manner is an exercise in pure imagination; it is a power fantasy. Now, granted: if you're Donald Trump, or you're Kamala Harris, or you're Taylor Swift, or even if you're maybe Scott Alexander, and you have the power sway voting blocs? Sure, this is a great piece of rhetoric, a potentially useful lie to tell, etc. I don't deny that major political parties (and their partisans!) have every reason to peddle this claptrap.
But as a matter of fact, everyone has some actual reason to vote (or not) as seems best to them, and virtually no one has any reason to vote as a bloc (if that's not what actually seems best to them)--with the exception of vanishingly rare edge cases where their one vote actually makes a difference. This sometimes happens at the local level, so the fewer people there are voting in a given election, the more actual reason you have to cast your vote strategically. But also: in such cases, it's virtually guaranteed that you are actually voting as seems best to you, and not merely casting a vote to prevent the greater of two evils from taking office. (Many local elections are lucky to get two whole candidates in the first place.)
If making a difference in politics matters to you, then you need to secure political office for yourself, or become famous enough that a lot of people take their cues from you--ideally, many many thousands. At which point you will have some actual reason to tell this lie. (Just be careful not to fall for your own marketing--it's not your vote that matters, it is your influence over many votes!) Until then, the vast majority of people who say/believe the "you must vote for one of the two viable candidates" lie are merely someone else's useful tool.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
But all this is entirely beside the point. If it seems best to you that you should vote for a major party candidate, then do it! And if the emergent pattern is a "two party system," okay, that's the emergent pattern! What's completely bonkers is telling people that
if you dislike Trump more than Harris you must support Harris and vice versa
That's just bullshit, and someone declining to vote for either is much more likely to have a positive effect, insofar as it has any effect at all, than forcing oneself to pick a "lesser of two evils" instead.
When I am arguing against the efficacy of individual strategic partisanship, "but then a group following this advice might cause the wrong party to win!" is not a meaningful response. Yes, if one side is collectively strategic and another isn't, then that other will lose the election. But (presumably) you don't have any control of either side, collectively, and your defection or cooperation will basically never make any difference, so you have no compelling reason to behave as if it it would. If everyone could be counted upon to behave as I am suggesting, it would actually be good for our election processes. If they can't be so counted upon, then you lose nothing by behaving better anyway.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
If one side in the election all suddenly came to this realisation and freely discussed and acknowledged this fact, while the other still maintained the fantasy that 'every vote matters', then side B would win a landslide, and in a sense they've almost willed their fantasy into being.
Indeed. And if everyone were to suddenly come to this realization all together, and realize that everyone else had reached this realization, then we'd almost certainly elect many more "third party" candidates. This is why I always push back against the "you must pick one of these two" argument: because it is false, and we'd all be better off if everyone treated it as false. Far better for people to simply vote to express what they think is genuinely best, than to imagine themselves strategically selecting a particular outcome.
What I mean is that both for democracy at large and for your preferred candidate, it's pretty important that the general proposition that every vote matters is considered to be true, even if it isn't.
So close! It's pretty important for the Republican and Democrat parties that the general proposition that every vote matters is considered true, even though it isn't. Democracy at large is better off without building a consensus around falsehoods.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
If you're not voting with reference to the outcome, why bother going at all?
What are you talking about? I didn't say people should vote without reference to the outcome. I said people should vote as seems best to them.
If you think your vote will affect the outcome, you're probably just bad at math. What do you think it means to vote "with reference to" the outcome? Here's my take: a vote is your opportunity to express a preference to the public concerning how the public should be run. There is presumably some outcome that you desire, and voting is a system we have in place to allow you to express that (or not). So of course you vote "with reference to" the outcome, if you decide to vote at all--you just don't vote in a way that implies you actually have some control over the outcome. If instead of expressing your desire, you try to influence the outcome in a strategic way, then again: you're probably just being bad at math. It's not a big deal, you being bad at math is fine, and even your imagining that your vote matters to the outcome is a relatively harmless delusion.
But if you cast your vote because you think it will influence the outcome, then you'll influence the outcome equally well by staying at home and throwing darts at a picture of Donald Trump, and letting the people who actually care about public discourse do the voting.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
I'm not persuaded that Trump or his allies believed that what they were doing was assembling fake electors. Just as I suspect the people trying to recruit faithless electors (or the Representatives declining to certify) did not, for even an instant, regard themselves as attempting to "steal" the election.
This is not the sort of thing that people generally think of in a point-by-point tit-for-tat. Rather, the dirtier the other side plays, the more justified one feels about playing dirty. The particulars are less important than the trend, because it is the trend and not the particulars that point toward what is likely to come next.
Obergefell was/is a very plausible extension of previous fourteenth amendment jurisprudence
Yeah, no, not even remotely. Obergefell was an unusually vapid decision even for Kennedy. He should have retired to write poetry, because he was apparently so tired of doing jurisprudence he forgot to include any in Obergefell. At best, it raises the idea that because marriage is rooted in history and tradition (which is what makes it a cognizable right), same sex marriage must also be rooted in history and tradition. This is absurd on its face.
suffice it to say conservative courts have been just as willing to impose on the states
It's okay for the federal government to impose on the states, when the Constitution clearly authorizes it. But it's probably only fair to note that I also hate stuff like Commerce Clause jurisprudence; my concerns about Constitutional Law are admittedly far out of step with the legal profession and the practical reality that substantial portions of the Constitution are functionally dead letter.
There doesn't seem to be a notable political valence to legislating from the bench.
But there is a noticeable political valence to respecting precedent and history. Less today than in the past, I'll grant, but when the precedent is really bad (and Roe was really bad, even Ginsberg regarded it a poor decision despite supporting its result), what else can you do?
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
But I'd argue that fake electors are much worse
You and a lot of other people! But that's one of the main reasons why norm violations are bad: they provide excuses for others to escalate. By declining to clearly and unequivocally condemn the faithless elector scheme, Democrats created a reason for Republicans to begin thinking seriously about ways to preserve victory in the face of electoral defeat.
Treating every conflict as the most important conflict ever and buying into the narrative that "whatever bad thing my side does is justified, because the other side is even worse" locks us all into a race to the bottom. Regardless of Tuesday's outcome, I have no confidence at all that the result will be a cooling of the culture war divide.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
Both are predictions based on knowledge, but reflect very different observations.
But two things can be true at the same time.
I do not think that either political party is engaged in organized attempts to "steal" elections. And yet election-influencing prospiracies arise with alarming regularity, whether that be in the form of lawsuits, robocalls, social media posts, or whatever. We even have hard evidence of such prospiracies arising in the context of elected officials and government employees (Trump campaign wiretapping, Strzok) and even rising to the level of full-blown conspiracies (Watergate).
None of that precludes the possibility that Harris is also sufficiently appealing, or Trump sufficiently revolting, for her to manage a "genuine" electoral victory. I find myself basically persuaded by the big city numbers and the suburbia polls that Kamala can pull off an electoral victory. But I am not a pollster! Math is not my thing! I would not encourage anyone to make bets on anything I predict, ever; I'm far too reflexively skeptical to ever feel very sure about anything, even ridiculous things. So I also have to think about the possibility that I've been misled by the polls. It certainly wouldn't be the first time!
What all that other stuff does preclude is any ability in me to feel highly confident about the results-as-eventually-reported. This is the argument Clinton (IIRC) initially brought out when Trump in 2016 started making noise about stolen elections. My memory is that she (or maybe it was one of her supporters) correctly observed that the outcome of the vote is just part of what's important; the other part is that people have to believe it wasn't rigged. Well, this painted her into a bit of a corner when she lost, and it took her a little while to reverse course and get in on the "Trump is not a legitimate president" narrative.
But eight years later we're all living in "broken window" territory. Democrats* tried to actually steal the 2016 election, via Russian dossiers and faithless elector schemes and votes against certification and throwing riots and spurious impeachment attempts. Republicans* largely followed suit in 2020. If you think your opponent is likely to play dirty, then you're a little more likely to play dirty, and if your opponent knows you're likely to escalate, then they prepare to escalate. Whether we're talking about nuclear war, rioting and looting, or election shenanigans, the logic is the same.
* "Not all..."
De-escalation is hard.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
If you’re a “bellwether voter”, it could be the case that by deciding to vote, you resolve reality so that others like you have also voted and your preferred candidate gets in.
Sure, but if anything this would appear to strengthen my case. If you don't vote for Jill Stein because you don't think she can win, then you're collapsing the waveforms where everyone who wanted to cast a protest vote actually did so; in so doing, you could very well be collapsing the waveforms where Jill Stein actually wins.
Obviously if you’re a two-boxer this is superstitious nonsense!
It's definitely superstitious nonsense, but isn't that noumena in a nutshell?
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
What's "high?" What's "stolen?"
I think it is a little more likely than not that Harris pulls off an electoral victory without anyone stuffing ballot boxes, and I think she does this by virtue of corporate news media having become the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party. This is why Bezos is getting such pushback on seeking to gain media credibility outside the blue tribe: news no longer exists to be credible, it exists to build consensus for your tribe and punish the outgroup. Does that count as "stealing" an election? My inclination is to say no! But when you add to that the political influence of teachers unions over indoctrinating children, the moneyed influence of woke capital, the cultural influence of Hollywood, the behind-the-scenes influence of government employees... at some point it seems like the idea that any election is the result of rational discourse or democratic consensus just becomes laughable in a way that discourages the appellation "legitimate."
Those same forces (news media, schoolteachers, woke capital, Hollywood, "deep state") are additionally committed to preventing a Trump inauguration even if he wins electoral victory, and so I think it is at least somewhat likely that, conditional on a Trump electoral victory, there will again be significant efforts to prevent his inauguration.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
There are many valid criticisms of Harris, but if you dislike Trump more than Harris you must support Harris and vice versa. To act otherwise in the US electoral system is to act irrationally.
No, this attitude is 100% Molochian. The odds of your one vote altering the outcome of the election are infinitesimal. Treating your vote as a strategic move in a game assumes a completely unrealistic degree of personal agency and impact. The psychological impact that voting (or not voting!) has on you is almost certainly (>99%) the only impact your vote will have on anyone, anywhere. In distant second place, your protest vote for a third party might contribute to making an impression on someone in power, such that they shift their policy priorities slightly toward your expressed preferences.
Of course, from the perspective of an American political party the most important voters to persuade are precisely those voters who are least likely to cast a vote for either major party candidate: the ones not already ideologically captured by either party. Consequently it is in both the Democrat and Republican parties' best interests to perpetuate the idea that because third party candidates are not "viable," it is a waste to vote for the candidate you prefer; you must vote only for the major party candidate you hate least!
Everyone should vote (or not vote!) as seems best to them, without regard for "picking a winner." To behave in any other way is to make of oneself another simple tool of party political machines.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
Is this assuming a mostly legitimate election?
Well, I feel like it's already a little late for that; to whatever extent "violating norms" can be said to undermine legitimacy, Harris' circumventing the nomination process to simply assume candidacy has already called into question the legitimacy of this election.
But yeah, I don't think the Democratic machine in the relevant swing states is going to go down without a fight (and a dirty one, if necessary).
Insofar as Harris has not (yet?) done anything blatantly unconstitutional, I also think it is a little more likely than not (55%? 60%?) that a true electoral win from Trump could still see his inauguration prevented by his opponents, hook or crook. This could potentially be done by preventing an apparent electoral victory simply by thumbing the scales in a few key states. We saw Lisa Page's and Peter Strzok's texts; how many three-letter-agency texts have we not seen? How many texts like that were never sent, because the people who might have sent them were smarter than Page and Strzok? (Page and Strzok were ultimately fired, but they sued the government over that, and then settled for a payout of about a million bucks apiece--not exactly the kind of government response that seems likely to discourage similar behavior from others.) We saw Hollywood's faithless elector scheme, how far would they go to prevent a second Trump term? There have already been so many attempts on Trump's life that there is a whole Wikipedia entry dedicated to them, which does not appear to be the case for any other U.S. President or presidential candidate. As we discussed a few weeks ago, there are a lot of people expressing worry over how to convince Republicans to accept a Trump defeat gracefully, and yet when I asked whether there would be any way to convince Democrats to accept a Harris defeat gracefully, no one even attempted to answer that question. Instead, several people flatly denied the demonstrated reality that Democrats in 2016 were working just as hard to change the outcome of the election, as Republicans were in 2020.
Unfortunately, I suspect that no matter who wins this time, the response from the other side will be lawsuits, denials, and probably some riots. Just like in 2016. Just like in 2020.
I'm less comfortable with Trump than you, and I'm thinking Kamala basically did her job of losing gracefully for the Dems.
I'm pretty uncomfortable with Trump; I'm just much, much less comfortable with the idea of packing the Supreme Court with justices who don't know what "woman" means.
Could I get a confidence level on that prediction?
I'm bad with numbers, but it feels pretty likely to me. Is that 70%-80%? I don't think I'd say 90%, the electoral college situation does give me some hesitation. By "inevitable" I mean "I don't see anything short of a black swan event shifting the outcome from where it's currently headed," not "I'm 100% sure of this specific outcome."
And yes: when Harris' chances hit 33% on Polymarket, I was sorely tempted to YOLO a lot of money into it. But I am extremely risk-averse; I can barely psychologically handle the uncertainties of reasonable business investment. "Shares" of anything that can go rapidly to $0 are just too much for me, at least on my current budget.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
How is it not a massive norms violation to spend 3 years investigating and accusing a sitting president of Treason based on a campaign dosier that was almost entirely made up by his opposition?
To say nothing of using the Supreme Court to impose abortion and same-sex marriage on every single state. Or "not my president"--there was even a 2016 campaign to recruit faithless electors. The idea that Trump is the blatant norm-violator requires an awfully selective memory. I don't like Trump, but thanks to him I have been mostly satisfied with what's coming out of the Supreme Court for the first time in my adult life. The idea of returning to an activist Court, but with fresh Wokist judges instead of merely Liberal ones, is in my mind the most realistic bad-and-lasting effect of a Harris victory.
(Which, by the way, I do think is inevitable at this point, if not necessarily without some of what Time once called "fortification" from a "shadow campaign.")
That said, I think Scott's endorsement is 100% in-character for him, and it's probably worth noting that the reasoning he provides is in response to a case he has first worked to steelman. I suspect it is not a steelman he actually buys--just the best he was able to come up with. Rather, think of what the New York Times put Scott through the last time Trump won a presidential election. I don't know that it was this way for everyone, but in 2016 and 2017 I personally lost about 25% of my social media connections after Clinton's loss, and I didn't even support Trump--I just expressed clear criticism of Clinton. So I suspect that a lot of what we're seeing from Scott here is a kind of rhetorical, anticipatory flinch. Particularly given his somewhat defiant direct link back to "You Are Still Crying Wolf." (Insert Straussian reading here?)
So my biggest concern for this election is not really to do with either candidate, but with my suspicion that either way, the country comes further apart. The one thing I have appreciated from Harris is her bumbling attempts to appeal to the garbage deplorables. Even she (or at least her campaign) realizes that the culture wars are moving the nation in a potentially disastrous direction (not that this seems to have inspired the Left to pump the brakes--yet). But I have to wonder, climate-change-style, if we're not already past the point of no return.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
Lifewise is a religious organization, the Social Justice Academy is... well some of these programs get a little on the nose with the extent that they're replacements for religion, but...
The evolution of "non-religious" religions like Wokism is in desperate need of better legal analysis. However the Supreme Court hasn't even managed to actually define religion for Constitutional purposes, so I don't see how anyone could convince it to recognize the problem that First Amendment selection pressure has created in the ideological memeplex. Everything that "separation of church and state" was supposed to protect us from, it no longer protects us from, because the church meme has largely evolved into identity politics. "This isn't a religion, this is just what it means to be a good person" is the anti-ideologic-resistant super-meme that resulted from excessive use of the Establishment Clause.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
it sounds like you like slop. I guess that's your perogative.
This is pointless antagonism. It adds nothing but heat to the conversation. Your AAQCs get you some leeway, but that leeway is not infinite.
Three day ban.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
I'm completely flabbergasted by their advertising. It reminds me a bit of Hillary Clinton going to Utah--like, WTF? She's not going to get the votes of stereotypically masculine men, but also she doesn't need the votes of stereotypically masculine men. I get the temptation to try to claim "cross demographic victory" as a mandate to swing for the fences in her presumptive legislative agenda, I understand the culture-building angle of "let's make ideological conservatism extinct." But conservatism is already doing tons of work toward extincting itself, and trying to urge it along only strengthens the perception that partisanship is a fight for ingroup survival rather than a neighborly disagreement over the optimal tax rate.
I don't think Trump can win this, ultimately--but I've been wrong about that before, and if I'm wrong about it again, he will owe Kamala's campaign team a thank-you card.
While I don't have any hard evidence, this thing trips my "scam" intuition big time.
The only "scam" that seems likely here would be overstating the potential. It doesn't look like they're doing anything that isn't already routinely done with IVF, they're just getting more specific and detailed about it, connecting it to current best-understanding data on genetics. IVF clients are already routinely informed of the sex and "strength" of the embryos created, along with obvious stuff like "this embryo has trisomy 21" or whatever. Since there isn't a "big IQ" gene, the best they could do with this particular measure would be "given our current best understanding, embryo A is X% more likely to have increased IQ than embryo B."
That is still a long, long way from doing things like bioengineering superhumans. As the Gattaca line goes--"Keep in mind, this child is still you. Simply--the best of you."
EDIT: On reflection I guess my biggest worry about this is that it could exacerbate a certain poorly-understood trend.
The PDF I provided explicitly mentions children under 15, and elsewhere distinguishes between "children" and "adolescents," both of which Hamas has recruited in its history, in some cases quite recently. But one of the reasons for me to not get into the substance with you is that you have shown no inclination to actually accept evidence when it is provided to you. I anticipated you would do that, and now you have done it, so there is evidently no reason to continue to attempt to meet your demands. You apparently will not accept any evidence even when it is provided to you (as an aside, you do not seem similarly inclined to demand precise evidence when Hamas makes dubious claims--interesting!).
I think that, at best, you have actually failed to understand what Dean's post was really about. What you identify as its "heart" seems non-central on my reading. I suspect that you are doing something worse, though: I suspect that you are demanding rigor in isolation, in order to excuse your own uncharitable engagement.
Well, you are under no obligation to like Dean's post, or to accept his or my evidence of anything. You are under no obligation to like or agree with any of this. What you are under some minimal obligation to do, is not to engage in ways that degrade discourse here. The way you have chosen to grouse about this particular AAQC does not meet that threshold.
Moreover, about a year ago, I warned you that your engagement on the topic of Israel was verging into "single-issue poster" territory. It's clearly something you care about a lot, for reasons I cannot fathom. I am hesitant to impose a topic ban on you, but I am pretty protective of the AAQC process, and the discussion we're having right now is doing a lot to persuade me that I should simply ban you from discussing Israel anymore.
Yes. Dean is an excellent poster with an absolutely stellar history of making quality contributions to the Motte. He is probably in the top 5 userbase favorites. You, too, have made some good posts in the past, which is one of the reasons I haven't banned you yet. But if you're gonna rain on the AAQC parade any time your ox gets gored, I'll count it against you.
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