slawrence
2mo ago
Does anybody here subscribe to Asterisk (the magazine)? Have you gotten issue 5 delivered yet, and if so how long ago?
No question too simple or too silly.
You asked for it!
slawrence
7mo ago
The NYT (and fellow travelers) likely would view the article as bunk, because it's clearly a physics/energy/environment paper written by a CS professor. This is one of the few checks that journalists are able to perform, and from what I've seen they generally do perform that check.
They might also note that it hasn't been peer reviewed, and that it isn't formatted according to the accepted standard for scientific papers. (As QuantumFreakonomics says below, it's more blog than paper.)
Whether they would note what, concretely, is wrong with the paper, I think depends on who else they managed to interview, and how persuasive those would be.
slawrence
7mo ago
As others have pointed out, we might also worry about (say) Fetterman's cognitive capabilities. Or the emotional stability of some of congress's younger members.
I think it's better to look at this as a symptom. It's not like U.S. voters got together and said "okay, we'd like a gerontocracy". Rather, there's some underlying dysfunction preventing these people from being kicked out. This dysfunction ought to be identified and rectified, not just because having senile officeholders is bad, but because there may be still worse consequences.
We observe that politicians remain in office despite obvious incapacity. Outlawing a single obvious incapacity is hardly a solution.
slawrence
8mo ago
Makes sense. I was more concerned about the other influences (I didn't know how involved Kai Bird was for instance), but yeah I've seen Nolan films before and while I've never really liked them, they're at least not political.
Must've blown your mind to watch Schindler's List then :)
slawrence
8mo ago
This is a request for recommendations. I am dimly aware that after (and during) the H-bomb development, there was a bunch of game theory being done (RAND comes up a lot) to understand the U.S.'s strategic situation. What are good things to read about this? I'm interested in all/any of: technical reviews, pop-level history books (in the vein of Rhodes's "Making of the Atomic Bomb"), and any source at all that discusses the Soviet equivalent of these activities.
slawrence
8mo ago
I was not planning on seeing it; this review has mostly changed my mind. Thanks!
I was particularly afraid that the movie would be a hagiography of the poor maligned Oppie, with an overlay of "trust the science" messaging. A fear amplified by reading some op-ed by Kai Bird (who has some second-degree connection to the movie I think?), about Oppenheimer, ending with a comparison to Fauci. (Would Fauci be flattered to know that he's being compared to "the nuke guy"? I wonder...). Gratifying to hear that it's a more normal movie.
On the other hand, I did not like Interstellar...
slawrence
1yr ago
For example, despite 50+ years of subjecting many different laboratory animals (such as dogs, monkeys, rats, mice, and so on) to enormous amounts of tobacco smoke – in one instance laboratory mice were forced to inhale the human equivalent of 62 packs of cigarettes a day – no animal has ever developed lung cancer.
As far as I can tell this is false. See here for early attempts (some successful) and here for a more recent review, including claims like:
However, in 1997 the first of a series of studies reported that exposure of strain A mice for 5 months to a mixture of 89% cigarette sidestream and 11% mainstream smoke, followed by a month recovery period in air, significantly increased lung tumor multiplicity in strain A mice (Witschi et al. 1997a, 1997b).
There may be adjacent true claims, like "inducing lung cancer in animal models via tobacco smoke is surprisingly difficult". But there's something of a chasm between "surprisingly difficult" (which would still be evidence of causation) and "not accomplished" (which is not the claim supported by recorded research.)
I think you mean well, but contrarianism is not interesting on its own.
slawrence
1yr ago
This is bizarre, because of how easy it is to get around. For instance, if instead of a 10 paragraph argument, I request a 2 paragraph argument, it does as requested. It's also happier if I put the request into an already existing chat, rather than just opening a new conversation with "please write 10 paragraphs".
Particularly because of the fact that requesting 2 paragraphs works, I'm not at all sure that there was a real attempt to special-case this thing in.
slawrence
1yr ago
Not sure what GP meant precisely, but I agree with the conclusion. In the case I'm most familiar with, D party paid for ads, before R primary, promoting the R candidate who was questioning the 2020 election results. IIRC the ads specifically mentioned the 2020 election.
I don't think the general form of strategy ("promote the opponent party's weaker candidate") is much of a blow to democracy---it's plausibly a boost to independent candidates long-term, in which case I guess I should be happy!
But to specifically claim, with one mouth, that "election denial is a thread to democracy", and "these guys are insurrectionists", and then with the other mouth to be promoting the supposed insurrectionists, is nakedly hypocritical. The conclusion I draw is that Ds (by which I mean "political class" Ds and "decision making" Ds, to be clear) do not actually believe that Jan 6 and the associated theories are anything like a serious threat to the country. If they did, they'd be desperate for the election deniers and insurrectionists and whatever else to lose, in primaries, as write-in candidates, to never get funding, and on and on.
slawrence
1yr ago
slawrence
1yr ago
Related to a theme that's been touched on in other recent Elowitter threads: the thing about Al Waleed specifically doesn't really bother me. There are many problems with the behavior of anglosphere media, but the biggest is that they consistently agree on what the correct Overton window is, with only small deviations. If Musk decides to censor criticism out of pettiness, or keep Trump off as a favor to Al Waleed, then these are all unfortunate, but a relatively small price to pay for breaking the alignment between Twitter's totally-not-censorship and everyone else's totally-not-censorship.
Of course, sometimes there'll be alignment---in this case there pretty clearly is with respect to Trump. But that's more of a coincidence than it was before, so as far as I'm concerned it represents a strict improvement.
More interesting/concerning to me is the implication that Morgan Stanley, BofA, etc. may have some ability to influence these decisions. Are there similar cases in the past of those banks being part of large deals (by financing the individual/corporation making the purchase), and then exerting meaningful control?
More directly, I'm not sure I believe even the claim that Al Waleed is influencing things. Isn't it more likely that Musk merely wishes to give the appearance of some sort of reasonable process---or even more, intends to use the Trump question as an early test of whatever process he intends to set up ("content moderation council" was suggested Friday but I can't find any more recent evidence that this is happening)? "Normal" timescales for setting up a meaningfully different moderation process would be what, 6 months or more? I don't think too much can be read into a delay of a couple weeks, and what I can read into it is reassuring. Restoring Trump has symbolic value, but provides little actual protection (particularly for non-Trump people) going forward. Setting up a moderation system that would not have banned him in the first place is far better.
slawrence
1yr ago
Largely agreed. I could still be swayed on euthanasia worries; I'm not sure why, but somehow it seems particularly bad to kill somebody and call it kindness. I haven't thought about it carefully enough to have proper thoughts though.
What does "last man" refer to? Not familiar with the phrase.
slawrence
1yr ago
Well, now I feel bad. My initial reply was dishonest, in that I did not accurately represent my thoughts on the matter. I attempted to construct a maximally charitable interpretation, as well as blindly accept almost-certainly-false factual claims. I wanted the comment to be "fun". In light of your reply---certainly not in the same spirit!---I regret this. Let me attempt to rectify the mistake, being both more honest and more literal:
The first is plainly false. There have not been plagues; there's been a plague (involving no frogs or locusts!). The transmission of that plague (COVID) is not facilitated by anything related to gay marriage. There's been one other disease, of minor import, whose origins lie before the introduction of gay marriage, and in a continent that contains exactly one country to have legalized same-sex marriage (out of 54). The effects of this disease have been minimal in the U.S.; it less qualifies as a "plague" than the common cold. (That was the point of my comment that you asserted was "mind-reading", by the way: that monkeypox is not actually a thing to deserve the name "plague", it only seems that way because the media is going through some sort of perverse "pandemic withdrawal". Thanks for that particularly uncharitable interpretation.)
The second is likewise absurd. Gay marriage was legalized in the U.S. several years after it became obvious that American ventures in the middle east were an enormous, largely unnecessary, resource sink. "Terrorist victories caused gay marriage" is more likely to be a defensible position here.
The third... shit, I already used the word "absurd". Let's go with "risible" this time around. WWIII hasn't happened. The zeal for Ukraine is shared by many countries that don't share the U.S.'s laws on same-sex relationships. For instance, Ukraine. Less glibly, say, Italy. Moreover, the assertion of a general pattern "left wins -> left becomes more active" (relevant both here and for the next point) is probably untrue. The greatest expression of leftist zeal in recent times came after a loss (2016), not a win.
The fourth is just an obvious M&B (which makes it the best claim so far!). The motte is "we managed to find O(1) instances of teachers doing bad things" (at least one of whom got sent to jail for it). The bailey is "this is happening at a large fraction of schools". This particular M&B is enabled by the standard linguistic ambiguity in sentences of the form "[broad class of things without quantifier] [predicate]". This isn't even an interesting M&B.
The best that can be said about these arguments is that, among the obviously untrue claims, they contain claims that are less obviously untrue, and even occasionally claims that have not yet been decisively proven untrue.
Look, none of this is surprising or interesting. An absurd strawman argument turned out to be low-quality: who could have guessed! As you hinted, nothing said here could affect an underlying debate over the consequences of legalizing SSM. But suggesting, for rhetorical effect, that "even the strawman was right", isn't going to lead to truth unless there's a non-deranged argument that the strawman was actually right. At best, you have to abandon the claim in a hurry when called on it; more often, you end up doing what you just did, and attempting to defend claims like "gay marriage caused WWIII".
How right were the strawmen? Taking the linked graphic way too seriously, I think it's clear that the strawman is supposed to be an assertion of a causal relationship, right? Not just the bare "if X then Y", which is vacuously true if Y is something guaranteed to happen eventually, like a plague, or teachers being dumb.
My scoring would be:
-
Various plagues. Partial credit here: it's possible that modern acceptance of gay (relationships/marriage/whatever) exacerbated Monkeypox. (The counterargument is that removing stigma allows Public Health Inc to intervene more effectively. And also that the continent on which Monkeypox is most prevalent is... not famously accepting of gay anything.) There's nothing resembling a causal relationship with COVID though, and since that one's the main reason "plagues" are on our minds these days, only partial credit. Also I'm being generous by interpreting "plague" literally and ignoring the "locusts and frogs" thing.
-
The terrorists will win. Trying to be charitable, our (U.S.) horrid withdrawal from Kabul was a "win" for the terrorists. I'm not clever enough to construct a causal path from gay marriage to that, though. No points.
-
Third world war. Again being charitable, we have an elevated risk of a third world war today. I can think of possible causal paths, but none that I can unironically believe, so no points here either.
-
Schools will begin to teach... First, I have to be extremely charitable in ignoring the obvious ways in which the statement "schools are teaching..." is at best grotesquely misleading. I think the sensible reading of this strawman is not "married gay people will force schools to..." but rather a sort of slippery slope. I think it's true that there's a slope there, and it was slippery, but it's also true that once we hit the "parents don't have the right to a say in what their kids are taught" level, it became an excellent electoral strategy to run against this stuff. We're not falling into a trough of unbounded stupidity. Nevertheless it is the case that legalizing gay marriage probably made this broad category of thing common, so yes, partial credit here too.
In summary: not very right. With this amount of stretching, I can give any terrible theory partial credit. Par for the course for strawmen, but let's not give credit where it ain't due.
slawrence
1yr ago
I've been reading this blog. Every two weeks, the person behind it (David Ownby) posts a set of 2-5 translations of Chinese-language articles, typically about or adjacent to politics. It's a nice little window into a world of political thought from which I'm otherwise separated by a pretty serious linguistic barrier. I suspect that I get a much better view of what Chinese public intellectuals are thinking by reading these articles, unrepresentative though they may be (since they're just chosen based Ownby's interests), than I would by reading articles about China in $NewsOutlet. (Also, it's just fun to read, somehow.)
Do people here know of other, similar resources, whether for China or other countries? Obviously the ideal thing would be to just be fluent in whatever languages, but realistically that ain't gonna happen, and also it can be difficult for an outsider to determine who the right people to read are. Ownby's site provides both the translation and some light context.
slawrence
1yr ago
An attempt to understand one small corner of this story: am I to believe that the current situation is that DFS knows of many instances of Lloyd's breaking the law, but is not going to go after them?
This does not seem like a stable equilibrium. Are all of these violations only of rules specific to New York, so that there's no information other regulators/prosecutors might be interested in? And somehow, Lloyd's doesn't suffer reputational damage (in the form of increased scrutiny by other regulators) as a result of it being public knowledge that they're conspiring with DFS to get off the hook for no good reason?
Another thing I'm not following: what does NRA need insurance for? Sure, every organization needs insurance for one reason or another, but this story is written as if NRA's need for insurance is particularly large. What's that insurance covering?
slawrence
1yr ago
Ataturk and Turkey sounds like interesting reading---and far enough from my usual American culture-war bubble that it might be possible to think about productively.
As a prequel, I'd love a clear explanation of what meaningful definitions of terms like "fascist" (or "national socialist", or "marxist", or for that matter even the neo-(liberal/conservative)s) might be. Every attempt I've come across in the past has been more oriented towards drawing connections between undesirables. I'd be interested to hear, from a less agenda-driven source, how these terms can be used in a useful manner.
Perhaps there's recommended reading that I've just missed?
For starters, what sort of thing is fascism? A table is a physical object. A family is a set of people. What's fascism? Is it a tribal label? Is it a coherent ideology? A (pseudo-)intellectual heritage, with a set of mandatory heroes and demons? A form of government? An economic system?
And then, is there a relatively mechanistic procedure by which one might decide if an individual, or speech, or policy, or symbol, is "fascist"? (Ditto for all those other terms.) The sense I've always gotten is that this is labeling is driven, in practice, by who the speaker/policymaker considers their heroes, rather than any concrete aspect of the speech or policy. What's the Motte?
The intro text for the culture war roundup thread still links to reddit's /r/TheThread. That should be moved as well, right?
The U.S. has a (small, I think) naval base in neighboring Djibouti: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Lemonnier.
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