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sodiummuffin


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 05 03:26:09 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 28, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
A summary of her original written statement to police was just released today. Her statement to police does not allege that she was unconscious or was forced to have sex or take ketamine. She describes her refusals as being respected:




“[Male Number 1] would eventually wake up” and “said he wanted to take part and asked about making it a foursome, to which [Jane Doe] said ‘Hell No.” Jane Doe rejected this request “because [she] knew that a foursome meant that [she] would have to take part in anal sex.” Jane Doe then remembered Male Number 3 leaving the room.




And them stopping as soon as she said that she no longer wanted to have sex:




“The threesome continued until at some point, around 5:45am, [Jane Doe] said [she] was tired and needed to turn in. At that point, both guys stopped the threesome with [her] as far as [she] can remember.”




This is how she describes the ketamine use:




Male Number 2 “asked [Jane Doe] if she wanted to do more Ketamine.” At that, Jane Doe remembered “that [she] had taken Ketamine at some point on the couch with [Male Number 1 and Male Number 2] during this night” but she could not remember “where or when that took place.”






Jane Doe thought that she “had already done Ketamine once so why not do it a second time.” “At that point, [Male Number 2] poured a line of Ketamine on his erect penis, implying for [her] to snort the line. [Jane Doe] snorted the line of Ketamine, which was a heavy amount of Ketamine.”




I'm guessing that her going to the police was under the idea that intoxicated sex is rape even if she verbally agrees. However that does not actually constitute rape under New York law, which is why no charges were filed. Note that, for those who classify drunken sex as rape regardless of the law, reading the statement summary makes it seem like some of the other participants were probably drunker than her:




The three engaged in a “threesome” involving oral and vaginal sex in a room of the fraternity. At the start of the threesome, Jane Doe described her intoxication level as “5 or 6 out of 10” and that she was “pretty ok with having this threesome.” The sexual conduct ended when Jane Doe “noticed that [Male Number 1] appeared really sleepy and was no longer fully erect.” She told Male Number 2 “[they] needed to stop having sex in order to make sure [Male Number 1] was ok. [Male Number 2] then stopped having sex with [Jane Doe].”


Male Number 1 said “he was going to take a nap and refresh himself” and “would eventually stumble his way from the couch to the bed.” While Male Number 1 slept, “[Male Number 2] began to dry heave as if he was going to vomit. Jane Doe “began to take care of [Male Number 2] by patting his back while also waking [Male Number 1] every few minutes to make sure he was okay.”




In other news, per TMZ one of the accused was just fired from his job at Wells Fargo.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This is an example of how results based on "controlling for confounders" are inherently dubious for complicated fields like social science. Fundamentally the researchers are coming up with a list of potential confounders (which must be legible across many individual cases, available to the researchers, etc.) and assuming that anything left after they're controlled for must be whatever signal they're looking for. I recommend this SSC post as a classic example of this, in which a study on the impact of bullying controls for bullies targeting unpopular disadvantaged kids using the Bristol Social Adjustment Guide. In this case this is what they controlled for:




The model presented in Table 6 includes only case characteristics that would have been known by judges and jurors: the number of prior convictions; the number of victims (included here as a binary variable for one victim/multiple victims); the nature of the defendant’s plea; the number of applied aggravators (as determined by the judge or jury); the number of mitigating circumstances identified; the number of defenses offered; and whether the victim was held hostage. (We also tested the significance of a concomitant sex crime and whether the victim was a law enforcement officer; neither of these factors was found to be a significant predictor of sentencing outcomes and are not included in the model shown below).




This misses nearly all the details of the case. They count the raw number of official "applied aggravators" but not what those aggravators are. They count the number of prior convictions but not their severity, the number of mitigating circumstances and number of defenses but not what those are or how convincingly they are argued. They check whether the victim was held hostage for some reason but not other similar specifics (chosen controls tend to be arbitrary and vary widely across studies on the same subject). The people making the decision have all the details that a set of controls can't possibly encompass, and we know the controlled factors differ by race, yet any systematic difference in their decisions is assumed to be a product of racial discrimination rather than everything they didn't control for.


Imagine a study trying to determine if the date of birth on a birth certificate is a biased indicator of age. Group 1 is stereotyped as being older than Group 2, does this influence the date written down when they're born? Naturally the study controls for age, with a multiple-choice question to choose an age range ("[B]: 20-29 years old"). They find that, while Group 1 does pick older age ranges, even after you control for age [B] respondents in Group 1 have an earlier date of birth than [B]s in Group 2. In fact, a later more sophisticated study outright asks for age, and finds that 25 year olds in Group 1 have an earlier birth date than 25 year olds in Group 2. Needless to say, this is a perfectly expected result even without any birth-certificate bias.




Interestingly, after controlling for race of defendant, the number of mitigating circumstances is no longer a significant predictor of decisions to impose death.




In other words "race" and "number of mitigating circumstances" correlate strongly enough that if they didn't put "mitigating circumstances" in their model any difference in sentencing from mitigating circumstances would be assumed to be due to racism. Naturally they don't consider whether the same thing might be happening with factors they didn't control for.




Second, the regression results indicate that case characteristics explain only a small proportion of the variation in the case outcomes analyzed here. Specifically, case characteristics alone explain only 9% of the variation in prosecutorial decisions regarding whether to seek death and 20% of the variation in juries’ sentencing decisions.






Unexplained variation documented in the results presented here suggest that other extra-legal and social factors –not captured by our statistical models – are playing an important role in death penalty case dynamics.




Interestingly their conclusion calls the variation not explained by their model "extra-legal and social factors". I don't think it's really "extra-legal factors" when the jury makes decisions using methods more complicated than "count up the number of applied aggravators".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
All three of OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI were founded by people who were already expressing concerns about AI wiping out humanity before modern AI existed. OpenAI started in 2015 as a nonprofit with the aim of making sure AI benefits rather than harms humanity. Anthropic was founded in 2021 in the GPT-3 era, before ChatGPT, by OpenAI employees who thought OpenAI wasn't taking AI safety seriously enough. They have been predicting AI risk continuously for years and they have had intimate experience with lesser predictions about AI advancement coming true. It is crazy to me how reluctant people are to believe they are sincere about worrying that careless AI advancement will kill them and everyone else, rather than it being a plot to make money when they're already rich.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Come on dude. EA organizations make and publish analyses of effectiveness all the time, it's their whole thing. Here is an EA blog post about bednet misuse I found in a minute of searching. As it mentions, Givewell commissioned Rethink Priorities to research use of bednets in fishing:




Based on the available data, Rethink Priorities estimates that only 1.2% of bednets globally are repurposed for fishing.




Imperfect use is already included in cost-effectiveness:




For example, GiveWell estimates that only 60% of recipients will use their nets consistently and correctly. After accounting for this, they still find bednets to be extremely cost effective, with every thousand nets saving a life in expectation. That 400 will not be used correctly— and that 12 might be used for fishing— is already baked into the calculation.




And of course there is a ton of research, including randomized control trials, showing distributing bednets is effective:




The typical study design involves randomly assigning groups of people to receive (or not receive) nets. Researchers then wait to see whether mortality and malaria rates differ between the two groups. There is never an assumption that everyone who receives a net will use it. And yet, such studies consistently find that nets reduce child mortality by around 17 percent.




				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


On his death, there were many in the Right who believed he could serve as the martyr that would finally force the Right to "get serious". This meant very different things to different people from retaliating for cancel culture, to aggressively implementing Trump's immigration agenda, to turning the US into an outright dictatorship and instituting the Day of the Rope. In the end, none of this happened since his death got bogged down in endless conspiracies.




No, none of that happened because...why would it? Politicians who want conservative policy are generally already doing their best to implement it, though sometimes their best isn't very good. It alienated some left-wingers and moderates to see celebration of the assassination be relatively mainstream in left-wing spaces, but it's not something that was going to cause a huge shift in either public opinion or politician's opinions on any specific issue. Being a left-wing assassin is already illegal. There's been more of a crackdown on antifa groups - probably the Autistici/Inventati Collective wouldn't have gotten designated as a terrorist group (and officially dissolved 4 days ago) if it wasn't for Kirk's death - but most antifa activity is already either clearly illegal or clearly legal and also antifa doesn't actually matter that much.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Regardless of what improvements can be made to daycare regulations, "childcare subsidies but only if you pay for someone else to do it" is distortionary and produces economic inefficiency. Even if you hypothetically fixed regulations so hard that paying for daycare was always cheaper than even the worst-paying jobs, it would still be paying people trading off between "more money so we can save up for a cruise" and "getting to spend time with my kids instead of in an Amazon warehouse" to take the non-utility-maximizing option.


Making the childcare subsidies less distortionary is not "more government" in any meaningful sense, especially since it's coming out of the same fund so it is literally the same number of tax dollars being distributed. And of course until such hypothetical improvements are made we get the current situation where daycare for a couple children often costs more than the entire take-home pay for one of the parents, but the government will pay people to use it.




And in a fair fight it's very obvious that daycares win economically because one person taking care of ten children frees up nine workers.




I think you are underestimating the overhead inherent in things like property costs, having a formal organization where people can sign up their kids, and compensating for the lower trustworthiness of multiple for-pay non-parent carers. Regarding the last I'm reminded of the statistic that non-relatives in the home are massively over-represented in abuse, while obviously some parents are abusive or neglectful it's less common. Not to mention the simple fact that more carers means a higher chance that at least one is bad. So if you're having strangers take care of your children there's an incentive to pursue overhead-increasing safety measures and expensive signaling like "all carers have a college degree in Early Childhood Education" or "daycare seems very well-maintained and high-class" to reduce risk, regardless of regulatory requirements. In any case, whether it can be made dramatically cheaper or not, subsidizing it over unpaid childcare is fundamentally paying people on the margin to choose it even if it would otherwise be the worse choice.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
We have a much better way of measuring whether it cancels out than the number of children per carer: the number of dollars. If some of the dollars instead go to "the construction workers who built the daycare building" and "the daycare administrators who handle the legal issues and overhead of taking care of other people's children" that doesn't represent an increase in efficiency. If anything having a lower carer to child ratio will on average correspond to lower quality (not to mention differences like how on average carers care less than parents do), so if daycare costs more than Alice's job pays she is paying more for lower quality. Rather than deciding on Alice's behalf that daycare must be more efficient because it has more children, we can let her compare her wages to the cost of daycare (not to mention other factors like how much she likes her job) and decide for herself. Except that, by subsidizing paid childcare, we distort this comparison and end up paying her to take the economically less efficient option. Equally subsidizing childcare whether she does it herself or pays a daycare to do it removes this distortion, letting her once again decide for herself based on her individual situation which is the best option.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
So if Alice and Susie are paid to take care of their own children they are welfare leeches, but not if Susie is paid to take care of Alice's child and Alice is paid to take care of Susie's child?


If Alice is paid less than the cost of daycare for working, would do a better job than the daycare, and would prefer spending time with her own children to spending time at work, then working that job is not economically efficient. Subsidizing paid childcare is thus an obvious example of creating economic inefficiency, and the stay-at-home parents who get screwed by their exclusion have understandably been complaining. (Subsidizing childcare in general isn't necessarily inefficient because the average person creates net-positive externalities which parents aren't paid for because it's illegal and impractical to sell your children into slavery or take out loans against their future earnings. Thus the job of creating people suffers from underinvestment.)


Now, it is possible that subsidizing daycare but not stay-at-home parents served a beneficial purpose despite the obvious economic inefficiency. The average first-world person has net-positive externalities but lots of people do not. I assume that is what some of the backlash against "welfare-queen"-enabling policies was, not just enabling people to be net-negative to societal productivity but paying them to create more people who will likely also be net-negative in a fashion that is obviously unsustainable because somebody has to actually pay taxes. Proposals to increase the fertility rate often take the form of reducing taxes rather than direct payments for this reason. However the new proposal would require that the spouse be working 35+ hours a week, which might be sufficient to make it net-positive despite it cutting out at higher income levels.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 31, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Fundamentally, nerds are more likely to hold non-mainstream political views because they are more likely to have picked up their political ideas from the internet, from other nerdy sources like political books, or from nerd peers who got their views from nerdy sources. Non-nerds are more likely to have gotten their views from sources like school, TV news, or non-nerd peers. Because non-nerd sources were more centralized they were more likely to be controlled by the political memeplexes that were already the most powerful, like mainline Democrats/Republicans, and not include niche or taboo views. The internet, on the other hand, favors views that are well-optimized for grassroots virality (with a secondary advantage for being good at taking control of website moderation, though this can also spark backlash). There may be psychological reasons why people favor the exact views they do, but first and foremost any analysis should keep in mind the viral nature of ideas.


Of course, this dynamic is changing as more of the population is heavily online, though there is inertia both on the individual level (people tend to stick with the views they are already committed to) and the group level (views that are already dominant in a social group have an advantage). Increasingly the nerd/non-nerd division is not between online and offline but between more and less nerdy websites (ordered something like political-blogs>Tumblr>4chan>Reddit>Twitter>Tiktok, though some of the biggest political blogs might have a less nerdy audience). As a result, niche and taboo views are increasingly popular among non-nerds, though the kinds of views which gain popularity on Tiktok are different from those that gain popularity from long-form political blogs. Furthermore, the internet provided a space for the development and refinement of once-niche views which in turn managed to seize control of (or at least influence) more mainstream institutions like news outlets and political parties. So even people who still get their views from the news and mainstream institutions tend to just be downstream of whatever internet memeplexes have managed to take over those institutions. This includes the linked article, which is essentially an extension of an internet flame-war where the ideology which now runs NPR is using it to take shots at those tech CEOs who have been converted by enemy ideologies.