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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30632 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 16, 2024

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Did The Motte already speak about this small story surrounding some controversy at psychology/psychometrics journal Intelligence? One of the, if not the, top journals for intelligence research to find publication as I understand it. Anyone privy to academic journal gossip?

Aporia reports "Mass resignations at the journal Intelligence: Numerous members of the editorial board resign after publisher installs new editors-in-chief."

The gist:

Intelligence is one of the few scientific journals where it is possible to publish work on controversial topics such as national IQ.

At the end of November, members of the editorial board were notified that current editor-in-chief Richard Haier would be stepping down and would be replaced by two new editors-in-chief. While editorships changing hands is perfectly normal in academia, two elements made this handover rather unusual.

The dirt:

the current editors were excluded from the decision of whom to select as new editor-in-chief, which was instead made by the journal’s publisher, Elsevier. The second is that the two individuals who were selected do not appear to be well-suited for the role. I will not name them...

Neither is currently a member of the journal’s editorial board, and neither lists “intelligence” among their main research interests on their faculty page.

There is also reason to believe that at least one appointee may not share the journal’s stated commitment to academic freedom as regards controversial topics.

Haier scheduled (forced?) to leave as EIC, publisher puts out job listings, then picks candidates that are perceived as unsuited to the listing and the role according to a number of editors.

Since learning about the new editors-in-chief and the process by which they were appointed, most members of the editorial board have resigned in protest. Some are now making plans to start a new journal. There is a general feeling that Elsevier has acted improperly.

The reporting is brief. A whole 7 paragraphs. I might even say it's incomplete.

Missing from the reporting includes a reason why the current editor-in-chief, Richard Haeier, is stepping down. Perhaps he is retiring. Who knows? I assume he was well-respected within the journal if his departure leads to mass resignations. He did a too-long Lex Friedman podcast appearance a couple years ago. It's probably good to have one public facing representative for intelligence research. I couldn't recall any big hubbub from Haeier's appearance on Lex Fridman's show, so I looked for some. Despite the episode reaching 1.8 million views, Google only showed me one mention of it in a "news" search. It was crammed into Quillete's weekly Bare Link Repository

Also not mentioned in the reporting is the names of the two new editors Elsevier has chosen to take over the journal. "I will not name them here." One commenter (brief /r/SSC discussion) suggests it is because naming the editors would make it harder to reverse the decision, but it is reported as if resignations are already through. It's done. So this could be a professional courtesy?

If this is a pressure campaign from editors and academics that seek to save the integrity of the journal they've invested in, then why choose Aporia of all places to spread the word? Quillette and The FP might report on this. If the new EIC's are the types to destroy the integrity of your journal why be courteous to them? The publisher wanted to change course no matter which way. Maybe Things Are In The Works and we'll hear more in time.

If everything is done and the journal considered lost by its editors, then I do reckon there's not much use crying about spilled milk to "heterodox" journalists. If the reported angle is accurate Intelligence made it through 2016-2023 only to fall now. Talk about timing.

I have no specific information.

See Scott's article on Kolmogorov complicity. Researching possible group difference in IQ is a third rail for the career in pretty much the same way as applying the scientific method to questions of religion was in 17th century Italy.

Elsevier is a relic of the print era, making tremendous profits on the back of the scientific community. They do not pay the academics who publish articles. They do not pay the academics who review articles. But they charge the institutions which wish to carry their journals (which are generally the same institutions who pay the people who work for free to make their journals work) an arm and a leg.

They basically profit from the fact that the economics of signaling and reputation are messy -- just like you will not simply build a university which is considered as prestigious as Harvard, you will also not simply build a journal as renown as Cell.

Given that the publishers are in it to extract a profit by providing a mostly redundant service, it comes at no surprise that they make publishing decisions where they try to minimize harm to their bottom line instead of pushing for academic freedom. If the eye of the twitter (now probably bluesky) mob turns to 'Intelligence' and decides it does not like their findings, the damage to Elsevier could be much larger than the money they are making from intelligence research.

So even if all the editors resign in protest and leave Intelligence the kind of empty husk that freenode has become after everyone migrated to libera chat following the takeover, it could still be in Elsevier's interests. Wokism had a surge under the first Trump administration and might make a comeback soon.

Or I could be wrong and it could all not be related to the topic of the journal at all.

See Scott's article on Kolmogorov complicity. Researching possible group difference in IQ is a third rail for the career in pretty much the same way as applying the scientific method to questions of religion was in 17th century Italy.

I had linked it as well, but axed that paragraph in an edit.

try to minimize harm to their bottom line instead of pushing for academic freedom

If they refund their prestige by, say, making all their prestigious domain editing expert volunteers leave they might also damage the bottom line. If the journal isn't financially viable they can try to turn it into a new kind of journal with a different mission. That would make sense.

However, since my post there has been a different assessment from two people that both have a history in intelligence research. Could be politics of other sorts that was sold as something else. Some clique angry one of them didn't get the job.

The new editors-in-chief have been named, Crémieux is tentatively optimistic, but that has to be weighed against the suspicious selection process and the reaction of the other editors.

I perpetuated fake news. This raises more questions. Why the big hubbub quitting then? Typical organization silliness?

Doesn't look like they've been named. Charles Murray and Cremieux vouch for the new, unnamed editors.

Ah, I see they're named in Murray's reply to his post. Darn you twitter.

Still perpetuated fake news. Shame.

Sounds like they shouldn't have a journal controlled by a large corporation as their field's schelling point! They should start their own journal with the old editors. What exactly does Elsevier control that matters, anyway? A name? The only thing would be some amount of prestige you can show to academia as a whole, or the university that employs you. Even then, from wikipedia it "is published by Elsevier and is the official journal of the International Society for Intelligence Research", so maybe the Society can just endorse the new journal.

Recently there has been some discussion in the media about fare evasion, and I thought in light of @WhiningCoil's comment on low trust societies it might be of interest to you all.

Over the past five years the fare evasion rate on New York City's bus lines has risen from 20% to 50%. while there has also been a similar (but less dramatic) rise among subway customers.

Recently the MTA commissioned a study to investigate the psychology of fare evaders and The New York Post has picked this up and mocked the project.. The study broke down different "personas" of fare evaders like a software product manager might. The NYP felt that this was inane as the obvious conclusion was that scofflaws were simply motivated by a lack of enforcement:

The pricy research – which comes as the authority is crying poverty and pushing for a detested congestion pricing plan — is being blasted by critics as a huge waste that will only tell them what anyone with common sense already knows about scofflaws....If we are going to hire a behavioral consultant, it will be to help change the behavior of a criminal justice system that has determined that fare evasion should have no consequences

I enjoyed this article by Manhattan Contrarian that criticizes the New York Post for completely ignoring race when discussing this issue, and pretending that lack of enforcement is the source of our woes.

But even the Post, in both its editorial and news pieces, is not willing to talk honestly about the association of race and fare-beating. Neither their news article nor editorial says a word about the race of the fare beaters. The subject is too sensitive even for them. But the problem is that until we can have an honest discussion about the association of race and fare-beating, it is almost impossible to address the issue.

I'll note as an amusing aside, that even the conservative Post uses an image of a White teenager for their illustration of a common fare evader.

However, I have to disagree with Francis Menton of The Manhattan Contrarian here when he writes the following:

To enable such a program to begin and to move forward, it is necessary for the issue of refusal to pay fares by race to enter the public consciousness. Someone first must collect systematic data and report it and point out what is actually going on. If it is too sensitive to report by race per se, then how about reporting by zip code? And then the newspapers and TV stations and podcasts and websites would need to pick up the story and make something out of it.

The racial makeup of fare evaders is perfectly well known of course and actually quite openly acknowledged so long as it is being done by the right sorts of organizations for the right ends.

I also wonder why the Post refuses to ask why draconian fare enforcement measures are only now needed? Somehow the MTA functioned perfectly fine with its easily-avoidable turnstyles decades ago. To relate it back to WhiningCoil's comment, I can only say "I think the bottom line, is this is just what a low trust society looks like."

I enjoyed this article by Manhattan Contrarian that criticizes the New York Post for completely ignoring race when discussing this issue, and pretending that lack of enforcement is the source of our woes.

I have to say that disagree with Manhattan Contrarian and am prepared to defend the New York Post's take.

If you start from the supposition that humans are (for the most part at least) individuals who exercise personal agency it doesn't really matter to the transportation agency what color the free-rider is or how they justify thier actions. The motives of the finance bro who can't be bothered to pay, the edgy teen jumping turnstiles for a thrill, and the homeless bum who just doesn't give a shit about your rules (but will shit on your floor), all ultimately boil down to the same thing. They do it because they beleive they'll get away with it. Thus the clear solution to fair-evasion/free-riders (a solution so obvious that only someone very educated or deep in the terminal stages of woke brain-rot could fail to see it) is don't let them get away with it.

As I was telling @The_Nybbler a couple weeks back, the reason for unchecked crime is that people have chosen to allow crime to go unchecked.

Or to riff off of your own post from down-thread, I think the reason New York has these sort of problems is that woke Democrats, and the people who elect them, are getting the system they deserve.

Want to live in a safe, well-ordered, high-trust society? Try prosecuting trouble-makers and promoting men like Daniel Penney instead of the reciprocal.

Thus the simplest solution to fair-evasion/free-riders (a solution so obvious that only someone very educated or deep in the terminal stages of woke brain-rot could fail to see it) is don't let them get away with it

There is a slow convergent point in most criminal justice studies is that law enforcement works by true arrest rate, not necessarily severity. The problem in the USA and Europe is that the disproportionate arrest rates of minorities is attributed to societal failures that one of the competing dominant political arms can use to attack the other in order to further their own political interests. So long as heterogenous outcomes are treated as failures requiring intervention, the meta will incentivize redefining heterogeneity to maximize resource capture.

The ROI of fare enforcement is the higher utilization rate of commuters when criminal vagrants are no longer an everpresent concern. The ROI of fare enforcement is the lower maintenance costs for repairs and cleanup when mentally ill homeless no longer defecate and trash the public space with the full expectation of someone else cleaning up their mess. The ROI of fare enforcement is the higher communal trust that the MTA will enjoy when it looks to be an organization that can steward its received resources with competence and clarity, instead of burying its head deeper in the sand about extant problems too inconvenient to address openly.

The Shopping Cart Theory is a great first-order test to determine prevalence of antisocial elements. Disproportionate amounts of resources are invested in cleaning up after noncooperatives, and even more are invested in resources to gently nudge them into being cooperative of their own recognizance or accommodating their preferences through rehabilitation and custodial services. Some people get off on being as difficult as possible because they fundamentally hate the people offering them help to begin with, and self-flagellating to absolve the noncooperative of their responsibility does not lead to greater resource utilization efficacy.

Just like how drug-testing welfare recipients does not meaningfully capture significant amounts of drug abusers or signalling immigration crackdowns does not actually catch many illegals, these programs are meant as signals to the noncompliant that mercy is no longer guaranteed. Less fare evaders will use the services on offer to begin with, and that is a perfectly acceptable outcome.

There is a slow convergent point in most criminal justice studies is that law enforcement works by true arrest rate

I think that there is a very real sense in which surety of consequences is a more effective deterrent than severity. IME lots of people who might roll the dice on a 5% chance of something very bad happening become an order of magnitude more careful/conservative/cooperative when presented with a 50% chance of something moderately bad happening.

The ROI of fare enforcement is the higher utilization rate of commuters when criminal vagrants are no longer an everpresent concern. The ROI of fare enforcement is the lower maintenance costs for repairs and cleanup when mentally ill homeless no longer defecate and trash the public space with the full expectation of someone else cleaning up their mess. The ROI of fare enforcement is the higher communal trust that the MTA will enjoy when it looks to be an organization that can steward its received resources with competence and clarity.

I believe that you, I, and the NYP are all in broad agreement here.

So long as heterogenous outcomes are treated as failures requiring intervention, the meta will incentivize redefining heterogeneity to maximize resource capture.

Maybe the answer is the Tom Paris rebuttal.

The ROI of fare enforcement is the higher utilization rate of commuters when criminal vagrants are no longer an everpresent concern. The ROI of fare enforcement is the lower maintenance costs for repairs and cleanup when mentally ill homeless no longer defecate and trash the public space with the full expectation of someone else cleaning up their mess. The ROI of fare enforcement is the higher communal trust that the MTA will enjoy when it looks to be an organization that can steward its received resources with competence and clarity, instead of burying its head deeper in the sand about extant problems too inconvenient to address openly.

That's without counting the effects downstream from Broken Windows Theory. Which despite mainstream academia trying for decades to tarnish it, is so obvious from observation of humans and human nature that it still holds a quasi-tautological position in my thinking on this.

The Shopping Cart Theory is a great first-order test to determine prevalence of antisocial elements.

It is often a private choice, and it is harder to notice if this has any downstream effect because ressources are deployed to clean up, as you've mentionned. I've started to prefer bus queues to point out antisocial elements. Who, when coming up to wait at a bus stop that has an obvious, clear, nonambiguous line of people queueing up for the bus, decides to ignore the queue entirely, without any mitigating factors (joining a friend being barely acceptable). There's sadly patterns in what kind of neighborhood and people ignore bus queues.

There's sadly patterns in what kind of neighborhood and people ignore bus queues.

Why is it sad?

Are you happy when someonetakes cuts in front of you to get a limited resource (like a seat on a filling bus)? When people line up in order of arrival there's a certain fairness.

Yeah -- not what I was asking about. The question is why it's sad that there are patterns in what kind of neighborhood and people ignore bus queues. To me this implies some 'ought'-style thinking that I can neither model nor understand. Should cultures or people all be identical? If not, doesn't that imply differences? Is the sentiment of the person to whom I was responding merely a reflexive genuflection toward prevailing political ideology, or did he mean something else by it?

I find it sad because it means some demographics are going to have to shoulder blame. It would be much easier if the blame was diffused and we could blame and address society wide problems, but ones that are targeted are harder to solve because they elicit a defensive attitude.

It's also interesting to note that for the bus queues, the demographics at fault are not exclusively those you're probably thinking about. Yes, they are overrepresented, but some of the most frequently offending demographic I notice are elderly women (of all races).

I find it sad because it means some demographics are going to have to shoulder blame. It would be much easier if the blame was diffused and we could blame and address society wide problems, but ones that are targeted are harder to solve because they elicit a defensive attitude.

I am torn on this.

On the one hand, the fact that offenders are disproportionately members of a certain demographic group makes it harder to gather the political support needed to crack down on fare evasion; this is, indeed, sad, sad because it is a reflection of how thoroughly the mind-virus of wokeism and its opportunistic infection of “disparate impact”-ism has infected the body politic.

On the other hand, what’s not sad is the fact that much-needed and even-handed punishment of fare evaders would affect certain demographics disproportionately. As I see it, the reputation or good name of one’s visible demographic group—race, sex, certain religions, perhaps class insofar as indicated through clothing and mannerisms—is a commons in the economic sense. However, unlike the economist’s favorite example of grazing land, the reputation of one’s demographic group cannot possibly be privatized to avoid the tragedy of the commons: liberals and wokeists (when tactically convenient) tend to argue for a form of “privatization”, viz. “treating people as individuals” and not stereotyping. But the fact remains that humans are too good at pattern matching and stereotypes remain stubbornly accurate in their predictions. And the brute fact also remains that some demographic groups do a good job of maintaining a positive reputation for the group, even at some individual cost, while others overgraze the commons and then complain about unfair treatment.

To be maximally fair, it truly does suck to be judged negatively by the color of your skin, or some other attribute you didn’t choose, when in fact you’re an upstanding pro-social citizen who bucks the stereotypes. The solution here is twofold:

  1. As the unjustly-judged individual, you should put pressure on your group—even if you didn’t choose to be a member of that group!—to do a better job of maintaining the commons, since it’s never going away.

  2. The system as a whole must punish all individuals swiftly, surely, and harshly enough that the calculus of “Well, I’m already going to be seen as $NEGATIVE_STEREOTYPE anyway; might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb” does not make sense.

As for the reason elderly women are often taking antisocial actions, I would hasard the reason is the same as anyone else. People, but men especially, are quickly thaught in life that them taking antisocial actions will usually make people around them angry. Sometimes this anger will turn to confrontation, and rarely (but sometimes) that confrontation will turn to violence. Minorities in majority white countries know that they could potentially turn it around if confronted by a white person by claiming it's racism so some of them abuse that. And elderly women (of any race) are the most oblivious demographic of all, because they are completely insulated from the consequences of antisocial actions as anyone confronting them immediately looks like the bad guy in the situation. If they had the physical ability to jump turnstiles, I have no doubt they would.

More comments

Within a nation, yes, I believe it's best for the nation to share a single culture. There can be lots of room for personal preferences some might like to sit in the back of the bus others near the front etc but I think nations are best when it's a smaller nation built around a shared culture universal to the nation. Multicultural nations should assimilate or subdivide.

For example I'm of German descent and I think the forced assimilation of Germans during World War I should happen to all the population groups in America. It would be a painful transition but the results would make the nation a better place.

I don't know that I'd characterize it as "reflexive genuflection," but the way I interpreted the statement was that it's sad that the specific pattern that's observed is sad (rather than that it's sad that there is a pattern at all, which is what the text actually says, which I took to be carelessness), because the prevailing ideology makes it difficult to solve the problem due to making the act of publicly noticing this specific pattern severely punishable. Now, I'm personally not sure that ignoring such patterns is meaningfully harmful to our ability to address the problem of the kinds of antisocial behavior that's being discussed, but certainly many people in this forum seem to believe otherwise.

I disagree that race is central here. Treating fare evasion as a complex socio-economic problem where you need to understand the demographics is overkill.

Like copyright infringement and unlike shoplifting, riding a mostly empty bus without paying when you would otherwise walk seems a mostly victimless crime. The extra amount of gas the bus requires to transport you is likely a few cents. As such, you will always have a substantial amount of people who see nothing morally wrong with it, whatever their racial distribution.

Rather than trying to understand why people think that way and how they could be persuaded to change their attitudes, the way to fix this is enforcement. For underground/metro/subway, you want barriers with card scanners. For busses, you could require everyone enter through the front door and pass such a barrier there. While we have seen a lot of AI systems fail spectacularly, I feel "detecting people entering through the rear doors of the bus and telling the bus driver to wait until they have validated their tickets" should be well within the realm of the doable.

The point of having fares in city public transports is not to pay for running the service. The point is to price the undesirables out. I vaguely recollect Scott mentioning that once BART put up barriers, this generally improved the feeling of safety for the customers, because the homeless and drug addicts which made people detest travelling on BART were not buying tickets.

This can be totally solved in color-blind mode, no need to bring up race. Of course, sooner or later the other side will bring up race, claiming that blacks are over-represented in subway fines (due to systemic racism, surely!), but the law&order side should stick to the color-blind mode here.

The issue isn't that race is central to fare evasion, but any difference, or perhaps even more importantly, the perception of differences in the prosecution of fare evasion, will be used to show that this is a racist policy.

I spent around seven years living in Seattle. There are a few gangs in Seattle, generally based in the southern area. As it turns out, most of the participants of the gangs happen to be black. This led to the black gang members being arrested and prosecuted for crimes in a disproportionate way compared to the overall population of the city. Seattle's solution to this was to disband the gang unit.

Seattle Police’s Gang Unit was revised to the Gun Violence Reduction Unit (GVRU) in 2020. GVRU does not actively track gang data within Seattle. GVRU conducts the majority of investigations regarding gun violence, whether or not its gang related. Gang specialist Gabe Morales says several local gangs are still active in Seattle. (https://www.kiro7.com/news/investigates/monday-530-gangs-still-plague-puget-sound-especially-among-teens/57BJEHV4IVA65IT2NHPZYI7LGM/)

The criminal irony of this style of thinking is that the (in the case of Seattle) primarily black gangs tend to commit violence predominantly to the black community itself. By not dealing with the problem of gang violence, the black community is being further set back. It's all in the name of "equity" in terms of punishment since there doesn't happen to be any prominent white gangs.

Now apply the same to fare evasion. The moment you have blacks being arrested for it, even if it is proportional to the population, you'll have the activists protesting that this is racially motivated. The end result is that certain crimes go unpunished -- and once that happens, it's defacto no longer a crime. It gets compounded when the individuals involved know they're not going to be prosecuted so they continue to break the law even more.

I spent around seven years living in Seattle. There are a few gangs in Seattle, generally based in the southern area. As it turns out, most of the participants of the gangs happen to be black. This led to the black gang members being arrested and prosecuted for crimes in a disproportionate way compared to the overall population of the city. Seattle's solution to this was to disband the gang unit.

This looks like it'd be a good basis for a reboot or spiritual successor of The Wire. Like how the then-contemporary issue of the drug war was used as good fodder for showcasing dysfunction in policing in the original series, the now-contemporary issue of DEI/socjus/idpol/CRT/etc. seems like it could provide plenty of fodder for showcasing dysfunction in policing today, as well as other related institutions like schools and local government. I just wonder if there's a David Simon today who's been covering local police work in some city for the past 15 years who has the depth and breadth of experience to now put together a show.

Or perhaps rather than something like The Wire, something more akin to Dr. Strangelove would be more appropriate.

I don't disagree. However, I doubt something like this would ever get made while the folks signing the checks are the same people cheering on the DEI, et al. initiatives.

Honestly, I'm hoping there's going to be sea change in the coming years and we get back to something more normal. There are so many changes going on all over the western world with people getting fed up with their governments. Who knows..?

For underground/metro/subway, you want barriers with card scanners.

They bypass them. By literally jumping the turnstiles, or entering through the exit gate when someone else is exiting. Passive enforcement won't cut it; you could use man-trap style doors in every entrance, but you're still going to need openable gates for handicapped, people with luggage, etc, and there aren't the personnel to operate those only manually. Also the man-trap doors are slower to use and will result in congestion.

I don't know about New York, but race does play a direct role in fare evasion in Philadelphia. A bus driver simply isn't going to give trouble to a co-racial free rider.

there aren't the personnel to operate those only manually

How come? There are 472 stations, they have, let's say, 1000 entrances, you need just 8000 cops to patrol each entrance round the clock. But you really need much fewer people: you only have to patrol the stations with the highest rate of fare evasion and you don't have to do this round the clock.

There's actually more than 2000 entrances. There are less than 1200 MTA police officers. And 36,000 in the NYPD. The cost of having enough of them to stop farebeating would be staggering.

An individual in a central control room (who can eventually be replaced by AI) can monitor dozens of man trap doors on CCTV to allow those with luggage or in wheelchairs to come through. This isn’t intractable.

… right up until roving gangs vibrant urban youth groups start smashing the CCTV cameras for laughs. Or even just start loitering around the station until someone with luggage or a stroller comes, and then they swoop in and prop open the gate so subsequent thugs delinquents persons of alternative socialization can stroll right through

Once in Shanghai there was a problem with my subway card. The scanner at the turnstile would not let me out for some mysterious reason. I went to the nearby help desk which is an enclosed room with glass panels you can talk to workers through. I gestured to the turnstile with my card and the woman at the help desk gestured me to use a nearby turnstile. It was unlocked when I reached it. She must have unlocked it for me.

There are simple systems that allow for manual override but are not susceptible to gangs of urban youths bypassing. Forethought and will the size of a mustard seed would let us have this in America. It's not like special Chinese-only DNA let them set up this handy and secure system. We are choosing to live this way and can choose to stop anytime.

Sure, but this is the general crime spiral. Some percentage of subway fare evaders will give up because they do not want to smash the cameras, are too short, don’t have enough time, etc.

This is a technical problem. There are turnstiles you can't jump over. A waist high rotating bar can't stop a palsied child from crossing it. 7 foot high one-way turnstile on all entrances and exits are impossible to slip by.

  • For busses, you could require everyone enter through the front door and pass such a barrier there. While we have seen a lot of AI systems fail spectacularly, I feel "detecting people entering through the rear doors of the bus and telling the bus driver to wait until they have validated their tickets" should be well within the realm of the doable.

Having everyone enter through the front of the bus is bad because it slows the travel time of the bus considerably and also makes it more of an interference to other traffic. Minimizing stopped time is very important for effective transit.

The better strategy is just very visible and frequent fare enforcement. Teams of inspectors rove the bus lines and bust people for not paying, in a very visible and obvious and shaming way. Yeah maybe you still have serial cheats or whatever but you get average people to think there are consequences and more importantly not feel like they're a sucker for paying a fare.

For busses, you could require everyone enter through the front door

This isn't standard? It's how it works on the buses here in Anchorage: enter at the front door, pay at the little podium next to the driver, take your seat, and exit out the door further back (about midway down the bus) at your stop. No tickets, nobody sneaking on, or past the driver, only one employee on the bus — the driver.

Yeah that only works for a limited population, it's too slow to handle the volume buses get in new york.

I think that's probably the key. Bus size and usage here in Anchorage is a minuscule fraction of that in large cities.

Some busses have a door in the front and a door in the middle. No real way to monitor those ones. Not like the driver is going to notice you walking in throughout the rear door and stop his route to demand you leave.

Some busses have a door in the front and a door in the middle.

Yes, that's how they work here: the front door is for getting on, the middle for getting off.

No real way to monitor those ones.

Our bus drivers seem to do it just fine. A big mirror that lets them see down the aisle and pretty much the whole bus interior.

Not like the driver is going to notice you walking in throughout the rear door and stop his route to demand you leave.

That's exactly what they do.

If the change is over the last five years, surely race can be of only marginal relevance in explaining that change?

Possibly, but not necessarily. Say you have an original population of fare evaders that are disproportionately one race, but represent only a small fraction of that demographic in the city. If the larger population of that race comes to believe (almost certainly accurately, in a case like NYC over the last several years) that lack of enforcement is at least partially contingent on race, why wouldn't they take advantage of the "unofficial" policy for free fare? People of other races recognize that they are more likely to be enforced-upon, and so do not change the rate at which they dodge fares.

Surely one can think of a series of events in the last five years that changed how law enforcement behaves around certain demographics, especially in large metropolitan areas.

Somehow the MTA functioned perfectly fine with its easily-avoidable turnstyles decades ago.

I think you are missing the mta lore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_New_York_City_Subway#Crime

The subway was in seriously bad shape a few decades ago

I gotta know. What is actually the ROI on fare enforcement? Here's an article from the AP written March this year talking about NYC sending an "additional" 800 NYPD officers specifically to check for turnstile fare evasion. According to the NYPD Police Officer benefits page the starting salary for an officer is $58580/year and grows to $121589/year at 5.5 years of experience. So the total cost to the city of just these officers is somewhere between $47M and $97M per year (assuming all are between 0 and 5.5 years experience). The fine for jumping a turnstile starts at $100. So in order to justify the cost of these officers they are going to need to ticket between 470k and 970k people. According to that same AP article 28k people had been ticketed so far that year. Here's a Gothamist article from September this year that claims about 70k tickets were issued for fare evasion in the first 6 months of the year. So those 800 officers turned a presumptive 28k tickets/3 months into 42k tickets/4 months, a gain of 14k tickets (or, $1.4M in fines). Set this against the payout of NYPD salaries in the neighborhood of $12-24M. A steal! As long as you're the NYPD.

This is just the usual "haha we've made it impossible to enforce the law, better give up and let us do whatever we want forever."
The same argument could be (and is) made for bike theft: the value of the bikes stolen in a 6 month period is far less than the cost of catching and prosecuting the bike thieves. Better just to give up and let it happen, right?
This argument is of course only deployed by people who approve of the criminal element in question. Even if the math wasn't incorrect, it should be rejected as a bad faith manipulation attempt. There should be a sudden brutal crackdown on both the criminals and the anarcho-tyrants supporting them, and when we are finished with them the problem will be solved. The long term reduction of bike theft by obliterating the theft rings, fences, and their leftist enablers is worth far more than the few months of stolen bikes the criminal accomplices would prefer to compare the enforcement cost to.

The cost of fare enforcement will decrease as over time, so why not use the cost of fare enforcement in Tokyo as a baseline for our cost comparison? But the value of enforcing law on the lawless (and their supporters) is what really matters.

so why not use the cost of fare enforcement in Tokyo as a baseline for our cost comparison?

Because New York isn't full of Japanese people.

Fun fact: Subway gates don't even have turnstiles in Japan. You can just walk right through without paying. I think they beep or something if you don't pay, but I've never seen anyone just keep on walking, so I don't know if they keep beeping.

The gates slam shut if they detect you trying to walk through without paying. I've occasionally been in a rush and slapped down my card without checking if there was money on it - having the gates knock you back in an instant is a pretty big shock.

You're looking at this wrong. The policy isn't expected or intended primarily to pay for itself via fines. The policy is intended to pay for itself by deterring fare evaders from evading fares i.e. a visible police presence will encourage people to buy tickets who otherwise would not have bought them.

Let's take the middle of your cost estimate, $72m/year. Per the NYT, the typical New York subway fare is $2.90. To get a return on investment, in the course of a calendar year, 24,827,586 passengers who would otherwise have avoided paying the fare need to pay the fare. That works out at 68,021 passengers a day.

3.6 million people ride the NYC subway every day, of whom (again per NYT) 14% refuse to pay the fare - 504,000 people a day. If a visible police presence convinces 68,021 of those people (a mere 13.5% of the total number of daily fare evaders) to pay the fare, the policy has paid for itself. Sounds doable, frankly.

Using the lower bound of your cost estimate works out at 44,402 passengers a day (8.8% of people currently evading fares on the subway); the upper bound, 91,639 (18.2%). None of these sound like fantastical pie-in-the-sky figures: at most, you have to persuade a fifth of people currently jumping the turnstiles not to do so, and you're done. Anything above that is pure profit.

There are downstream effects that go beyond the financial loss. Basically not enforcing laws for petty crimes can encourage lawbreakers to escalate to more serious crimes. More police means more natural surveillance and deterrence for opportunistic lawbreakers.

You may as well ask 'why pay for any police to enforce any crime that doesn't directly recoup cash into the cities coffers?'

I notice that that cost question never gets asked when the time comes to prosecute Daniel Penny.

Who? Whom?

Fare evasion costs the MTA $600 million a year, according to the Post article. The ROI, of course, depends on how much evasion the enforcement stops, which is hard to know.

Also, not enforcing rules against fare evasion makes honest people into chumps. Why should Joe Commuter pay $116/month for the subway when Johnny Lowlife rides for free?

So in order to justify the cost of these officers they are going to need to ticket between 470k and 970k people.

Wait, you were being literal when you asked about the Return on Investment? I'm sure that the 11 Insanely Corrupt Speed-Trap Towns have great ROI figures for their police forces.

The "return" for proper policework is non-financial.

What is actually the ROI on fare enforcement?

Keeping actual psychopaths off the subway. Not putting innocent people through the kafkaeque nightmare of defending themselves and then having the state come down on them like a brick of shit.

Enforcement changes habits. Right now 'everyone' does it, so everyone does it. If 'everyone' stopped doing it, it'd feel weird to do it, and many fewer people would do it, and enforcement costs go down. It's like smoking, or littering, or drunk driving. https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-the-war-on-drunk-driving-was-won/

Two underappreciated ideas stick out from this experience. First, deterrence works: incentives matter to offenders much more than many scholars found initially plausible. Second, the long-run impact that successful criminal justice interventions have is not primarily in rehabilitation, incapacitation, or even deterrence, but in altering the social norms around acceptable behavior.

You don’t need to catch all of them. You need to catch enough to make turnstile jumping too risky for the potential gain. If you’re catching 28K, you’re probably missing at least the same number of people maybe more.

What is actually the ROI on fare enforcement?

It's not about the money, it's about sending a message.

I can only say "I think the bottom line, is this is just what a low trust society looks like."

Luigi's CEO assassination has been a real statement piece to drive your point.

Other than money, the US lacks other recognizable traits of a developed nation.

High violence, low trust, unreliable social safety nets, bad health outcomes...... you name it. The US has money, and that's about it. Yes, being in the top 1% of America makes for an amazing life. Guess what ? That applies to every half-developed nation.

This is how ChatGPT outlines what living in a developed nation feels like:

Aspects of a Developed Country from a Quality of Life Perspective

  1. Healthcare

    • Universal access to high-quality healthcare services.
    • Advanced medical facilities and technologies.
    • High life expectancy and low infant mortality.

  2. Education

    • Free or affordable access to primary, secondary, and tertiary education.
    • High literacy rates and skilled workforce.
    • Emphasis on research and innovation.

  3. Economic Stability

    • High GDP per capita.
    • Low unemployment and inflation rates.
    • Strong social safety nets and pensions.

  4. Infrastructure

    • Efficient transportation systems (roads, public transit, airports).
    • Reliable utilities (electricity, water, internet).
    • Modern urban planning with sustainable practices.

  5. Safety and Security

    • Low crime rates and effective law enforcement.
    • Political stability and strong governance.
    • Protection of civil rights and freedoms.

  6. Environmental Quality

    • Clean air, water, and well-maintained public spaces.
    • Access to green spaces and recreational areas.

  7. Social Equity

    • Gender equality and inclusivity.
    • Access to housing and elimination of poverty.

  8. Work-Life Balance

    • Reasonable work hours and paid leave policies.
    • Opportunities for cultural, leisure, and recreational activities.

(Note: it gave me a couple of woke talking points. I deleted those)

I've personally striked out what America fails at. It's pretty damning.

  • -19

Don't spam threads with LLM output. ChatGPT answers aren't forbidden, if there is some context or purpose to them, but "I was too lazy to write up my thoughts myself so I had ChatGPT do it" is what every lazy college student is doing nowadays. This place is not for lazy college students half-assedly submitting their homework.

I did only use it to get a list of points that add up to a first world QOL.

The actual value add (the strike throughs) and the core point (Luigi's assassination as major anecdote for America's low-trust-society-ness, America feeling like a developing country) are all mine.

But point taken. Not a lot of 'human' places left on the internet. No point in turning this one into a vanilla slop-fest.

PS: and before I get accused for using Chatgpt, this is the first time I've done that. My point-wise markdown writing style is my own. That chat gpt uses the same style is coincidence.

I have surprisingly few feelings about the object level discussion here, but why must you impugn the good name of vanilla?

Vanilla isn't an insult, Vanilla is a sign of absolute victory. Made from the 2nd most expensive spice, vanilla is exquisite. So much so, that we normiefied it. We now have ways to make imitation vanilla and once the inner bean is used, we can still extract by preserving it in alcohol.

English is the most 'vanilla' language, because the Britain/America won. Fries are vanilla sides because nothing is better. Chatgpt's writing style is vanilla, because that exact sentence pattern dominated western speech for a century.

Vanilla becomes an insult, yes. But, that's because it's already won. High quality vanilla bean is genuinely top-tier.

And why should anyone care what a jumped-up matrix multiplier trained on the output of the Internet thinks?

That's a tired argument. For near-consensus topics, Chat-gpt gives acceptable answers. I could've done the legwork and found this exact same points elsewhere, but I ain't doing that for free. So you get Chatgpt.

  • -17

I doubt I would trust any actual "consensus" on this topic, I'm certainly not going to trust ChatGPT. If you'd found the points elsewhere, I could tell you exactly why the definition was not to be trusted, but since you used ChatGPT as your authority, there is no authority.

but I ain't doing that for free

You don't have to post if a particular comment would cost you too much effort to be bothered to research and then type up.

And I'm not convinced that the median internet opinion fed into ChatGTP is a consensus view worthy of consideration. They poisoned these poor LLMs with all of reddit, etc. Their "consensus" opinion could be overly online nonsense. How indeed should I thicken my pizza sauce.

fair fair.

The US does have a European-sized welfare state, has crime rates which are not globally that high, has a high life expectancy and low infant mortality with universal access to emergency medicine(seriously a driver of US healthcare costs is the constitutional right to access emergency medicine and then just not pay it), and has universal access to college education(which, if you’re willing to accept the kinds of conditions college kids have historically lived in, is actually fairly affordable). There’s a housing shortage, but it’s a lot better than other Anglosphere countries.

Crime rates are geographically constrained in the USA rather than an everpresent reality. Much ink can be spilled about general observations, but the simple fact is that if you don't live near blacks, crime will be a much lower problem. The USA has enough space for crime-worried californians to flee to economic centers in texas or florida, while economic activity concentrated in only a few cities filled with racialized criminality limits the options for Europeans.

Racialized crime is a solvable problem; black people don't like crime either as clearly evinced by their disapproval of 'defund the police'. The problem is liberals who use disparate impact as a means to castigate their proximate political opponent instead. There is of course the grift of NGOs and the like to extract sympathy from do gooders, but that happens on both sides of the aisle and so its a wash.

Racialized crime is a solvable problem; black people don't like crime either as clearly evinced by their disapproval of 'defund the police'.

I recall polls as such. Perhaps blacks disapprove of "defund the police," insofar as they may imagine themselves as the victims of crime.

However, it's a different story when it comes to blacks being disproportionate perpetrators of crime—blacks are likely not as enthusiastic about law and order when it comes to imagining their brothers, sons, nephews, etc. doing prison time for robbing convenience stores or gas stations, participating in lootings, harassing/assaulting people in subways and other public spaces, beating up Asian and white classmates with their other black friends, punching Asian grandmothers on the street.

I'm not accusing you of this, but I'm not a fan of using the opinions of blacks to subtract/add legitimacy from/to "defund the police"/"law and order". It reinforces the notion that Black Lives Matter More, and has the vibe of DR3. Mainstream conservatives, such as /r/Conservative, are always two-soyjaks-pointing when it comes to blacks being (at least superficially) supportive of things like "law and order," though.

And why does it matter? Until we bite the bullet and actually go into those areas arrest and jail those committing the crimes, they cannot have the save communities, let alone prosperous ones, they say they want. It’s always been a problem for the liberal democratic state — we often know exactly what the problems are, and exactly how to solve them, but because the solutions require short-term pain they can never be implemented. They probably wouldn’t like tge process of law and order policing, they wouldn’t like to see black men going to prison for decades. They will like not having to ask the clerk to unlock the plastic doors so the6 can take groceries off the shelves. They will like not needing bars on their windows. They will love it when the lower crime rates mean businesses choose their neighborhoods to open up shop.

Crime in the US is a disproportionately but not exclusively black problem- US whites have much higher homicide rates than Europe, and indeed higher than Canada. It’s also not the case that crime is a mostly blue state problem- if anything, it’s more common in blue cities in red states, while there remain many hotspots in other locales.

Red states are disproportionately black, with blue cities in red states blacker than blue cities in blue states. Everytime liberals (so not specifically referring to you) smugly post that red states are stupider and more criminal than blue states they end up shooting themselves in the foot because it goes back to how large the black population is.

The ultimate test of this experiment will be the outcome of St George county in Louisiana after it split from Baton Rouge county. Richer whiter (but still having black residents) zone splits off from failing black county because the whites wanted better schools. With less whites around will the blacker Baton Rouge be free to prosper and flourish without the evils of racism tainting their progress? I posit no, but the anticipation of the upcoming crash is itself part of the journey.

Well yes, Baton Rouge itself does not want St George county to split off for that very reason. And the prototypical blue cities in red states, like Austin and Asheville, are doing at least OK.

Very poor governance associated with extremely large- and often outright majority- black populations is a major problem for these cities; Jackson and St. Louis are not doing well on non-crime related metrics either. Very white red states often do quite well on things like education and crime. But sun belt states maintain high crime rates and rural whites in the south have extremely high crime rates by first world standards- while blacks have a big portion of the blame, there are still other things going on.

if anything, it’s more common in blue cities in red states.

This probably deserves some exploration in itself, but annecdotally there seems to be a flow of bad actors towards places where they will be tolerated, and this is most visible in places where you have an island of "tolerance" in otherwise "intolerant" territory.

There’s probably a confluence of factors, with particularly bad local governance being a factor in lots of cases(Jackson’s water crisis was resolved by the corps of engineers in a matter of hours, but had lasted for weeks with no progress; you don’t get that with even minimal competence from the local authorities). Everything in New Orleans and St. Louis is horribly mismanaged, an adversarial relationship with the state doesn’t help but cant be blamed entirely(Austin seems to do fine despite its frequent and visible fallouts with the state).

Much ink can be spilled about general observations, but the simple fact is that if you don't live near blacks, crime will be a much lower problem

Proximity to black people is not the issue. My reasonably affluent suburban nieghborhood is easily 20% black and im not worried about my nieghbors.

Crime rates are geographically constrained, but that constraint is to the above-mentioned subset of urban areas where the Democratic Party has managed to impose one-party rule. IE places like Baltimore, St Louis, Chicago, and Seattle.

My reasonably affluent suburban nieghborhood is easily 20% black and im not worried about my nieghbors.

So is mine, but they're pretty wealthy black people. Many of the older ones moved here to get away from shittier co-ethnics. Even then, though... there's a neighboring town which is also wealthy and also has a considerable number of black people, and the few murders there were disproportionately committed by black people (specifically black men, if it needs to be said), including wealthy ones.

Common regression-to-the-mean W.

I was going to say that it reminds me of how wealthy blacks underperform poor whites (and especially poor Asians) on standardized tests. However, to my pleasant surprise while looking up the previous link, I Noticed that Random Critical Analysis also has a post "Racial differences in homicide rates are poorly explained by economics," where he concludes: "Race is a strong predictor of homicide rates at a county level. It predicts better than the poverty rate, median household income, racial segregation, income segregation, education rates, and so on and so forth."

Ah, but does it predict better than percentage of households headed by a woman?

Indeed it does, if we consider the percentage of households headed by women to be equivalent to single motherhood rates.

The literal next sentence after the brief blurb I pasted reads: "The single-motherhood rate is a close second though" (second to % black, in a bivariate correlation table). As shown in Section 3, black remains a significant predictor on top of single motherhood rates; that is, the black effect on homicides is robust net of family poverty and single motherhood rates.

Not that I necessarily believe blacks should be granted "credit" for family poverty and single motherhood rates as to excusing their high homicide rates. Akin to how we wouldn't adjust for homicide rates using battery rates. The same combination of heritable traits such as low IQ, high impulsiveness, and high time preference would result in high family poverty, single motherhood, and homicide rates.

Yeah, if the U.S. has a housing shortage than every country has a housing shortage.

I'm hard pressed to think of any single country where a person can get more square feet per hour of labor than the U.S.

Like, @The_Nybbler (apologies for pinging you twice in rapid succession) i dont care what your glorified markov chain has to say. And even if i did, i would dispute the assertion that it is "The United States" that is lacking and not "a distinct subset of urban areas where the Democratic Party have managed to impose one-party rule".

America is not fucked up, Chicago is fucked up, Oakland is fucked up, and Baltimore is... well... Baltimore.

The US does have high life expectancy and low infant mortality though. And most of the issues are caused by obesity not healthcare here in any case. Its not the highest certainly, but that isn't your criteria. Likewise the US does have a fairly robust social safety net, and low crime rates. It also has very little actual poverty. It certainly also has a lot of opportunities for leisure and recreation.

I'm by no means in the top 1% but the US is an excellent place to live.

Just comparing to places I have spent plenty of time in, it's better than the UK, better than France, better than China, India, Pakistan, Brazil, Mexico, Spain, Russia. Maybe the Nordics might beat it, maybe, but I didn't spend enough time in Sweden to assess.

I remembered an article comparing America’s gun crimes rate as the best among developing nations but high for developed nations. Certainly gave me food for thought.

A New York Times article currently entitled “The New Climate Gold Rush: Scrubbing Carbon From the Sky” (modern NYT headlines tend to shift with the winds of likes and comments) discusses the innovative corporations and world governments looking to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere for profit. On its surface, this is a potentially radical net-positive accelerant for humanity driven by its financial upside, in the same tradition as asteroid mining, child tax credits, and electric vehicle subsidies.

The comment section gives us a valuable insight into how the online progressive retiree set (many of them early architects and evangelists of the modern Left) see this news within the context of their worldview… and here it’s particularly interesting. I want to highlight one comment that’s emblematic of the general tenor there:

People want this to work because they don’t want to do the hard work of changing. That’s a mistake. Aside from the elusiveness of the technology itself, the current fossil fuels system is literally destroying our planet. We have to have the willpower to stop doing that.

Here we see plainly spoken a bedrock concept underlying many political ideologies that rarely breaches the surface: apocalyptic socio-political shibboleths cannot be resolved without the perceived antichrist(s) paying the cost. The motte: “There is a crisis all humanity should unite in resolving…” The bailey: “… only insofar as it upsets people I dislike.”

This response also seems to chalk up another point in favor of the “modern-politics-as-religion” thesis, with a (literally) puritanical association (even causation) between hard work and salvation. Those who circumvent this process are perceived with the equivalent spite of their ancestors imagining a sinner who never feels the fires of hell (or Salem, as it were). As a great Mottizen (@CrispyFriedBarnacles - thanks @ActuallyATleilaxuGhola) once reminded us, “Massachusetts was founded by, functionally, the Taliban.”

Yeah, the reason behind the left-wing rally behind environmentalism was never about environment itself, but about obtaining another method of doing the Revolution.

If you ever spoke with committed climate leftists, you quick understand that any discourse is not related to the environment, the economic or tech tools to use, energy, consumption etc, but it is about how to change people to achieve their particular brand of Socialism of the day.

Bonus point if you speak with left-wing climate women: At least men will earnestly tell you that is about the Revolution, while women will shut out angry rants about Mother Earth or being attuned with nature or whetever. A telluric and Dyonisian cult with socialist characteristics, made by people that, without modernity and capitalism, would be better doing literally any other job.

For what it's worth, they seem much more honest about it these days than they did when I was young. The misanthropic Malthusians have been marginalized on the mainstream left in favor of the honestly-concerned-about-the-apocalypse types, who are, funnily enough, typically more moderate in their views on the matter.

I bumped into Can the working class resist “green capitalism”? earlier today, linked from Reddit's Left without edge which seems to confirm what you are saying.

In this context, mere environmentalism, that is, environmentalism without revolutionary will, does nothing more than pave the way for the chaotic management processes implemented by governments at capitalism’s service.

But then @anon_ replied with his experience of people genuinely caring about the environment for its own sake. Err, the article that I linked is full of passion, so much that there is room for its author to genuinely care about the environment. Where I get confused is that the article lacks practical answers. Ordinary people like stuff. Get rid of capitalism and advertising and ordinary people will still crave enough stuff to leave us searching for practical answers. Who will tell them "No!" ? Who will have that power?

The ecological problem we face is not essentially a technical issue, but a political conflict, and it must be treated as such. It is a problem that the people must take into their own hands and hearts.

People will take the problem into their hearts, and then what...

I foresee passion, without clarity or practicality, ending badly, whether the primary goal is revolution or ecology.

I don't have time to write a thoughtful reply right now what with holiday chaos, but thanks for the link.

This has not been my experience living in a half dozen left-wing circles. As much as you can't believe it, most of them genuinely care about the environment for its own sake. To the extent that they rant against capitalism destroying the planet, the causality goes the other way.

Of course I disagree, but at least get a handle on it.

Climate Change Solutions: An Opportunity To Subvert Capitalism and a million articles like it would seem to disagree. Does anyone have the link with the green party woman talking about how they won't need to abolish money because everything you could use it for will be rationed or banned by the state on environmental grounds, from shower time to travel?
Edit: here

I definitely agree on the more reasonable & moderate left-wing groups that dominate the PMC and STEM, but it's not that rare in the social sciences and adjacent university staff.

To be honest, this is a perspective I have never really understood. It just goes at right-angles to me - I don't understand the moralisation of climate change. Kevin Rudd famously said that climate change is the great moral challenge of our generation, and this lens just doesn't make much sense to me.

From where I'm standing, climate change seems like a pretty straightforward engineering problem. There isn't really a hard normative debate about it - we mostly all agree on what we want in terms of the environment. The issue is just how to achieve it, and that seems like a technical problem par excellence.

We can debate culpability or responsibility all we want, and that's fine, but that's also largely irrelevant to solving the technical issue. We can talk about moral transformation or changing attitudes ("the hard work of changing"), but that is also largely irrelevant to solving the issue. It's a technological problem! The value of changing social or political attitudes is only insofar as they might help us solve the technological problem! That's it!

It makes me feel like a lunatic - or else, everybody else is.

It's also an economical and political problem. How are we funding the (technological) solution and who should bear the cost?

Depending on the technical solution the economic and political issues can be minor or major.

Doing carbon capture makes it all a major issue, since that will cost trillions or tens of trillions.

Sulfur dioxide seeding or a sun shade only cost tens of billions. Which is within the funding range of some existing US billionaires.

Sulfur dioxide seeding or a sun shade only cost tens of billions.

Do you have a good source for the costs of geo-engineering? Unfortunately, currently the field looks like an absolute shitshow to me. It's at the same time full of taboo and hype, riddled with known/unknown unknowns and (to my knowledge), foundational research is sparse and actually engineering is non-existent.

I'm especially interested in details like the delivery mechanism in stratospheric SO2 seeding. What does the engineering look like? Minor altitude-boosting redesigns of the 737, or is it a from-scratch design of a "U2-cargo"? Do we build 100 or 10 000 new airframes?

Same with marine cloud brightening. Is that 1000 drone boats with a snow-cannon spraying sea water, or 100 000 platforms each carrying a gigantic stack-effect chimney?

Wikipedia article on the topic seems fine. A while back there was a big back and forth between Bryan Caplan and some others on this topic. I've rarely seen anyone question that this is one of the cheapest methods. Usually the complaints are along the lines of "side effects"

Yeah, I don't doubt that it's comparatively cheap.

"Tens of billions" is just... extremely cheap. Since stratospheric seeding involves aircraft development, billions go fast. Both Airbus and Boeing spent between $5B and $10B on their last couple of civilian airframes (and that price just gets you a prototype and a manufacturing line). And since those future stratospheric seeders need to both fly a lot and fly unusually high, I wouldn't expect a civil development budget, I'd expect a military budget - those tend to run 2 orders of magnitude higher (but that gets you a couple hundred airframes and their continued maintenance).

And yes, I consider side effects part of those unknown unknowns.

Two other options:

Artillery and rockets.

I can't tell if you are being sarcastic, but yes tens of billions is cheap when carbon emissions reductions are measured in tens of trillions of dollars

Edit: rereading, it doesn't seem like sarcasm. I do think the estimates are fair. The cost of carbon supression and sequestration is also an estimate. And we are ultimately comparing different climate change proposals.

The costs of global warming have been much debated over, but IPCC estimates of damages overlap with solutions like "do nothing and let economic growth solve the problem".

Everything is in orders of magnitude for these comparisons.

No sarcasm, just a misunderstanding. I assumed we're talking total mitigation costs, you almost certainly were talking about the yearly budget of the project.

I agree, with $10B per year you can design a new airframe, build a few hundred and then fly them around the clock, resulting in a few dozen megatons lifted to the stratosphere per year. That certainly would get some results.

To be fair, this sort of on-its-face won’t work. It’s just basic high school thermodynamics.

The carbon dioxide ratio in the atmosphere is increasing precisely because creating that carbon dioxide produced usable energy for us. You can’t un-make that carbon dioxide without spending at least as much energy as you put in (and in fact, substantially more).

So either you’re going to produce even more CO2 than you’re eradicating, or you’re simply pursuing non-fossil-fuel energy sources entirely—which would simply have not produced the CO2 in the first place if you’d just done that from the start.

The only way any of this makes any "sense" is if you get the government to write you a check to perform what ultimately amounts to fake work, in the most fundamental sense. Which probably means that’s exactly what will happen.

Yes, but, hypothetically this could let us burn fuel in ships and planes and land vehicles and then remove the carbon with large facilities that don't burn fossil fuels. Not that a coal burning power plant next to a decarbonization facility makes any thermodynamic sense.

In theory you're not backing all the way down the entropy graph to create a synthetic fossil fuel, you only want to go as far as some compound where carbon can exist as a solid. But yeah, in practical terms with realistic losses it's obviously not energy positive to burn gasoline to run a generator that pulls the carbon back out of the air.

One potential use is if they could do it at very low capital cost (but high energy cost) would be sucking up all the waste electricity from solar and wind. You could site it anywhere, so putting them at key interchanges where you can exploit transmission bottlenecks for cheap electricity would make them free to run much of the time.

Of course, the actual economic benefit of reducing atmospheric carbon is anywhere between "low" and "negative." And ocean fertilization would do the same thing for free. But when has that ever stopped a subsidy program.

Isn't it pretty straightforward that it's hard to turn things from diffuse to concentrated? We've done the energy-releasing transformation turning oil into gas, now it's diffuse and a pain to turn back into oil or any other substance?

With cheap fusion I guess you could brute force it and drain the skies. I guess there's some technical level where he might not be totally right but it seems substantively right.

Copy pasting my response from a few days ago:

the socially agreed upon consequences

Some people fantasize that such consensus views exist. They then act cheated when someone mitigates or entirely avoids negative consequences. As though cosmic justice has been subverted.

I think this is a real thing. People have some internal sense of justice in which the wages of bad behavior is suitable negative consequences. And then they notice people engaging in "bad" behavior and working sensibly to avoid bad outcomes, like gay men taking PrEP or something, and get offended. The wicked were supposed to get their just rewards, but now some technological solution dodged it.

In the prep case it's "wait so I'm paying $20,000 a year just so a gay guy can have unprotected sex for free, but the same people who mandated that are talking about using insurance costs to make driving unaffordable for me?

Insurance and government action have moral hazards it makes perfect sense to get upset about. Like if the government pays a guy to buy solar panels made from coal in China, then pays him a subsidy to make power with them, then pays him to suck the CO2 from the chinese coal out of the air with that power.
Every step of that technological solution makes me poorer for no benefit to anyone except the parasite.

wait so I'm paying $20,000 a year just so a gay guy can have unprotected sex for free, but the same people who mandated that are talking about using insurance costs to make driving unaffordable for me?

To what extent is the health insurance company allowed to tell you what you can and can't do?

Let's assume, arguendo, that eating red meat and animal fat really does cause disease and increase costs. Does the insurance company have a right to drop you for eating red meat or are they obligated to pay for your quadruple bypass?

But we're getting it both ways. They're pushing for "discouraging" activities they oppose while forcing us to subsidize the health risks of activities they support.
Smoking makes your insurance go way up because they specifically allowed it in the ACA, but doing meth and raw dog anal with 20 strangers a week doesn't.

If they get their single payer option you can bet they'll be charging extra for smoking, meat, guns, and weightlifting, but not for obesity, fentanyl, weed, and 1000 man gangbangs at the national bugchaser convention. And it will all be decided by Science™, so disagreeing will make you a science-denying conspiracy theorist.

meat, guns, and weightlifting

Insurance companies care about how much they have to pay out. Their actuaries will compute the cost of being a steak-eating gun owner and determine it is almost nothing. They'll pass that miniscule cost onto their customers. It's not like they're going to fact check you or drop your health insurance because you had two servings of beef rather than one.

To the degree they care about weight lifting or martial arts or other masculine forms of health, I would think they would like it because it makes you cost them less if you are generally healthier.

But sure, they can't discriminate against raw-dogging enthusiasts but can against cigar enthusiasts, so it is a little unfair. But it isn't some insidious plan to punish you for being a stereotypical conservative guy with a weight bench and some guns.

I did say "when they get their public option", which will not be administered by people trying to make a profit. And of course even if it is some public-private abomination like the university system, we've already seen how willing they are to leave consumer money on the table in exchange for other benefits.

Point taken about the lack of profit motive letting government agencies pursue ideological goals rather than finding ways to serve customers while making a profit.

Do you think this public option will refuse to treat me because I own guns and eat meat? What do you think they'll do, have an ideological test to be allowed to buy in and get their medical care?

Opaque metrics filtered through a layer of "equity pricing" for who pays what, justified through procedural manipulation of cost benefit studies. Literally just the usual "make gun and car owners pay for the costs of their abhorrent lifestyles" applied to literally everything.

Isn't it obvious how this sort of thing will work? We've seen so many examples of how this, I can already write the headlines for it (and the National Review's objections as they stumble along behind history, feebly mumbling "slow down")

Insurance companies care about how much they have to pay out. Their actuaries will compute the cost of being a steak-eating gun owner any determine it is almost nothing.

You're talking about things that would happen in a free market economy. Health insurance... is not.

These are private companies and they employ actuaries to do real work. Short of government mandates forcing them to discriminate against stereotypical conservative men, they won't proactively harm their business by dropping you as a customer without financial reasons or charging you wrong.

Sir, over the last decade we've seen private companies ban, debank, and blacklist their customers on several occasions. Doing so either does not hurt their business, or in the event it does, they don't care about it.

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But we're getting it both ways. They're pushing for "discouraging" activities they oppose while forcing us to subsidize the health risks of activities they support.

This doesn't sound like you're getting it both ways. It sounds like it's just one way - that you can engage in just about any activity (except smoking I guess, although I have never revealed my smoking status to my insurer) without insurers taking action.

The hypotheticals are closer to a persecution fantasy than reality.

Maybe it's some deep-rooted primitive instinct. Defectors in the tribe are supposed to end up dead, lest they end up destroying the tribe.

This article is enormously relevant: https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-chump-effect

I think the definitive piece written on this is Nadia Asparouhova's Tribes of Climate. Introductory quote:

For someone who doesn’t work in climate, trying to figure out which opportunities to pursue – carbon removal, renewables, energy storage and transmission – is a dizzying array of options, with no way to sort or rank their importance. But it seems to me that climate is better understood not as a singular list of technology and policy action items, but as an assortment of climate tribes. Tribes tell us why these opportunities are interesting and help us make better predictions about how they will unfold.

I recommend reading the whole article in full. FWIW, I identify as what Asparouhova calls an "Energy Maximalist" - I regard climate change as a genuine but convenient crisis point that provides incentives for us to transition from the local minimum of fossil fuels to the global minimum of cheap renewable energy. Consequently, for most of the climate activist world, I'm the most despicable class of heretic. This is true despite my acceptance of the general catechism of contemporary climate activism - (i) the earth is warming (ii) it's mostly our fault (iii) this is bad (iv) we can do something about it (v) we should do something about it.

with a (literally) puritanical association (even causation) between hard work and salvation.

The irony here being of course that they themselves are doing the opposite. They support changes that aren't effective at solving the issues at hand but are in line with their aesthical preferences, gives pork to their friends, hurts their outgroup and paints themselves as saviours. This is obviously one of the easy ways.

A pharisaical association, then?

Source of the Massachusetts Taliban quote.

Where does your commenter say that only people she dislikes should have to make any lifestyle changes?

Like anyone, I'm sure they don't mind getting burned a bit... so long as their opponent is the one actually tied to the stake.

Don’t put words in people’s mouths.

Internet archive doesn't seem to have captured the whole page btw.

So apparently there’s some online strategy game called “Civilization VII” scheduled to be released next year (I’m not terribly interested in the entire subject of such games) and there’s an ongoing drama on Reddit and other venues due to the creators adding Harriet Tubman of all people as a playable political leader.

This rang a bell for me because I was reminded that there was some sort of political campaign a long time ago to replace president Andrew Jackson’s portrait on the $20 bill with hers, because he was a slaveholder genocider racist and so on. I looked this up on Wikipedia and it seems that this has merely remained a plan so far.

Anyway, concluding that she must be some relevant figure in the US culture wars, I looked around on the SSC and Motte subreddits, plus this site, but I found that there has never been even one discussion on her so far. I looked up Askhistorians and other similar subreddits and concluded that any discussion on her life is resolutely suppressed by the mods (all dissenting comment chains get deleted basically).

Being a dissident rightist this obvious case of information suppression piqued my interest, so I looked up John Derbyshire’s website because I’ve usually followed his work. I found this rather hilarious piece of information (emphasis mine):

We have very few facts about Tubman's life and activities. Most of what people think they know comes from her own testimony, as narrated to friends after the Civil War. There are two problems there.

First problem: Tubman, who escaped from slavery in her mid-twenties, was illiterate all her life. She left no paper trail in the way of letters or diaries. Until her forties, when friends started taking down her reminiscences, we have only her word for the events of her earlier life.

This wouldn't matter so much if we didn't know she had brain problems: narcolepsy, delusions, apparently epileptic fits. Tubman acknowledged these problems, saying they were the result of a blow on the head she received in childhood. Perhaps they were; but again we only have her word for it.

Whatever the cause of the brain problems, they surely weren't Tubman's fault. They weren't my fault either, though, nor yours, nor Andrew Jackson's, and they do cast a cloud of doubt over her stories.

Second problem: Tubman's friends got Sarah Bradford, a successful fiction writer, to produce Tubman's autobiographies. This was after the Civil War, but the tradition of abolitionist propaganda, whose greatest success was of course Uncle Tom's Cabin, was still alive, and Sarah Bradford likely saw herself in that tradition, as the literary heiress of Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Tubman then sank into obscurity until leftist writers of the 1930s took an interest in her as part of their general critique of U.S. society, which they compared unfavorably with the new system of justice and equality being established, according to them, in the Soviet Union.

In short, the Tubman story originated with her own unreliable recollections, and was then promulgated by people all of whom had agendas.

Harriet Tubman may have been — on the scattered evidence we have, probably was — a brave and resourceful person. Still, her story belongs much more to the realms of myth and propaganda than to history.

I found this mildly amusing. And on a scale of 1 to 10, the level of my surprise is maybe 3.

4X games audience is roughly split in two parts - people that have no fucking idea who Harriet Tubman is (every person outside of the US) and people that don't want to play as her. I don't know why the AAA games studios want to go the way of Hollywood to the rock bottom before reversing course. Disney removes trans storylines from upcoming projects. It is best if you learn from other's mistakes.

More suitable people for US leaders than Tubman - Barrack Obama, Colin Powel, Dennis Rodman ...

Yes, if an additional data point is needed, I had never heard of Tubman before there was some culture war nonsense about putting her face on money.

My opinion is that she seems like a silly, politics-driven addition to VII. I don't necessarily insist that leaders in Civ games always have formally occupied the office of head of state or what have you, but I do think that leaders in Civ should be people who can be meaningfully said to have been the leader of their civilisation. Gandhi was never prime minister of India, but he can be reasonably said to have been the leader of the Indian people in his time.

There's clearly no sense in which you could say that Harriet Tubman was ever the leader of the United States. She'd be fine as a Great Person in Civ, but... leader? No. That's silly.

I think like most AAA games, they want something easy enough that you don’t have to know anything about the mechanics or the strategy to win. The reason for the Hollywood stuff is exactly that, it’s designed to be an idle game where people pretend to be world leaders while also not having to learn to actually build or run an empire. Why not aim for the casual crowd with the appropriate heroes that they can girl boss with? They’re playing Barbie’s magic empire adventure, and putting out a cute hero for the casuals? Besides which there really aren’t enough hardcore players who want strategy games and would consider “Civilization” a good sim to bother catering to. Gaming has become TV.

Most people who would want to play a game like this would better power game by playing with, or against Washington than Tubman.

You don't have to be hardcore gamer to prefer more suitable historical figures. Part of the appeal of a game like civilization and it was more so with civ 4, was to see civilizations represented by those larger than life leaders that actually are identified with the civilization.

I don't agree that they succeed in appealing to more people by having Tubman as a leader. They are promoting based on their own politics, or pandering to video journalists or others with influence who want to push this. Rather than reasonably expecting to make more money, they probably think they can get away with some amount of woke pandering that they want to do because of their ideology, even if it does result in backlash. To be fair maybe there are people involved with such projects who do claim either as true believers, or pretextually, that this will bring more sales and others are unwilling to counter them.

I was just at the African American history museum recently. My mother recently published a paper on the graves, names, and locations of slaves that our ancestors owned.

I bring those both up just to say that in my observation there is a large amount of myth and uncertainty even in things that feel like recent history.

Even internet history is convoluted and difficult to untangle. And we often have all the logs and evidence available!

Harriet Tubman's general exploits seem plausible. There were almost certainly former slaves that worked in semi clandestine roles to ferry other escaped slaves up north. There were almost certainly stories of harrowing close calls. We know for certain there was an "underground railroad" for those escaped slaves, or at least as certain as we can be about these things (maybe a bunch of people all lied convincingly in a similar way).

It also seems like she isn't a very trustworthy narrator. She probably lied about her personal role or took on the stories of others she had heard from. Or maybe she under embellished and the truth is crazier than the stories we got. History sometimes has some off the wall weird shit happening.

I'm not entirely sure how much it matters. Even prominent placement in a video game seems underwhelming. Those leader portraits can and are replaced by game mods. I'm almost certain there are mods that switch out the German leader for Hitler.

Most importantly of all, stick with Civ 4. It's the best in the series, and the peak of the genre. We need more autists like the dwarf fortress guys making video games. Work on the same thing for twenty years and retain all creative control within a family sized social unit. If it was them making the civ game they would have just encoded a whole leadership class that represented Tubman and stuck a random name generator on top of it. We wouldn't have this silly controversy, and more importantly no one without an extreme interest in the game would even be able to articulate a culture war critique of how it was handled.

I've been a big fan of the Civ series since buying the Civ II disks at Kmart in 1996. I'm somewhat up to date on the Leader drama, and I haven't really seen much about Tubman tbh. There has been Leader choice drama since the first Civ forum (Civ Fanatics) was made in like 2002 or so. Most of it is international, and less about which leaders are chosen and more about which nations are included. The fan groups for Korea and Poland both launched aggressive, decade long campaigns to get included, which were successful. Both also got female leaders who were minor characters from their nation's histories with very little good information about their actual lives. Tubman at least lived in the moden era.

Hot take, Civ rankings from best to worst imo. 4 - 6 - 2 - 5 - 3 (I never played 1) . Honorable mention to Colonization II, which is built on the Civ 4 engine. Alpha Centari (Civ in Space) is also pretty good.

The biggest thing going for Civ 4 that makes me (any many, many others) consider it the best was the incredible freedom for modders to alter the game. Vanilla out of the box Civ 4 was mid, the mod community was amazing. Civ 5 changed a great deal about how the game worked, a significant overhaul of the underlying mechanics that turned a lot of people off. Civ 6 addressed many of the problems with 5, while bringing back a lot of the modding freedoms of 4. 3 was a buggy disaster with the main challenge coming from the AI acting in ways that were largely considered cheating by the players, ie. the AI opponents always had perfect knowledge of the entire game world that its decisions were based on, and very limited modding.

Alpha Centauri (Civ in Space) is also pretty good.

Its story holds up better than its mechanics, the exploitability of which limits the replay value. But I'd still give it more than a "pretty good".

Civ IV wasn't just about the mods. It was also that the developers were bold enough to include things like slavery and religions in a way that had some real mechanical meat. Made you think, as the player, without preaching at you.

There has been Leader choice drama since the first Civ forum (Civ Fanatics) was made in like 2002 or so.

The first major Civ forum was Apolyton, established in 1998, which used to be considerably bigger than CivFanatics until it started dying sometime after mid-00s (around that time I also stopped participating, incidentally). Fond memories of that forum, including first encounters with a very smart teenager who later established a moderately successful blog.

Alpha Centari (Civ in Space) is also pretty good.

Very good! But, bad replay value. And I still don't know why we haven't had a remake.

What do you mean bad replay value, I've been playing it for 25 years

The vibes are great, the mechanics are deep, the controls and discoverability were dogshit. Or maybe I'm just too zoomer brained.

No, I'm a millennial and ideal target audience for SMAC and played the hell out of it when it dropped, but when attempting to replay it, I just can't get over how ass the graphics and controls are by modern standards.

They made one (or at least, a spiritual sequel). It was rubbish.

I mean, there was Sid Meier's Beyond Earth.

It was OK I guess.

I really wish we had the level of UI accessibility of that game combined with the deep mechanics and settings of alpha centauri. Friends have played beyond earth with me, nobody wants to play alpha centauri.

It's been a long time for me, but IIRC there was only the one map, and no real functionality for good random maps. So, same map, same factions, same locations every time. Is very limiting.

I believe AC had randomized maps?

Like I said it's been a long time but iirc the random maps were non workable for some reason.

Like maybe there was functionality that only worked on the default map.

never played civ 1

I'd recommend giving it a try sometime. First because its such an iconic piece of gaming history, and its amazing they managed to include so much and get it right on the first try. But even today, it holds up.

Its very simple and streamlined, compared to later civ games. There's a quirky charm to its simple cartoon graphics. Theres no "filler", so you can play a full game reasonably quickly.

And the combat! Its highly random, just a single dice roll based on the stats. A tank (attack 10) vs a spear (defense 2) has a 1 in 6 chance to lose, even without any defendive bonuses. And if you lose on defense, you lose everything. This leads to wild fluctuations back and forth, so you have to be flexible and adjust on the fly. It also means that the technologically inferior civ still has a good chance to catch up and win, whereas the later games are something of a foregone conclusion once someone gets a solid tech lead.

edit- now that i think about it, a lot of the stuff they added in civ2 really broke the balance of civ1. The harbor makes ocean tiles way too strong, and being able to negoiate with barbarians and other civs makes your undefended cities way too easy to defend. Throw in the pikemen to deter early mounted aggression, and the ridiculous power of Mike's Cathedral in civ2 to deter unhappiness, and it's just way too easy to expand in civ2. civ1 has a much better balance between economy and warfare.

3 was a buggy disaster with the main challenge coming from the AI acting in ways that were largely considered cheating by the players, ie. the AI opponents always had perfect knowledge of the entire game world that its decisions were based on, and very limited modding.

Of the limited mods, though, 3 does have a very enjoyable LoTR mod, if you just want a 4x LoTR game. Which I often do, and have yet to find a good game/mod equivalent.

I will risk drama and say that I enjoyed V and VI more than IV.

IV just has too much that doesn't work that well in hindsight - in particular, IV has really bad and tedious combat.

The key element in IV that makes it work is how smooth industrialization feels. There’s not just two or three key techs that unlock massive growth. Almost every single advance between printing press and electricity gives a tiny productivity advantage too small to notice individually, but each one compounds all of the others. Nothing before or since has quite matched it in terms of aesthetics of play.

I think I first learned about her when I was about 9 years old (American public school). They present her as fact, just like everything else in history class, so we all just kind of went along with it, which was often um... less than perfectly factual. As I got older I learned a more nuanced/mature view about the other famous American historical figures. But Tubman just sort of... never came up again in school, so I never really thought about her much until recently. Like you said she really isn't a major figure in our history, so there's no reason to think about her much except as an inspirational figure and culture war talking point.

As a long time civ fan I... don't love the choice, but don't hate it either. The problem with a history-themed game is there's only so many famous leaders to choose from, and the obvious ones like Washington/Lincoln have been done to death. If you want non-white woman as an American historical leader you have to really stretch to find someone who counts. I'm just glad they didn't try to shoehorn in a modern figure like Rosa Parks or Kamala Harris.

When they made civ2 back in the 90s, it was a much simpler game, so they could easily add in tons of leaders. They made the decision that every single civ should have 1 male and 1 female leader, which made for some odd inclusions. For America it was Eleanor Roosevelt. For most of the other civs it was either "the male leader's wife" or "a mythological/religious figure who probably never existed in real life."

As a game they should just do the ultrafictionalized portrayals of ahistorical figures. In Civ Alexander rubs shoulders with Cleopatra and Gilgamesh and whatever other big name just like its right out of Fate Grand Order. In the same vein Civ should not be beholden to true existence or even semirealistic representation. The Japanese turned King Arthur into 6 different versions of big titted blondes, Sid Meier can genderbend MLK into a beyonce lookalike.

Hey, most of the versions of King Arthur in Fate are not big-titted. Saber was introduced in the original F/SN visual novel with a mumbo jumbo explanation of why she was the same age as the teenage protagonist. So most versions in the game are teenage and not adult. Visually, the teenage versions are distinguished by not being big-titted.

I will not tolerate this slander against the sacred numbers. The grand repository of interpersonal relationships curated by the loyal stewarts of pixiv and nhentai have assured me that Arthur and Modred and (insert saberface variation n) all are glorious vanguards with terminal weaknesses against phalli of any sort, especially goblin or orcs or black men (which is its own pathology to be unpacked at another thread). Work that into the Civ 6 leader bonus table, Firaxis.

Thomas Jefferson as the American leader, expect it is this Thomas Jefferson.

That should be left to the Chinese, that's what they do with their unholy Genshin mods for EU4, they just throw down 124 Genshin wonders into a formerly historical game: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3213222906

Lancer Arthur >>>>>> Saber Arthur

I don't think I mind the mythologizing all that much. There were a lot of brave people who helped slaves before and during the civil war, they deserve credit. As long as it's directionally true (Harriet Tubman did actually help slaves), I don't mind her being a stand-in for the credit that they deserve.

What I do object to is attempts to elevate her beyond that, especially in the role of a political leader, which she was not. Andrew Jackson was the President of the United States. He's on our money because we put Presidents on money (And Benjamin Franklin, because he was important in founding the nation). All of the leaders in Civ games are Presidents, Kings, Chiefs, etc: actual historical rulers, because you as the player are making the decisions controlling your nation. Harriet Tubman was not. Every single thing she said could be true and she still wouldn't belong on money or in Civ because, despite being a good person, she wasn't actually a political leader. It's a category error.

He's on our money because we put Presidents on money (And Benjamin Franklin, because he was important in founding the nation).

And Alexander Hamilton, who was also never president.

He was first Secretary of the Treasury, among his other accomplishments, so the connection with US money is clear.

Right, obviously. Just pointing out that Franklin isn’t the only non-president on U.S. currency.

All of the leaders in Civ games are Presidents, Kings, Chiefs, etc: actual historical rulers

Gandhi (Indian leader as far back as Civ 1) wasn't, and as said elsewhere, Civ 2 included a lot of optional leaders that didn't actually lead their countries or actually even exist.

Ultimately the leaders as representation fails to accommodate their specific (a?)historical perculiarities, instead treating the leaders as avatars of national aspects.

In that vein, I still long for a true age of mythology style approach to a 4X game. Use regional gods and regional aspects as socionational representations, and go ham with it. I want Arminius channeling Wodans +10 Black Forest ambush rolls in his rebellion against Bismarck seizing the +6 cultural stability bonus of King Of Franks from Charlemange who needs that bonus in the campaign against Nelsons +4 global naval bonus. That'll be absolute tits and be much richer than the giggles of seeing Gandhi roflstomp Elizabeth.

100% up for this. Preferably with a small lore button on the tooltips so you can read more if interested.

Well, neither was Stalin until 1946.

All of the leaders in Civ games are Presidents, Kings, Chiefs, etc: actual historical rulers

This used to be true but wasn't for VI. They had more than one leader who was not a ruler, nor even a real leader of their people (like Gandhi could be argued). Catherine de Medici was the leader for France, for example, which was very controversial at the time (and I still think was bullshit that they made her a leader).

I haven't played a Civilization game since I dabbled in 5, and decided the tactical layer with single combat ruined an element of Civilization that I actually really enjoyed, which was the death stacks.

That said, Civilization has always dabbled in some measure of political grandstanding. I recall reading about a minor controversy from Civilization 2 and the fact that it included a global warming mechanic back when the concept of global warming was far less accepted. That said, there is still something dispiriting about Civilization scraping the bottom of the barrel of "current year" so hard they have turned Harriet Tubman into, whatever she is in that game. I don't want to beclown myself criticizing it, because I honestly haven't kept up with the mechanics of how this new Civilization will work. That said, she probably would have had a quote attached to a tech tree upgrade (like "Emancipation" or the like) in previous games had they decided she were important enough to include over other abolitionist leaders.

Like I said, I haven't kept up. I don't know if they have 700 leaders in the game with an exhaustive and expansive coverage of even niche historical figures from around the globe. Or if they've developed a myopic focus on black hagiography and include the current year talking points to puts "The founding fathers were slave owners" above "Wrote some of the most important documents on human rights ever in history, and then fought and died establishing a free nation that lived those principles"

All that said, Civilization 7 will have 26 leaders at launch, and I guess 20 of them are known at this time. The white ones are Augustus, Benjamin Franklin, Charlemagne, Isabella, Machiavelli, Napoleon (two versions?). The black ones are Amina and Harriet Tubman. So I wouldn't exactly claim they've developed any sort of myopic focus on blacks.

That said, Harriet Tubman is still just goofy.

I haven't played a Civilization game since I dabbled in 5, and decided the tactical layer with single combat ruined an element of Civilization that I actually really enjoyed, which was the death stacks.

Granted we're on the same side here, but THIS PISSES ME OFF SO MUCH.

Death stacks. Death stacks? Death stacks!

According to the complaint, the problem with this game is that it allows you to combine several units of disparate types all in one area and attack with them in the same turn.

You know what we call that in the real world? A mother fucking ARMY. In other words, it's just how things actually work.

Yeah, you know what, it is troublesome when an ARMY shows up at your door and your defenses weren't ready for one. So what are you gonna do? Prepare, or bitch about it? Here I'm imagining any great military commander of yore whining that he lost because his opponent utilized (implicitly, fake and gay) 'death stacks'. Honestly! 'March divided and fight concentrated.' This is central to warfare in the human experience.

And it's not like the game is un-self-aware about this! In fact several mechanisms exist to moderate the power of death stacks armies. For one, a much smaller defensive force can almost always hold against one in a fortified position given rough technological parity. So, again, reality. For another, multiple classes of units exist just to punish the behavior of packing too many units in too small a space. Siege weapons, early on, and later we have things like bomber squadrons. Enormous, ruinous collateral damage. Sure, put all your units on that square. Pack 'em in. See what happens.

Also, the sheer logistical challenges of actually getting all those units to one place at one time seem to go almost wholly unappreciated. It's not an easy thing to do! And concentrating your military at one point on your frontier means that a whole lot more of your land borders go undefended. Do you have the roads and railroads and bridges to get them back to defend if necessary? There's a lot of tradeoff and investment considerations here!

When we do get to aircraft, there's a whole consideration about also sending along fighter squadrons to maintain air superiority and protect your armies from enemy bombers. So now you've got firefights blazing across the sky while you try to establish forward airstrips to keep control of the heavens and avoid getting your entire army wiped out before it achieves its goals. This is GOOD. This is RIGHT. This is FUN.

Civ4's treatment of unit consolidation and movement makes vastly more sense than any later entry in the series. V was a mess in general (terrible game design mostly across the board) but what really killed it for me was the ridiculous traffic jams and archers shooting across the English Channel. I don't want a cutesy pegboard-style tiny-scale European board game-esque microcosm of tactical combat played out on the apparent scale of a continent. I want vast armies clashing! Oh, sorry, the swordsmen can't get to London because some (allied) archers are hanging out in Northumbria. What the fuck.

Anyway, the very existence of the (craven, weak, and effete) term "death stacks" fills me with disgust. Civ4 is by far the best game in the series and when the primary salient complaint about it has to do with modeling reality well and generating interesting logistical and defensive considerations, because, apparently, a bunch of losers failed to prepare adequate defenses and got caught with their pants down when a lizard-brained AI managed to show up with something resembling a coordinated assault, which was entirely foreseeable, and rage-quit in protest at their pretense of being a brilliant mastermind strategist being exposed as the comforting, but baseless schizophrenic fantasy that it was, well, I, I disagree.

Do yourself a favor and stop repeating the phrase 'death stacks'. It's unbecoming.

death stacks

Appreciate the rant, but I'm gonna keep using it. I think it's awesome, and my primary enjoyment of the game is overcoming all the challenges you listed above and finally assembling an unconquerable death stack that end an entire civilization before it's exhausted. Maybe it's taken on a more derogatory tone since Civ 5, but I'm taking it back god damnit! I think it sounds awesome. You might as well be telling me to stop saying "head shot".

Yeah, the stakes here are low enough that any principled objection I could (and would) make would obviously be silly.

But since I apparently felt like dying on this hill today (defensive bonus btw) I'll superciliously argue that the analog here would be 'clicking on heads' instead of 'head shot'.

In fact there are games where head shots include a lot of setup, deep thought, consideration of range and windage, etc. plus a whole bunch of skill, and conflating that with 'click on head' is inappropriate.

But clicking on heads is even more awesome! It's like you have reached such a level of zen with the game, so mastered the physics and situational awareness, that all the ephemera melted away and you are literally just clicking on heads.

I mean, I get what you mean. Coming from a person who's never played an FPS, it sounds reductive. But if master Counter-Strike 1.6 players talked about clicking on heads, I wouldn't want to play a team game against them.

Yeah, clicking on heads is fine, it's just not my thing.

Also, my thing is better.

Based and IV-pilled.

God favours the side of the big battalions, the whole point of war should be about building a big strong army. And if size doesn't matter, it just removes a potential opportunity cost, it removes strategy from the strategy game. If I don't have to choose between universities or musketmen, what's the point?

Anyway, the Advanced Civ mod is quite good, the AI gets quite cunning tactically and strategically, they somehow made it run significantly faster too.

What of HoI's combat width?

Granted civ is too light and too historically broad to model the wax and wane of army sizes, but there is no denying that infinite concentration removes a lot of tactics about terrain and positioning.

Concentration has also waxed and waned as a valid tactic over time. You sure should be able to put a million men in a small area, but that means that they can be devastated by artillery and bombing.

Civ is just too abstract to model this. It's closer to chess than anything that actually involves armies as a meaningful concept.

Granted civ is too light and too historically broad to model the wax and wane of army sizes, but there is no denying that infinite concentration removes a lot of tactics about terrain and positioning.

I deny it. What is true is that in wars where the human player is the aggressor, there's often one decisive battle followed up by a slow roll over the now-mostly-defenseless territory. And so the tactical considerations for that battle are going to be minimized, in that they only need to be figured out once. I.e. a well-researched and -implemented invasion can accomplish a lot by choosing a favorable initial battlefield, yes.

Concentration has also waxed and waned as a valid tactic over time. You sure should be able to put a million men in a small area, but that means that they can be devastated by artillery and bombing.

Which is how Civ4 works, yes. Literally with artillery and bombing and the 'collateral damage' mechanic. Your units standing shoulder to shoulder will get absolutely shredded by AOE damage if you're not taking steps to prevent that, and first-line enemy defensive cities usually have multiple artillery units in them for this reason. Even the AI.

Civ is just too abstract to model this. It's closer to chess than anything that actually involves armies as a meaningful concept.

That's true of NuCiv, sure, but it's not true of Civ4.

I do think you're not alone in missing 4, I hear that a lot but I always chalked it up to 4 being the most featureful and having insane levels of content in the base game compared to any modern release.

I was too young to dig deep into the combat so my memory of it mostly comes from the later instalments.

What I remember of 4 is that the combat was a slog in the late game because everyone had so many units you couldn't make any progress.

I guess that's actually a pretty decent portrayal of modern warfare, ironically enough.

I'm with you, civ4 has a ton of tactical depth to its combat system, and I get annoyed when people don't see it. I think the main problem is that a lot of new players don't like seeing their catapults die (which they usually do when used for collateral damage), so they never really figure out the 'collateral damage' system. They also seem to feel guilty about using nukes in the late game, for some reason. Notably the AI does not share that guilt, and will freely use catapults or nukes all over the place.

Death stacking is a derogatory term for a common theme in GSGs and RTSes that the best strategy to beat the AI is just to have a huge blob of units that overruns one's enemy like a horde of ants eating a hot dog. The idea is that games should heavily discourage this beginner strategy. It reduces the complexity of systems to whoever has more units will win.

Although there's a lot of merit in what you say, microing dozens, if not hundreds of units in the late game - in a turn-based strategy game like CIV - is a huge pain in the ass. It's not fun. It may be more 'realistic', but games like EU4 and HOI4 do it better. CIV's combat usually amounts to out-producing one's enemy rather than elaborate strategic maneuvers, which is fine, but let's not pretend the IV combat system was deep or anything. It wasn't. It was the garnish on top of a city manager.

Man, you occur to me as being like one of those guys who complains about 'capitalism' and then when someone tries to dig down into what you mean, it turns out you're actually just describing reality.

It reduces the complexity of systems to whoever has more units will win.

Well, first of all, all else being equal, isn't that exactly how it should work? And if a game were indeed that simple, and someone were still complaining about it, my analysis wouldn't be that it's a bad game, it's that either he doesn't care for it (valid) or he simply sucks at it and is whinging to cover for his wounded pride (invalid).

But this doesn't describe Civ4 at all.

A lot of things can come into play to add depth and complexity to a (realistic) system wherein, all else being equal, the side with more units wins. Including but not limited to:

  1. Terrain modifiers such as hills or forests being more defensible
  2. Penalties to, e.g., attacking amphibiously or across rivers
  3. More than one enemy such that throwing one's forces at A leaves one vulnerable to B
  4. Logistical challenges in coordinating a united attack
  5. Economic difficulties in even fielding and supplying a force above a certain size
  6. General homefield advantages favoring the defender
  7. Area of effect damage to discourage clumping
  8. Diversity of units such that some are strong or weak against certain other types
  9. Ability to specialize/promote units such that they can surprise or circumvent the dynamic from the previous item
  10. Sheer potential to tech up and field fewer superior units over more (but inferior) ones
  11. Diplomacy to allow for multiple weaker players to collectively outweigh individual stronger ones
  12. Additional layers of combat e.g. air or naval superiority which can radically shift the balance of power in the 'main' (in this case, ground) layer
  13. Espionage/intelligence systems to allow for seeing/delaying enemy deployments to counter them in time
  14. Some element of randomized results such that surprise upsets can and do occur

And you'll notice that not only does Civ4 do all of these things, but I could jump into any of those items and talk more about additional complexity within them to make it even more interesting and fun.

So, in summary, the complaint that Civ4 has a 'death stack' problem is, by your own definition, entirely invalid. Therefore I conclude that you have no basis upon which to call it a bad game, only that you personally don't care for it.

(...Or.)

Are you a Civ multiplayer person? I think that probably explains it. Civ multiplayer is just so different of a game from Civ single-player that it's impossible to talk about the subject without mentioning the elephant in the room.

I play GSG-type games as single-player experiences. (Mostly because my internet was dogshit for the longest time.) And, in my experience, the Civ AI has always been dogshit, unable to comprehend the multivariate functions of its own systems.

IT VERY WELL MAY BE TRUE that those elements are present in Civ 4. I never got to experience them properly. I concede the point that the Civ 4 combat is not as two-dimensional as my hot take would imply but the game itself does a bad job of demonstrating it for the player. EU4 also has very bad AI, but the cheating is in such a matter that it has the pretense of emulating skillful play, and not just modifiers given to the AI just because.

(Yes, I know the AI gets buffs in Paradox games. But the buffs in Civ are much, much larger comparatively, to compensate for a lack of historicity and other railroady mechanics.)

The base game of CIV is piss easy, even on Deity: the AI is too incompetent and cowardly for the job of containing the player without obviously ganging up against him. You don't need to know any of that to win single player civ (although it will make your game go faster.) But that's not even the worst part of it!

The inability of players falling behind to catch up means that in Civ games, there is an obvious winner very early on, deincentivizing participation in casual play and ensuring a negative experience for the majority of players. This is the real reason why Civ sucks. No matter how clever you are tactically and keeping all of those modifiers in mind, the bigger blob will always win. I'm not going to fight to the bitter end for days for a predestined conclusion: I'm just going to quit before the birth of Christ.

Although there's a lot of merit in what you say, microing dozens, if not hundreds of units in the late game - in a turn-based strategy game like CIV - is a huge pain in the ass.

BTW, and I mention this sincerely, there's a 'move all' button that a lot of people seem to manage to miss.

Death stacking is a derogatory term for a common theme in GSGs and RTSes that the best strategy to beat the AI is just to have a huge blob of units that overruns one's enemy like a horde of ants eating a hot dog. The idea is that games should heavily discourage this beginner strategy. It reduces the complexity of systems to whoever has more units will win.

Maybe I'm a scrub*, then, but that's exactly what I enjoy. I'm not a micro fan. I don't want to care about my APM. I want to build infrastructure, and then crush my opponent witb superior logistics and production.

*No maybe about it. I'm terrible at RTSs, but I love me some late game tech trees

Yeah, the complaint that IF you manage your nation well enough to invest in logistical infrastructure and research and production while hindering your opponents from doing the same, while navigating politics and making the best of the (inevitably awful) start location you rolled, and put a lot of thought into sophisticated combined-arms deployments while spinning a whole bunch of other absolutely-vital plates and taking care to avoid getting penned in and AOE-wrecked—

That IF you do all that, you're more likely to win than they are—

Well, it just doesn't strike me as credible. And neither do the people who make such a complaint. And somehow I'm sure that this is a window onto what is basically wrong with the world, and why democracy needs to be acknowledged as the hideous mistake it was.

There's something to be said on this topic about League of Legends and other games like that, but I've only a glimmer... something about stat-checks and outplay potential.

Just different genres. I for one like games where the player can end up in unrecoverable situations not due to reaction time, but poor decision-making.

I don't think that people complain about army stacks in Civ IV (and earlier) because it's unrealistic, or too hard. It's because it's motherfucking boring. There's no gameplay at all there. Figure out your army composition, mash it into the other army. Yawn.

I started Civ with IV, and I still have a lot of fondness for it. I think it has a lot of soul, and they tried (and succeeded!) to capture historical details in a way that V or VI just never did. I still play it sometimes. But there's a reason that I never, ever went for domination victory in IV whereas I actually do in V and VI. It's because military sucks ass as a game mechanic without the one unit per tile system. It might be more realistic, it certainly is easier for the AI to work with, but it's way less fun and that's ultimately why people didn't like it.

Speak for yourself. It is perhaps a little boring, but significantly less so than moving a hundred units one by one because they cannot occupy the same space together.

Well, obviously I am speaking for myself. ;) But I strongly disagree with your statement there. I fully admit that moving a large army in the 1UPT system is tedious. But that's a small percentage of the time spent, and the rest gives you very engaging gameplay. Whereas the old army system never gave you engaging gameplay. It's a clear upgrade in my eyes.

Honestly, if one could mod Civ IV to have the unit mechanics of the newer games that would probably be the ideal Civ for me. The stacking army system just plain sucks and it's the only serious blemish on an otherwise great game.

There's no gameplay at all there. Figure out your army composition, mash it into the other army.

Well, again, you just elided a huge number of complicated and involved tasks and decisions under that sentence. I mean I could do this with any game, right? "Just do the correct things needed to win and then you win the game. Boring."

It's because military sucks ass as a game mechanic without the one unit per tile system.

Are you sure you're not just doing it wrong?

Well, again, you just elided a huge number of complicated and involved tasks and decisions under that sentence.

The extent to which army composition matters is pretty similar in either system. Which is to say it matters not at all versus AI (just bring more units and higher tech units and you win), and a decent bit versus humans (from what I've seen anyways, I don't play MP Civ). So I think it's perfectly fair to elide that decision tree as it isn't a differentiator. The gameplay that happens after you have an army is a differentiator, and again... there is none under the stack system.

Are you sure you're not just doing it wrong?

Pretty sure. But if you think I'm missing something crucial that would make the stack system actually fun to play, feel free to elaborate.

The black ones are Amina and Harriet Tubman

Man, deciding to have the two black women leaders being an abolitionist and a colonising, slave-raiding queen who was also an aprocryphal serial killer is choice.

Maybe they wanted to choose Amina and had to put in Tubman in for cover?

I mean, in part, it goes to back to some things I said about "DEI" not being about diversity per se, but about raising up the most questionable unqualified people deliberately. Because they fundamentally don't believe in merit, or accomplishment at all.

Apply that to a game about historical figures, and it results in some odd choices.

You know, it's funny reading over that post I made from the distance past of August 4th.

Now if Kamala picks an absolute loser idiot white guy because she feels the need to placate white liberals, I could accept that being DEI. But it's looking like she's going to pick someone that actually brings something to the ticket, unlike she did in 2020. Most likely counting on Josh Shapiro to deliver PA's electoral votes.

Yeah, I guess Tim Waltz was a DEI pick.

I mean, in part, it goes to back to some things I said about "DEI" not being about diversity per se, but about raising up the most questionable unqualified people deliberately. Because they fundamentally don't believe in merit, or accomplishment at all.

I have been thinking of it more and more as a vastly less consequential form of a third world country just grabbing all of the farmland or positions on the grounds that the privileged stole it and things will run just fine when others are given their chance. Except we're redistributing glory instead of material assets. Which makes sense given the sort of person interested in this sort of thing.

At least when it goes wrong no one starves or gets shot.

I do disagree with you on Harris though. I think there was just no one else Biden could have picked that fit the demographic criteria he decided he wanted. It's not "deliberately pick the worst person" it's "set up criteria you can't meet given the number of qualified candidates in that class then shoehorn whoever you have into the niche"

As for Walz, they really did seem to believe that a "weird" lying sitcom dad was positive masculinity. That and Shapiro was apparently not as deferential as they wanted. (Which makes sense; if you're jumping on a sinking ship you should be compensated for the risk. All of the celebrities were)

Except we're redistributing glory instead of material assets. Which makes sense given the sort of person interested in this sort of thing.

At least when it goes wrong no one starves or gets shot.

Citation needed. I'd argue misaligning our culture is even more damaging than naked redistribution of assets. At least that can theoretically be undone. A population demoralized by propaganda seems to just commit slow suicide. When Stalin caused a famine in Ukraine, they didn't stop existing. We'll see how Ukraine fairs now that they've fed the flower of their nation into the meatgrinder of war, and NATO nations will probably flood them with 3rd worlders to get their GDP up and pay back all the money they've borrowed.

Things like the fertility crisis that make it harder to bounce back (and act as a justification for migration) seem to predate people lying about black women inventing telescopes.

There’s pretty good circumstantial evidence that Shapiro covered up a murder that his friend committed. Picking him would have been an absolute time bomb for both the campaign and Shapiro himself.

I think not choosing Shapiro made sense. You don't want the VP overshadowing the presidential candidate. His speech and presence would tower over Harris like the Colossus. The fact that he copies Obama's speaking style would only make him better liked by Democrats.

See also- beauty pageant winners. There are black women who’ve won legitimately(miss France, for example), but there’s also a cavalcade of troons and landwhales who get DEI boosted to the top spot. For some reason, the wokes are way more excited about the latter.

There are black women who’ve won legitimately(miss France, for example)

Bad example. Oldest miss france ever at 34. She finished first runner up of her departement fourteen years ago. So during a time where most women lose attractiveness, she managed to raise hers from regional contender level to national champion. And they just changed rules to allow women over 24, as well as married women or mothers, to participate. The rule change by itself is fine, but obviously it's just a way to put 'inspiring' 50 year old women up there 'with the most difficult job in the world'. Whatever, beauty contests are stupid anyway, they just got considerably stupider now that they're ugly.

In line with contemporary trends in feminist and Afrocentrist historical revisionism. The logic of today is no longer starting with some great achievement such as winning a war (like Stalin and FDR), enacting positive reforms (like emperor Meiji), or unifying an area (like Wang Kon or Lincoln) and discovering the Great Man actually responsible. No, it is searching for Africans and women, no matter how insigificant or incompetent, and inflating their every action. This is how a person whose sole accomplishment is freeing a couple of dozen of slaves leads a country of as great military, cultural, and economic importance as the US.

Tubman didn't help found the USA, didn't help it win any war, didn't lead any movement. She was like an officer in an army, being only the choice of means in limited capacity to accomplish what others had determined.

This strange racial outgroup bias, as most historians scouring history for Africans to elevate aren't Black, is sometimes taken to the absurd as seen by the oeuvre of an English teacher who identifies as a historian.

While texts he has written are by historians of the country where he managed to find an African treated as historical fiction novels, by those unable to read languages other than English he is considered to be a reliable source.

At least with Tubman an American unwilling to learn another language or use Google Translate or Deepl can read the primary sources for himself, and see what Tubman did. But if the life of an African in a country which doesn't use English is distorted, such a monolingual will most likely fall victim to the avaliability bias, and trust the persceptive of English-speaking hstorians, no matter how poor their knowledge of relevant languages is, and thus how poor their knowledge of primary sources.

I think what you're saying is you want to see Joseph Kony in Civ VIII.

A big part of the issue with Tubman is that professional historians didn't really start taking African American History seriously until the 1970s, which was coincidentally around the same time that popular "revisionist" history started making inroads. Tubman is an interesting figure because her contributions to American history aren't unique, but her status is because she's identifiable. She's representative of a group of anonymous people who did similar things but didn't get the same profile. The upshot is that she didn't attract the same interest from historians looking to examine her life in detail. While social history, also of increased prominence since the 1970s, does look at people who aren't "great figures", it also consciously avoids trying to create them. For instance, a social history of the Underground Railroad would gather recollections from as many people as practicable and avoid placing emphasis on any one individual.

It wasn't until the early 1990s that the idea of examining the American mythos itself became the subject of serious discussion. Mystic Chords of Memory looked at how historical myth is created and how it changes over time. James Loewen isn't a historian and his work is controversial, but Lies My Teacher Told Me was a popular success and thus drew attention to the idea of heroification and raised general awareness that history isn't the pat story you got from high school textbooks. It still took another ten years before historians started looking at Tubman, and by then the process of making her into a heroic figure was complete, her life story filled with the kind of anecdotal detail that historians find suspect.

The consensus that emerged in the 2000s was basically that ther broad arc of her story is true but that some of the details have largely been either exaggerated or fabricated. She was a well-known and respected conductor on the Underground Railroad, but the number of people she helped escape was not in the hundreds but was more like 70. She did work as a nurse and spy during the Civil War. She had some kind of relationship with John Brown; she was prominent enough among the abolitionist community that she is mentioned in his writings. Bradford heavily relied on interviews with Tubman, but she also wrote to contemporary figures Tubman had mentioned for verification, and these letters survive.

I believe her participation in the Combahee Ferry raid is also pretty well supported.

I actually looked into this the other day. As it happens, Tubman was posthumously promoted to one star general last month, and her participation in that raid is given as part of the justification. Wikipedia says she lead it, linking to the website of the National Mall eyesore as a source. It says:

On June 2, 1863, Harriet Tubman, under the command of Union Colonel James Montgomery, became the first woman to lead a major military operation in the United States when she and 150 African American Union soldiers rescued more than 700 slaves in the Combahee Ferry Raid during the Civil War.

As its source, it links to History channel website:

Working in a series of camps in Union-held portions of South Carolina, Tubman quickly learned the lay of the land and offered her services to the army as a spy, leading a group of scouts who mapped out much of the region. Tubman’s reconnaissance work laid the foundation for one of the more daring raids of the Civil War, when she personally accompanied Union soldiers in their nighttime raid at Combahee Ferry in June 1863

So her leadership in that raid has already turned into just accompanying soldiers.

I looked at other sources talking about her promotion, like NPR and Smithsonian, both obviously very sympathetic to Tubman. They are much more careful about describing her role. NPR says she “helped guide” soldiers, which makes sense if you understand her role as a spy and a scout. Smithsonian says she “oversaw military operation”, which is close to claiming her to be leading it, but then it clarifies that she “worked with” Colonel Montgomery on it, and anyone with experience in corporate performance reviews knows that “worked with” means “been there but hasn’t actually contributed much”.

So, it seems like the Wikipedia and NMAAHC are basically full of shit when they say she led the raid, but somehow the belief that she did is widespread, apparently thanks to Wikipedia. Additionally, promoting her to Brigadier General for her military role is extremely jarring. While I think it would definitely be reasonable to posthumously grant her a military rank for her spying and scouting role, a 1 star general rank is much too high, and frankly insulting to other Civil War participants, like eg Colonel James Montgomery, who actually led the raid.

Either way, in my mind, Tubman joins the long list of diversity heroes whose actual achievements have been wildly overstated, like Ada Lovelace, or Margaret Hamilton.

All of this is really just a fancy way of them stating that she basically showed the path to the Unionist unit.

Strategy games have always had a degree of DEI in the past, usually overstating the accomplishments of various factions. Even Civ itself had cope wonders.

I don’t understand (but in some sense I obviously do) the obsession with Tubman in particular. Frederick Douglass was vastly more prominent and famous in his lifetime, especially in the prewar period. Are black women leaders really that much more valuable to DEI types than black men? It’s not like we have any black men on currency either, so why not push for Douglass or some much more universally hallowed figure like MLK?

Edit: I'll just add, although seemingly forgotten by comparison Sojourner Truth was also a black woman and actually somewhat famous and moderately known pre-war, something that can't be claimed for Tubman.

Some stats: I searched newspapers up until 1860 on chroniclingamerica and although the record is extremely limited the relative frequencies should hold. Number of mentions:

Harriet Tubman: 1

Sojourner Truth: 104

Frederick Douglass: 2003

Someone like MLK would fit much better as a Civ leader - he's much more obviously a political leader, and he fits a similar tradition in Civ games of giving prominent leaders of social movements a spot as Civ leaders (most notably Gandhi).

I assume they didn't choose MLK or Douglass because they're both men. If you have a black quota and a female quota, that limits your selection pool substantially.

That, and for a video game they also have to balance the type of leaders. Tubman works as a militaristic-type leader. There was a certain amount of criticism of past civ games in that most of the aggressive/warmonger type leaders came from extinct civilizations in Asia/Africa/MesoAmerica, while the financial/industrial leaders were clustered in Europe and America. The latter tend to be better leaders, and also feel more "civilized." In particular there were very few female war-type leaders.

Also, it looks like Ben Franklin is the male leader option for America alongside Tubman.

He'd definitely hit that.

Unlike Frederick Douglas, the median american hears the name ‘Harriet Tubman’ and goes, oh yeah, badass, helped people escape slavery. Frederick Douglas is more likely to get a literally who response because even if his contribution is important, it’s not sexy. Ditto for sojourner truth.

For an influential African American everyone has heard of, and who has mostly positive associations- try MLK(yes, yes, he wasn’t actually a good person, whatever, but the normies don’t know that anymore than they know who sojourner truth is).

My understanding is that Tubman's fame only shot up during/after the US Civil War, so that may not be the best finishing date.

I'm not American, and know a limited amount about Tubman. I'm more interested in the art of mythmaking itself.

The public's reception of every currency-note-resident is colored by myth more so than historical facts. The choice to put a person on the note is an ideological statement. Does it matter if Tubman's story is fiction, if it was mean to be apocryphal anyways ? It's about what Tubman stands for, not her actual exploits. As a counter, the same argument applies for George Floyd, whose public portrayal and personal reality couldn't have been more distant. However, Tubman at her worst, was a perfectly normal person. George Floyd was a criminal and a drug addict. I endorse one, not the other. There is a difference.

I am sympathetic to oral history narratives. The culture of transmission through writing is more prominent among European (Christian) & Chinese peoples. It is no doubt a superior technology to oral history, but there are good reasons for why some groups didn't favor it. Slaves were illiterate. Indic peoples had already developed a strict culture of oral history, and had notorious tropical degradation problems. Nomadic peoples such as native Americans didn't maintain keepsakes at all, books or otherwise. Yes, their historic accounts are by definition less trustworthy. But, they aren't fictitious. The mean truthfulness of oral vs written accounts is probably pretty close, but the oral stories definitely have higher variance. The strong coupling of religion (Bible, Protestantism) with the written text, obviously accelerated the adoption of writing among the west's population like no other place. Even among the inventors of paper (Chinese), historic accounts of non-royals aren't preserved that well.

From that POV, I don't think it's fair to hold Tubman's muddled history against her. She wasn't illiterate by choice. The absence of first person written accounts shouldn't be a reason to keep her out of the currency-note.
There are other good reasons to not replace presidents with civilians, but I digress.

P.S: Every passing day, I sound more and more like a woke cultural relativist. I bet it's the contrarian in me. Now that the right is ascendant, I rush to the left's defense.

Does it matter if Tubman's story is fiction, if it was mean to be apocryphal anyways ? It's about what Tubman stands for, not her actual exploits.

It absolutely does matrer, especially since there are so many other individuals whose involvement in abolition and the anti-slavery movements have much more concrete documentation. Why jump to hold up the apocryphal one?

It's not apocryphal, it was just exaggerated by her biographer. Tubman was widely known in abolitionist circles in the 1850s and there is documentary evidence suggesting that she was involved in the Underground Railroad. That is beyond reasonable dispute. The scope and volume of her work is where the variance is between popular accounts and the accepted historical record. Tubman was interviewed for a Boston newspaper in 1863 and described nine rescue missions between 1850 and 1860 during which she helped about 70 people escape slavery. All of these trips were to the same part of Eastern Maryland where she was born, and all were family or other people she knew. Bradford later claimed 19 trips, and a magazine article estimated that she must have rescued at least 300, and thus we end up with 300 people over 19 trips, even if Tubman herself never made such a claim. Bradford did speak to Tubman, but she admits that Tubman had no recollection of some of the trips she (Bradford) was claiming and said that instead she got the information from unidentified "friends". Her activities during the war and afterward are well-documented.

You can choose not to believe Tubman, which is your prerogative, but keep in mind that the kind of first-hand account we get from her is par for the course in history. Having read her accounts, there's no reason to believe they are any more or less reliable than any other documentary evidence we have from the period. Certainly, corroboration of details would be desirable, but keep in mind that she was engaging in secret activity that had dire consequences if discovered. If we aren't willing to believe firsthand accounts without corroboration, then our evidence that the Underground Railroad existed at all is based on a rather shaky foundation. And this has implications for a lot of other things as well. We don't torch entire fields of history just because we're skeptical that people won't lie.

Shouldn’t there be, or shouldn’t there have been written evidence available of at least those 70 slaves escaping from a specific plantation? News published, notices put up, searches ordered? Diaries, journals mentioning it? Anything?

I suspect it's the human tendency towards imagination that lets us place so much mythological importance on the unverifiable. Everyone wants to believe the heroic legend, that people existed who were larger than life itself and who did incredible things. The air of mystery may in fact be more tantalizing than the surety of reality, for some.

She wasn't illiterate by choice.

While a slave, yeah. But like... remaining illiterate till 91? She escaped when she was 27.

The state of her mental health probably precluded that at such an age.

I should get around to upgrading to civ 3 one of these days. Seems like most of these long running game series peaked at 2 (age of empires, star control) or 3 (homm, arguably, although I still like 2 better)

Having played all of them, 4 is the absolute pinnacle of the series, especially with the “beyond the sword” expansion pack. I fire up a marathon campaign on a huge terra map (which has all the civs on one Eurasia style continent but leaves at least one continent unoccupied except for Barbarians) every single year, and it’s usually a 40hr investment or so. Been playing it basically since it came out in ‘05

Yeah I also play biggest map/marathon and find it sad that so little theory has been written on that playstyle. It's the only thing that even remotely captures the vibe of Civ2 which I loved so well.

There is (or was in the past) a BetterAI mod who made the AI a bit more capable. In CIV 5 and 6 war is a snorefest, as moving many units with the new one-unit-per-tile is cumbersome, and the AI doesn't understand tactics. Multiplayer is okayish in CIV 6 though.

There is a fan overhaul mod called Vox Populi, that for my money, makes Civ5 the best in the series. I started with Civ way back in Civ 2 and have played them all, including Civ6. I highly recommend it. Its main focus is improved AI play and i think they accomplished their goal and made it much more replay friendly. Once you "solve" civ on Diety the game gets quite boring.

I've never played above King, mostly because I value my time, but also because I'm not the best player and would be cheating and reloading every other turn. What do you mean by "solve" at Deity? what's the trick?

What do you mean by "solve" at Deity? what's the trick?

Pick bablyon / korea / poland. The strat is tall + science. Get 3 to 4 cities ASAP. Trade resources to get gold per turn to buy settlers. Get a few workers out, then library in each city. You should have national college in your capital before turn 100. Your early game army should be compound bow. Tech tree wise you are basically just going for the science techs (library, university, public schools), and secondarily growth techs (for more pops and therefore science). You should overtake the AI in tech around the industrial age.

The problem is that this is very boring, there is basically only one way to win. All games on Diety start out the same way, see above. There is no building wonders, no early aggression (unless cheesing), no culture or religion. All game mechanics are ignored except for science maxing. There is an optimal way to play, and its also the only way you can win on Diety. So its boring, there is no player choice, even they tech tree path and order you take is more or less decided before the game starts. Same with army: you will go archer -> compound bow -> xbow -> gatling gun and then bombers. If you don't, you will die. It also relies on the AI being dumb and the player easily cheesing them (trading early res for gold, predictable diplomacy, total inability to fight on water).

Also some starts are mega OP and can decide the game for you - salt + plains is OP, jungle + luxury a restart.

To be pedantic it’s ‘deity’.

‘Diety’ is when the difficulty is so high you’re losing weight from stress :P

no early aggression (unless cheesing) easily cheesing them (trading early res for gold, predictable diplomacy, total inability to fight on water)

The only Cheesing I'm aware of is from South Park: https://youtube.com/watch?v=7kA4qgOc94M

I also vote for 4 as the pinnacle of the older style of Civ (stacking units, quadratic tiles), especially with various mods, many of both overhaul and rebalancing ones are great.

5 imo worth trying out as well for the newer style (non-stacking units, hexagonal tiles), again there are lots of (but much less than 4) nice mods. There is also a very well made fully free(!, no ads, nothing!) mobile version called unciv.

Props to 5 for Venice, which is just catnip for people who love building tall.

The NQ Mod and balance stuff from the community patch has Civ5 in a good place for multiplayer.

I am the resident Civ 5 multiplayer expert, so if people are interested the links to the most recent multiplayer map/mod versions are always here.

I remember learning about Tubman in middle school. Now, the textbooks probably weren't as progressive as they are now, but I clocked her as clearly a murderer. I don't know if this is now consensus, or if something else is, but the case presented to me by the text at the time was TRYING to portray her as some sort of liberator, but to me she was clearly a terrorist and murderer. And I am from a northern state. The story really never adds up aside from the homicides.

...who did Tubman murder again? I'm not that familiar with her story, but a quick skim of Wikipedia entry would indicate that if she ever directly killed anyone, it would have been within wartime context.

This is completely idiotic. If they wanted a black person who freed slaves and was actually a real leader they should have used Nat Turner instead. But we live in a fallen world and so have to deal with this BS...

Did they ever do Toussaint Louverture? He seems like an obvious pick. I'd take Frederick Douglass over Nat Turner--just a personal preference. Imagine John Brown, though. He'd be like, "Year 1: where are the nukes?" Tubman is a goofy choice; fake, lame and gay.

Toussaint L'ouverture was Haitian rather than American so that probably disqualifies him from leading the USA. John Brown would be amazing. That famous painting of him always reminds me of Moses coming down from mount Sinai preaching the right way to live to his people with the way Brown's holding the book resembling the tablets that Moses had.

How many people has his rebellion liberated?

The relevant fact is that Turner was provably the real leader of a real slave rebellion.


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