site banner
PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   32829 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

4
Bottom New Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I can't be the only one getting tired of the same couple topics, so here's some comparatively lighthearted fare. Well — if one can call lighthearted anything involving a first-world nation flirting with plague.

https://x.com/lara_e_brown/status/1909607333090513144

The Birmingham bin strike has reached its fifth week. Rubbish is piled high, rats are infesting the streets, and experts are concerned about Weil's disease.

🧵on how the Equality Act contributed to this, and how it may cause similar strikes across the country.

1/ In 2012, 174 former Birmingham Council employees brought an equal pay appeal to the Supreme Court.

They argued Birmingham City Council had provided lower pay to women in predominantly female jobs (cooks, cleaners & care staff) compared to refuse collectors and road workers.

Long story short: The Birmingham City Council employed (employed) garbagemen, roadworkers, and grave diggers, who naturally were mostly men. They also employ cooks, cleaners, and caregivers for the elderly; these are mostly women.

At some point someone noticed that the former set of workers tended to earn more than the latter. A lawsuit was launched which argued that this was obvious sexism and a violation of the Equality Act since, in aggregate, male employees were getting paid more than female employees. The lawsuit succeeded, which spawned countless followup lawsuits. Any woman working in a job which paid less than a typically-male job was suddenly able to sue for damages, and consequently the Council has paid out over a billion pounds in equal pay compensation. The Council estimates that it is likely to have to pay an additional 800 million or so pounds before the thing has run its course.

Naturally, they also had to fix the problem, and so slashed the pay of garbagemen, road workers, grave diggers, and so on to match the female average. (Raising female pay to the male level would have been untenable before paying out >£1B, and certainly isn't possible now, as they're already basically bankrupted.) Unfortunately, it seems that people aren't interested in doing those jobs for so much less pay, and have declined to continue.

Result: Ever-growing piles of garbage all over the place, leading to a massive population of disease-bearing rodents and other pests. Weil's disease and hantavirus are suddenly major concerns. And, as the average daily temperature rises, the already-unspeakable miasma is getting worse. And no one can do anything about it, since, afaict, it's not allowed for the private sector to 'compete' with the government.

No one's even arguing that it's different pay for the same job. It's universally agreed that it's different pay for different jobs. However, the rhetoric here has to do with the value of the job not economically, but in some ineffable moral sense. Supporters of the move argue that surely the 'value' of the predominantly-female jobs must be the same as the predominantly-male jobs. To think otherwise would apparently imply that female labor is less 'valuable' than male labor, which in turn would imply that women are less 'valuable' than men.

What can one say in reply? It's one of those things where all one can do is shake one's head. Especially in Birmingham, where anyone considering pointing out some obvious considerations on the matter is liable to be charged with misogyny. And modern polite white society doesn't seem to have any kind of defense against women's tears.

All in all it's one of the clearest examples I've ever seen of wokeness destroying a society's ability to perform basic functions.

Birmingham is, FWIW, the economic and cultural center of the Midlands region, and Britain's second-largest city after London. Now it's facing problems which sound like something out of its medieval era.

And I have to wonder: if it happened there, can it happen in London?

To add some of my own commentary, this seems to me an example of the impossibility of compromise with wokeness. There can be no detente. Wokeness can never rest until it has erased all practical distinctions between human beings, and one generation's gracious, ostensibly common-sensical compromise ('equal pay for the same job') not only doesn't address the real problem but serves as a springboard for the next generation's 'equal pay for different jobs', e.g.

The fundamental relationship between men and women hasn't been harmonious since Eden at the latest, but it has at least remained functional throughout most of history. When I see the above, it occurs to me that one side effect is even fewer men able to generate enough income to provide for a family or maintain the respect of potential mates. Another straw on the camel's back.

And modern polite white society doesn't seem to have any kind of defense against women's tears.

This refusal to work is that defense.

Weil's disease and hantavirus are suddenly major concerns. And, as the average daily temperature rises, the already-unspeakable miasma is getting worse.

Then the way I see it, the women have two choices- they can deal with it themselves (unlikely), or they can accept that their unwillingness to do certain types of labor makes that labor inherently more valuable.

I expect either forced arbitration or military action (financial or otherwise) will come next, perhaps both at the same time; this is a threat to the Two-Tier English order. (Ever wonder why China censors discussion of 'lying flat'? Now you know).

You left out a third option: raise taxes on the entire country to equalize compensation across the different job classes. You even get to hit highly productive men (and women) more, creating even more equality.

Do this process enough, and you can eventually make sure part time yoga instructors get paid the same as the top researchers at DeepMind!

There's also the fourth option, of doing pretty much nothing and then complaining on BlueSky about the conservative incel wreckers for causing the Fourth Bubonic Plague.

Uh, the result of forcing them to go back to work with a pay cut will be work-to-rule at a deliberately slow pace. This will not get garbage off the streets.

Ok, so forced arbitration then military action.

I think the current English order is evil enough to order them shot as a motivator if no alternative can be found; whether the soldiers actually pull the triggers when so ordered is another matter.

You’d start with the police, actually. The British unarmed police, many of them female, tasked with arresting physical laborers for not working quickly enough. This will go very badly and build the kind of sympathy which makes deploying regimental system armies against their social equals dangerous enough for Westminster to think twice about it, and possibly call sympathy strikes.

Like the structure of the British army makes it very bad for that kind of operation because the soldiers are loyal to their noncoms over their commanders; commissioned officers have less ability to issue unpopular orders in the breach without the support of the sergeants. And I’m given to understand that the British army is much less diverse than the American one; there’s a reason it wasn’t deployed to Liverpool.

Such an action is sufficiently unprecedented in the Anglosphere anyways that it would make senior political leaders jumpy enough to actually think long enough to consider the mutiny angle.

There is no need for any of this when the British government can just hire Polish garbage men (inventing a visa category if necessary, and it is barely even necessary) to do the job.

Well yes, there is likely a ‘scab’ option before getting on the escalation ladder to begin with. But the escalation ladder does not begin with military force, and military force is likely enough to go badly, that it would be unlikely anyways.

This is one of those things where I assume it can't be as bad as it sounds. I skimmed through 5 or 6 articles on the strike and only one of them mentioned the details of the equal pay ruling in 2012. If you just looked at the current articles, you'd never know the underlying issue.

So then I asked GPT4o for some context. The city is forced to deal with the costs and have tried to find reasonable solutions but the union is understandably not into the removal of higher paying roles and cuts to wages down the line for people that take those affected positions. The roles that are in question (bin men, street cleaning, parks - all outdoor jobs AFAIK) were deemed to receive higher than market compensation during that equal pay case due to union negotiated bonuses and regular OT hours. Those rates were hard to reduce as you would expect. I couldn't find any real hard evidence of the magnitude of all of this but it sounds like par for the course for long standing union jobs like this.

I did some more digging though and the real meat is the 2012 case which hinged on the legal principal of "equal value". According to 4o:

Legal Foundation:

Under the UK’s Equal Pay Act 1970 (and later the Equality Act 2010), women and men are entitled to equal pay for: Like work (same or broadly similar), Work rated as equivalent, or Work of equal value—even if the jobs are different, so long as they require comparable effort, skill, and responsibility.

What “Equal Value” Meant in This Case:

The women bringing the case—clerical, care, cleaning, and catering staff—argued that their work, though different in nature, required:

Comparable levels of skill and decision-making,

Similar responsibility and effort,

And that their roles contributed equally to the functioning of the council.

The tribunal agreed, finding that the systematic undervaluation of traditionally female roles, particularly through lack of access to bonuses and enhancements, violated the principle of equal value. Key Implications:

The tribunal rejected the argument that physical hardship or market tradition justified pay differences on their own.

It emphasized that job evaluation studies—not tradition or union negotiations—must guide pay parity.

It also showed that indirect discrimination can occur even in the absence of explicit exclusion or bias, through structures that consistently reward one gender over another.

It's noted that the female-dominated roles include more flexible hours, less physically demanding work, less exposure to the weather, later start times and shorter expected working hours. But those things would not be taken into consideration, except that those are factors that made those roles more appealing to women and that these differences in working conditions are part of the reason for the gender divide. In other words: the higher paid jobs are harder, lower status, less flexible. That means they have to pay more and they are more likely to be held by men. And because the easier, more flexible roles are filled by more women, but the "value" they create is the same, they must be paid the same amount.

I'm sure those male-dominate roles are overpaid to some degree due to the union doing what unions do. fair. But they don't seem to care about the real reasons for the pay difference. It's wild.

Even in non-union Texas, with strong right-to-work laws and a flat ban on public sector unions, you’d have gotten the same result.

These people are making me side with the longshoreman’s union.

Why not just rotate in the cooks and cleaners into the garbagewomen roles, since they're equivalent jobs?

This would be especially good if you swapped in the elderly caregivers into the gravedigger roles. It aligns incentives: if your care receiver dies, you dig the grave for them.

And the thread is full of people saying the decision is perfectly reasonable and that "bin men" are overpaid, e.g. "Mollie"

Bin men no longer have physically manual jobs. They wheel a bin from the curb to a lorry which the householder (often a woman) has dragged down stairs or along a gunnel.

And yet women weren't signing up in droves for the job when it paid so much better. I can't see why?

Seems entirely believable that men are more willing than women to suck it up and do a "gross" job even if it has gotten much less taxing in terms of sheer physical effort. I expect there's more male sewage inspectors than female, too, even if there's no lifting involved whatsoever.

Did you just equivocate between "male/man" and "female/woman"? Spicy.

Some did! Lost the source but I read that something like 20% of the garbage workers were women, though life experience has taught me that they were probably not actually doing the same work as the men. Can't help but wonder how all of this occurs to the women who were willing and able to do the job. Their perspective hasn't been represented anywhere that I've found.

That would surprise me. I have literally never seen a bin-woman in my life.

Although the Birmingham case got the same result as one involving the clothing retailer Next. In that case, the shop-floor staff were getting paid less than the staff in the warehouse. The funny thing is, for Next, women were a majority in both areas. However, since the female majority was smaller in the warehouse, the tribunal ruled there was a case to answer (while also admitting that there was no actual discrimination happening, and that the jobs weren't the same).

It baffles me that these tribunals have the power to just dictate what jobs should pay.

It baffles me that these tribunals have the power to just dictate what jobs should pay.

I think this is the part of the story that's more important than wokeness or whatever; that ideological judges have such power in determining policy.

And one that could genuinely change in the UK. Starmer clearly doesn't like quangos dictating policy (e.g. the Sentencing Council deciding that everybody except white men should get reduced sentences) so I can't imagine he'd be sympathetic to an employment tribunal casually bankrupting the UK's second city.

Is it true that Starmer doesn't like this sort of thing? AFAIK he only started acting tough on the sentencing council once it became an awkward political issue, and on a more abstract level he seems to believe any outcome is sacrosanct as long as it's been determined by a legal body of some description.

He seems to be opposed to excessive government getting in the way of his growth agenda/state capacity, and has told his cabinet to stop hiding behind quangos.

Of course, Labour gonna Labour, so they're still setting up new quangos and implementing new rules about diversity and stuff, so we'll see how it shakes out.

That's fair.

Interestingly, Next, which is genuinely led by one of the best businessmen in the world (and I mean that without reservation, turning a mediocre British clothing retailer into an extraordinarily profitable and resilient operation) mostly solved the issue by rotating staff between the warehouse and storefront. If Simon Wolfson were dictator of England…well, it would be better managed, for sure.

Their perspective hasn't been represented anywhere that I've found.

Yes, that's called "trans erasure". These women are performing opposite-, or rather trans-, gender roles- therefore, opinion discarded for doing work incompatible with one's gender.

Doubly so because they're gender traitors- again, traditionalist and progressive thought both agree that men owe women just for existing, so what are these women doing working, and why are they co-operating with men?

Don’t weakman, please.

Obviously this situation is retarded- did you expect blue collar workers doing nasty, physically demanding, unpleasant, and not well esteemed work were in it for the exercise? Self-fulfillment?

I suspect these coullions literally did think that garbage collectors and grave diggers went to work because they’d be bored otherwise. It certainly seems like the class behind wokeness has no concept of ‘people go to work so they aren’t homeless beggars’.

Individual citizens can call their council members and burn their trash(yeah, it probably takes a ‘not getting the plague’ license). Not a lot to be done though.

This morning I sought out and read two pieces on this news. The first was a short report from NPR which side stepped the Equal Pay Equality Act connection:

The Labour-run Birmingham City Council is effectively bankrupt because of a settlement over historic pay discrimination. As a result, it's had to make significant budget cuts of 300 million pounds ($383 million) over two years and is only providing services required by law, including waste collection.

The second was a BBC piece which more thoroughly reports on the immediate union dispute. The BBC article also more thoroughly avoids mentioning the equal pay lawsuit that set off the crisis. I do believe I am better informed by reading it, but only because I already read the broader context elsewhere. If I search "equal pay" on the BBC's website I can find articles like this one from a week ago, but the connection is almost a side note. It's a reality, not something to get upset about.

That leads me to a culture war observation: there is no Root Causeism to be found in these articles. Surely this is a case where the Root Cause is clear and could be addressed by fixing the legislation to avoid such judgments. If a city doesn't pay out hundreds of millions of dollars because a judge interprets a law a certain way, then a city is better positioned to avoid giving trash men an 8k/yr pay cut.

There are no professors, experts, or city officials quoted regarding the incredible judgment that led the city to the crisis. My expectation, were this a story on a knife crime crisis, the BBC would have criminologists to point at poverty or something. This is a union fight story, not a legislative or judicial horror show story, and those may be two different things in the UK's information environment. I feel demoralized thinking about it and I don't even live there.

The Birmingham City Council employed (employed) garbagemen, roadworkers, and grave diggers, who naturally were mostly men. They also employ cooks, cleaners, and caregivers for the elderly; these are mostly women.

I think that one aspect of this is that not all jobs are equal in prestige. Presumably, all things being equal, being a dish washer will lead to more success on the dating market than being a garbageman. So the demand-supply equilibrium for the hourly rates of a garbageman are higher than for a dish washer. The invisible hand of the market saves us yet again.

This is not restricted by gender in any way. A classical low prestige occupation (especially at low wage levels) is prostitution. Basically anyone would rather work eight hours as a supermarket cashier than have sex for money for the same period of time. Thus the hourly wages for a sex worker are much higher than for a cashier.

Another non-monetary benefit of a job is potential for advancement. The dish washer can level up to cook. The garbageman can not really expect to advance much from experience, being the one who drives the truck is more a matter of having the right driving license than being an expert in garbage collection operations. I am doubtful that leveling up your sex skill will significantly increase your income from sex work. By contrast, the cashier might plausibly get promoted to assistant manager at some point.

This is the woke thing where an unequal outcome is taken as an indication for foul play. As usual, it is bullshit. Any female cook can decide to make it big as a garbagewoman. Any nurse-in-training can decide that she would prefer to deal with the elderly in a more permanent fashion and become a grave-digger. If they don't, this does not mean that the system is unfair.

Another non-monetary benefit of a job is potential for advancement. The dish washer can level up to cook. The garbageman can not really expect to advance much from experience, being the one who drives the truck is more a matter of having the right driving license than being an expert in garbage collection operations. I am doubtful that leveling up your sex skill will significantly increase your income from sex work. By contrast, the cashier might plausibly get promoted to assistant manager at some point.

Driving the truck is determined by experience and seniority in garbage collecting - it's not much easier than being the guy who gets out when necessary, but it is easier. But your point still stands because there's nowhere to go from there - you are either the guy who drives garbage around all day or you are the guy who drives around with garbage all day. You can't collect garbage so well you get promoted to management, not these days.

Does driving the truck not open up possibilities of non-garbage truck driving?

When I was doing IT for the council here it was the other way around - everyone started off in the tip or the depot and was trying to get a job in the trucks. Driving the truck waa the easiest job there, because you never had to do heavy lifting.

I meant my comment as "does driving the garbage truck not open up opportunities for truck driving in general?"

Ah I was thinking of advancement strictly within the same company.

Yeah, my hyphenation was done intentionally, but I was afraid it might be missed.

Yeah it's interesting actually - because of the way the motte is displayed on my phone, it placed "Does driving the truck not open up possibilities of non-" on the first line and "garbage truck driving?" on the second, and due to that separation I intuitively read it as non 'garbage truck driving', so same business, but not in a truck. But when I quoted your post after you explained what you meant it printed non-garbage truck driving on the same line, and it was obvious what you originally meant. Sorry for my confusion.

Anyway it does for sure, but council truck driving is nothing like private truck driving. Despite being the most precious person I know when it comes to smells, I'd be happy to get a job driving a garbage truck if I was out of work. But you'd never convince me to drive trucks interstate or for earthworking. The amount of money you get for the work and risk is completely out of whack.

Even lower management is probably hard-gated by a degree requirement that is likely out of reach for the sorts of people who become garbage men.

But my experience in blue collar jobs is that there’s probably a few jobs like ‘route lead’ or ‘shop coordinator’ which are management in all but name and basically the senior non-coms of the place. Those jobs are probably available to garbage truck drivers after 10 years or so.

Sorry, I meant my comment more as "does driving the garbage truck not open up opportunities for truck driving in general?"

Upvoting not just for the very sensible analysis but for "deal with the elderly in a more permanent fashion".

Not disagreeing with your general point, but ‘dishwasher’ isn’t really a higher-status job than ‘garbage man’- although it probably has more flexible hours. That seems like a much more relevant difference, but maybe the UK employment market is different.

Heard a piece on the radio about this the other day. IIRC apparently what happened was they were paid equally per their contracted hours but the binmen were allowed to go home when their work was finished while the cooks and cleaners had to stay until the end of their shifts. The cooks etc then sued the council for pay discrimination because they were doing more hours active work for the same pay.

It's arguable that the binmen had finished their work, so why sit around the yard drinking tea just to fill out the hours. It's also arguable that the streets are never perfectly clean so why couldn't they pick up a broom and get to work refilling the bins if they've got a couple of hours left, they're not being paid to drink tea or leave early. Obviously at that point they stop working so hard because they don't have the incentive to finish early any more. At some point the council propose reducing either the number of binmen or their hours (and resulting pay) and you get a strike.

And I have to wonder: if it happened there, can it happen in London?

Garbage collection is handled individually by all 32 boroughs, so hopefully not at the same time.

In addition, almost every local authority in the UK except Birmingham has contracted out rubbish collection. Although the original reason for doing this was to bust the unions, it has the added advantage that binmen are not available to predatory lawyers as a comparator group for an equal pay claim.

I mean, not doubting that the union makes this easier, but if a private garbage collector decided to cut salaries by that much, they wouldn’t be able to collect garbage due to labor problems. In a way unions actually make fixing the problem easier- you can give them the number they agree on and everyone’s back to work.

The funniest solution would be to lower the Supreme Court's pay and perks to match the garbagemen and see how quickly they change their minds. It seems they're on £226,193 a year which is a very, very high salary for the UK. Ironically Brave search gives me this as explanation for the judge's salaries:

These salaries are relatively high compared to other professions, reflecting the demanding nature of the role and the importance of upholding the rule of law.

I wonder what percentage of Brummies think they would lose a fight with one of the many rats crawling on their streets.

I can't believe these people used to rule the world.

Perhaps it's time to start bestowing quests offering opportunities to low-level PCs children and the unemployed. Collect ten rat rails in exchange for a few coins and rep with the City Council.

Eventually, the pied piper will, after the city refuses to pay him because it would be gender unequal, lead the children into starting libertarian direct-action groups which establish an ancap utopia in which privatized courts assess fines on homeowners who don’t pay for their garbage to be hauled off.

Relevant Terry Pratchett:

Shortly before the Patrician came to power there was a terrible plague of rats. The city council countered it by offering twenty pence for every rat tail. This did, for a week or two, reduce the number of rats—and then people were suddenly queueing up with tails, the city treasury was being drained, and no one seemed to be doing much work. And there still seemed to be a lot of rats around. Lord Vetinari had listened carefully while the problem was explained, and had solved the thing with one memorable phrase which said a lot about him, about the folly of bounty offers, and about the natural instinct of Ankh-Morporkians in any situation involving money: “Tax the rat farms.”

Inspired, no doubt, by the (perhaps not true) story of the British offering bounties for cobras in India.

GNU Terry Pratchett.

(Raising female pay to the male level would have been untenable before paying out >£1B

Were the people who started the movement aware of this? I have to think anyone getting such a ball rolling is angling for higher salaries for the plaintiffs in the long term. Seems weird to bother otherwise. Why aren't the women going on strike too, and demanding to be paid as much as the men were before?

This is very similar to a 2024 case against a UK clothing chain Next. Equality Act lawsuit, but this time "underpaid" and mostly female retail works vs evenly split gender warehouse workers. Alex Tabarrok from marginal revolution has a good write up.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/09/equality-act-2010.html

The court used or accepted the use of a rubric to determine if the jobs were equal in value. 11 categories, each of equal weight. The retail job scored 440, the warehouse job scored 340. Which was enough for the court to the two jobs were equal in value. Next owes 30 million in damages and must equalize pay.

The 340 vs 440 score actually suggests the courts think that the retail job is harder than the warehouse job.

Apparently, the company had offered all of its retail employees the opportunity to transfer to the warehouse, and one of the plaintiffs had turned it down because the warehouse is loud and dirty and has very limited autonomy, and the only way she would ever take a job there is if... it offered a lot more money over her retail position.

I've been thinking about whether there are some plausible underlying causes to the sort of political and social chaos that has blessed our recent times and whether there are some things that can be done to improve the health of the civic body. It seems to me that perhaps the biggest problem we face is demoralization.

What is the source of this demoralization? I'd guess there are several. The first is the fruition of a generational demoralization campaign run by the left against America. This started mainly as comintern agitprop and Soviet psyops, and has been gradually adopted across left-progressive institutions, including, critically, higher education. This is the source of a wide variety of anti-American memes, from America being a dystopian late-stage-capitalism hellscape, to America being the most racist and bigoted nation which owes its existence to slavery and can never be free of its guilt, to American bullying and anticommunism being the root cause of suffering and oppression the world over. Centrists who wonder how public perception of their economic well-being is so divergent from what the statistics show, need only watch and internalize that damned Newsroom speech.

There's also the role of the media to consider, which, aside from being heavily leftist to begin with, also has a completely separate set of incentives to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt. They owe much of their existence to people obsessively following the news out of anxiety and panic. Beyond even pandering to prurient "if it bleeds, it leads" elevation of the worst kind of daily grotesqueries, there are multiple cataclysmic "end times" narratives that almost every event can be linked to, from climate collapse to the rise of fascism to race war.

Then there are the entirely self-inflicted wounds. In multiple ways and in multiple places, incompetence is tolerated, failure is rewarded, and sloth is celebrated. While institutions may see their own self-preservation as an accomplishment entirely worthy to justify their own existence, outsiders do not. The conduct of the GWOT was bad, the handling of Covid was bad, the administration of local urban governments is egregiously terrible. That these things go not just unpunished but unfixed is corrosive to public confidence. When even public art is instituted not to enliven the spirit but to deaden it, loss of hope should not be surprising!

The symptoms of demoralization manifest in ways that will seem familiar to us, I think. As people lose faith in institutions, they will become angry, fearful, and paranoid. They will choose the defect option across more and more choices. Demoralization increases time-sensitivity, when the future is discounted as likely to be worse than the present. Socially, people become alienated and transfer that dissatisfaction to their own lives. Fertility decrease is, in my opinion, downstream of this as well. Internationally, isolationism and collapse in confidence is the inevitable result. Why would any decent person who has internalized that their nation and their society is fundamentally believe in actions taken by that government on their behalf?

So what can be done to reverse this demoralization? To a certain extent I am afraid there is no putting this genie back in the bottle, save for a sufficiently grave external threat. Certainly academics would never agree to not criticize America, no should they. Freedom of speech grants everyone the right to air their grievances. But would it not be a worthy effort, on the eve of our semiquincentennial, to counter this with praise? This would perhaps have to come from the government itself, and patriotic propaganda risks a slide into jingoism, but is it not, after all, a valid function of the government to advocate on its own behalf? We once did this as a necessity against the creep of communism, but since the fall of the Berlin Wall, efforts perhaps seemed unnecessary.

Some great works would also be helpful. Literal moonshots, Manhattan programs, monumental bridges and dams, mind-bending radio telescopes and supercolliders - these all seem like relics of a previous time. Even now when we decide we want to do something spectacular and potentially society-altering, like a HSR line or a solar megaproject, it fizzles out in a mire of bureaucratic planning, lawsuits, and safetyism. Wouldn't it be inspiring to set out to something amazing and complete it on-time and on-budget? Once people realize that such a thing is possible, might they not start supporting many more such works?

Sorry if this all seems melodramatic. I freely admit that it's not something I've researched and am confident has a factual basis. It just seems to me that what's missing in most of the discussion of our problems is hopefulness and confidence that the future will be better than the present and much better than the past. In the same way that many economic indicators are, at bottom, about confidence in the future, I think many social indicators are as well.

But would it not be a worthy effort, on the eve of our semiquincentennial, to counter this with praise? This would perhaps have to come from the government itself, and patriotic propaganda risks a slide into jingoism, but is it not, after all, a valid function of the government to advocate on its own behalf? We once did this as a necessity against the creep of communism, but since the fall of the Berlin Wall, efforts perhaps seemed unnecessary.

Great! You start. What do you like about America as it now exists?

There's something a little funny about this depressing rant about how negatively-biased navel-gazing intellectuals have demoralized America with their depressing rants. "The Root Cause of all the bad things happening is our demoralization, and the Root Cause of our demoralization is everyone going around pointing out the Root Causes of how bad things are!"

The conduct of the GWOT was bad, the handling of Covid was bad, the administration of local urban governments is egregiously terrible.

To this list I would add earlier examples: the War on Drugs. They won, and there was never any serious chance of any other outcome. No serious effort was ever made to achieve victory, or even to define victory in a way that was achievable. Enforcement was always somewhere between haphazard and hopelessly arbitrary. At no point, even at the height of mass incarceration, did upper class degenerates succeed in giving everyone the impression that they didn't want or couldn't get drugs. Spreading Democracy, I grew up with it understood that this was part of America's mission in the world, then at some point we just kind of gave up on it. Iraq was part of the problem, but worse than that was coming to accept China's totalitarianism wasn't going anywhere. We just kinda gave up on these goals, like the War on Poverty, the effort to spread capitalist prosperity, environmentalism, space exploration. They seemed to just fizzle out.

As for solutions? I often return to the wisdom of Christopher Moore in his comedy novel A Dirty Job:

At the pet store he picked out two painted turtles, each about as big around as a mayonnaise-jar lid. He bought them a large kidney shaped dish that had its own little island, a plastic palm tree, some aquatic plants, and a snail. The snail, presumably, to bolster the self-esteem of the turtles: “You think we’re slow? Look at that guy.” To shore up the snail’s morale in the same way, there was a rock. Everyone is happier if they have someone to look down on, as well as someone to look up to, especially if they resent both. This is not only the Beta Male strategy for survival, but the basis for capitalism, democracy, and most religions.

Americans need a hierarchy. The Great Chain of Being brings comfort to all. Who you want to put at the top, and who at the bottom, is less important than that everyone needs to feel that their status can be raised above someone else's through their efforts. In my mind, the problem of so many NEETs is that when hitting on a girl, one is almost better off being unemployed and a charming slacker or daring criminal, than saying one works an entry level job at Amazon or McDonald's or wheeling dirt around a construction site. Work doesn't seem like it will significantly increase one's status. This is why things like exercise are such red-pilling experiences for so many men: they combine natural and inevitable hierarchy (someone is faster than you and someone is slower), and change in that status from one's own efforts (you move up or down in the hierarchy). We have to eliminate the sense of learned helplessness.

I often return to the wisdom of Christopher Moore in his comedy novel A Dirty Job

Totally unrelated, but it is always great to find a fellow Christopher Moore fan. He is probably the best comedic author after Pratchett and is criminally underappreciated.

No kidding! I LOVED him as a teenager, I actually drove to a college in New Jersey with my mother when Fool came out to watch him stage a live reading with the college Shakespeare company, they'd do scenes from Fool juxtaposed with King Lear. I keep meaning to do reread Lamb to do a write up here.

Lamb is his masterpiece. To make a die hard atheist like me to think "This is the jesus I would like to know better" is quite an achievement.

As @MaiqTheTrue says, the rot goes back much longer and, I would add, across many different domains.

This is at the root of anti-enlightenment / anti-modernist thinking (a position I seemingly become more comfortable with daily). Humans used to have a much more humble and limited opinion of their ability to understand the complexity of the universe and capital-T "Truth." Much of that was left to religion, theology, or, sometimes, applied ethics and morality. In fact, even the best thinkers of the enlightenment period had a totally different conception of religion and faith in terms of epistemic systems.

Whereas today, in purely rational terms, it is fashionable to draw a box around theology and religion as a kind of esoteric study of the human spirit or heart, classically, religion and theology was seen as a bedrock component of any knowledge system in much the same way we might think of arithmetic, basic grammar, or ... geography? (you take your pick).

And I think it's taken 300 or so years for the compounding effects of that loss to be felt. Your post highlights demoralization as a key issue. Many other places I've seen the term "crisis of meaning" thrown around. The figures for male suicides, drug overdose, and chornic alcoholism are often lumped together as "deaths of despair." The problem, to me, seems to be that a purely rational worldview creates a fundamentally underdeveloped system of knowledge and personal agency - we really do become the rational ideal. That is, information processors. But that alone does not make life livable, nor does it do anything to orient us towards useful application of information processing. One thing I know for sure about Scott from SSC - he is a world class thinker. Another thing I know for sure - sometimes he chooses the goofiest things to think about.

The various more developed religions do a lot to remedy this. The more purely "spiritual" ones (Buddhism etc.) I think aren't as great because they fail in engaging with the world in the opposite direction of rationalism. Instead of overthinking, they actively cultivate a profound detachment from things that may subjectively feel serene and peacful but is just a different method of undermining prosocial activities. If people find themselves adverse to organized religion, I see the most effective systems being some of the classic virtue ethics regimes -- stoicism etc.

There's going to (always) be a temptation to secularize the religious in order to try to split the baby and get the maximum amount of "meaning" without all of that pesky sin-and-metaphysics. This is the primary critique of Kant's categorical imperative. And I think it's a valid critique - secularizing something that is inherently not isn't possible and you're more likely engaging in some elaborate self-deception. Play the tape forward and you end up with wokeism - which has all of the anthropological trappings of a religious belief system yet is rife with internal contradictions and has zero rigorous epistemic construction.

In a nutshell, people need to cultivate a sense of faith - deeply held belief something transcendent and beyond themselves that they can orient a life towards. And there needs to be an accompanying practice of it. Just like physical fitness or general mental acuity, if you aren't doing "it" everyday, you're getting worse at it.

That’s absurd. Believing in something really hard doesn’t make it true, nor does it make it good. You’re opening the door to a lot more than the classic deontologies. New Age woo, personality cults, ultranationalism—they’re a lot harder to discount once you throw out rationality.

I think it’s also ridiculous to accuse the Buddhists of being “less developed” than, presumably, Christians. Doubly so if you’re considering the initial Protestants, the Second Great Awakening sects, any of the charismatic branches. Criticizing the parent church for being too materialist was like half their reason for splitting.

Oh, and of course you trot out the old punching bag. I don’t exactly disagree that “wokeism” is missing key traits of a religion, so I have to ask: do you think it would work any better as a movement if it abandoned all pretense of materialism? Would the practitioners be happier, would they resolve their internal contradictions?

Because it sounds like a lot of double standards. They should stop overthinking, but also be logically consistent. Oh, and they can’t underthink, either, or they’ll undermine their prosocial activities. Those get measured in material terms, so that subjective serenity must be worthless. Also, material terms don’t matter, and the real failing is allowing a “crisis of meaning.” Everyone should develop their own faith, except where it contradicts with your values, in which case they can get bent.

I don’t think your position is consistent.

I see these rants about instituting a muscular system of top-down control over the american economy and culture and think--

Have you considered communism?

No, seriously. What you are proposing is just globohomo minus the globo and the homo. And I don't mean that as a joke-- you are speaking to the exact same complaints that motivate the world's marxists and socialists. In particular, I could imagine the words "incompetence is tolerated, failure is rewarded, and sloth is celebrated," being a pointed critique of capitalists out of another person's mouth.

I don't say this as a rebuttal of your comment, exactly-- because there isn't much to rebut. Your line-level proposals are mostly things I like, and I firmly believe that the vast majority of all humans would prefer for things to get better rather than worse. But in response to proposals about how we should all push toward a particular unifying cultural norm, I'm always thinking... well, why doesn't the speaker just capitulate first? And the answer is always that their individual ideological quibbles really are more important to them (and everyone else) than linking arms with their ideological opponents.

I think the “rot” goes back much farther than people think. The biggest difference between modern society and much more ancient ones is that we have lost the idea of purpose, or to be more precise a purpose other than selfish hedonism. Why are we here, and what is our society actually supposed to accomplish and how every person fits into that great plan for society. Most traditional societies have that, usually connected to religion. You fit into the world created by God or the gods to do something either great or small to bring about whatever the will of the universe. Sometimes it’s secular, bringing about freedom for everyone, civilizing a frontier, colonizing a place (even mars). But it’s something all of society is striving for. We have “money and bitches” more or less. That’s the grand narrative— you exist as an atomized human in a society and your job is to get what you can for yourself and to have fun in any way you choose. Anyone getting in the way of your hedonistic desires or your wealth is bad.

This is no way to build anything. A society of atomized humans is not a society, just like a herd of cats — it’s not a cohesive unit coordinating to do things, it’s a bunch of cats who happen to be in the same place at the same time. And they cannot possibly trust any other cat to not steal their Fancy Feast, or not scratch them, or to let them use the scratching post. A herd of atomized humans is the same. You don’t form a community, you just exist around each other. And as such you don’t expect that anyone will not try to take advantage of you, or let you have things you need, or just simply leave you alone if need be.

I think that Elon gives an idea for a shared vision - to colonize the galaxy. And I don't know why so few people are actually interested of moving beyond Earth.

Because a) Elon and b) the vast majority of people do not know how to contribute or cannot. It'd be different if you could jump on a colony ship but what is the average person to do here?

This is the problem with many legitimately impressive secular achievements: lots of people have nothing to offer or nothing to gain. We don't want to be building pyramids and we can't all be at Los Alamos.

The people who get invested into moving beyond Earth seem to generally not be the kind of people who trust Elon to do anything about that. Anymore, at least.

Absent a purpose, at least the existence of the "other" can substitute for it. But these days, with globalism, mass media erasing cultural distinctions and the internet carving communities crossing national lines as if they were nothing, we are denied a clear "other". If there is no "them", then "us" is meaningless. This is how the last vestiges of unity and brotherhood in humanity are being wiped out. Blaming nationalism for the evils of the previous centuries, Western intelligentia cheered globalism on, thinking it would unite all of humanity, but a united humanity is impossible without something to contrast it against, and without the large entities we used to unite as, humans just fall back into basic individualism.

That is not how traditional societies by and large saw the world. People in traditional societies did not see themselves as individuals with a purpose, they saw themselves as members of a community- kind of the way we see ants or bees- and that community had obligations to God or the gods. An individual didn't; Roman peasants didn't supplicate the gods in penance for their sins, personally. The senate managed the relationship between the Romans(all of them) and the gods.

An individual didn't; Roman peasants didn't supplicate the gods in penance for their sins, personally. The senate managed the relationship between the Romans(all of them) and the gods.

This is simply incorrect, individuals routinely made offerings to gods, both minor and major, to try and influence events in their life. IE, a Roman sailor might give an offering to Neptune to protect him on his next voyage, or a soldier might do the same to Mars to protect him before a battle. Also you don't seem to grasp the primarily transactional nature of a lot of (most? all??) polytheistic ancient religions, you offer things to the gods because you want them to intercede on your behalf, in the same way that you might try to bribe a judge or a prominent politician. You worship and flatter the gods because they are powerful and can do things for you, not because they are paragons of morality.

I would also add that trying to reduce the worldviews of all the members of "traditional societies" into less than a paragraph is nonsensical, there were major differences in worldview between a Roman alive during the reign of Augustus and a Roman that was alive during the reign of Diocletian, let alone between an Assyrian labourer and a Gothic chieftain. The omnipresent threat of bandits and pirates puts paid to the idea that ancient societies were a monolith, before we even talk about the various historical\mythical figures who were very much just in it for themselves (Odysseus being a personal favourite of mine).

I think this has become a growing pet peeve of mine, listening to people try and make political points by referring to a funhouse mirror version of history that they have in their heads. It happens right across the political spectrum and I understand that by the nature of things no one will ever have a truly accurate understanding of the way things were (in fact I think nobody will ever truly have an accurate understanding of the way things are at any point in time), but I swear to god if I see one more twitter account with a greek statue profile picture complaining about how degenerate the modern world is, with its homos and pedophiles, I'm going to have an aneurysm.

but I swear to god if I see one more twitter account with a greek statue profile picture complaining about how degenerate the modern world is, with its homos and pedophiles, I'm going to have an aneurysm.

Worth remembering that some or all of those kinds of posters are secretly women (allegedly).

I thought they were Indian engagement farms?

An individual didn't; Roman peasants didn't supplicate the gods in penance for their sins, personally. The senate managed the relationship between the Romans(all of them) and the gods.

This doesn't even pass the smell test, because why then did it quickly become notable - and criminal - that Christians wouldn't sacrifice?

And yes, I'm sure the Senate liked to believe that they managed the relationship between Gods and the people. And, because of the slack in the polytheist system, they eventually could slide Emperors in there (and those sorts of proclamations are obviously more likely to reach us compared to a random freedman's sacrifices). But people probably still worshiped their tribal gods. In fact, when Constantine finally got tolerance for the Christians it was justified on the grounds of good politics: each group would cause its patron deity to be favorable to the Empire. That seems like the opposite relationship.

You can't look at the trouble a far more concerned Christian clergy had with enforcing uniform doctrine on the laity and imagine that the Senate alone managed religion

This is something I have been thinking about recently too and made an account just to respond to this. It's like the modern Western leftist memeplex is one of the worst things you could want if you were trying to create an ideology that would lead to the success and health of a nation. Although I have to admit that MAGA is just as bad in many ways, so the main alternative we have isn't any better (which itself is even more concerning because wokeness may actually be preferable to its alternative).

If you were trying to create an ideology for success, it would value strength, honor, intellectual curiosity, optimism for the future, pride in your country and people, and most importantly, not venerate weakness. This is of course the complete opposite of what modern day wokeness is, so it's not really a surprise that people are demoralized and depressed.

I also don't know how to fix this, and it feels like we are destined to just decline and everything will become worse for the foreseeable future. It's very depressing and I try not to think about it. I just try to have positive values for myself and those around me, and maybe that small amount can spread. But I've been pretty depressed myself the last week from these tariffs and market volatility. It makes it seem pointless to even try when even your safe investments absolutely tank and you see the money you were trying to put towards a house absolutely tank.

In the spirit of 'what American culture war development aren't we talking about because of the Trump tariffs,' might I offer...

Trump Goes After the (Largely Democratic) Federal Government Labor Unions

On 27 March, Trump signed an executive order titled the "EXCLUSIONS FROM FEDERAL LABOR-MANAGEMENT RELATIONS PROGRAMS." That is pretty vague, and I wouldn't blame anyone who doesn't recognize what it says inside either.

The (very) short version is that this executive order formally determines various executive agencies "to have as a primary function intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative, or national security work." This is the criteria that allows an exception to normal public sector union formation rights and so on. (You don't want the military or CIA to form a union in case it decides to strike, after all.) That might make sense in principle. What may raise eyebrows are some of the additions.

Newly added agencies determined to have a 'primary function' as national security work or otherwise, include-

  • 1-401. The Department of State.
  • 1-403. The Department of the Treasury, except the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.
  • 1-405. The Department of Justice.
  • 1-412. The Environmental Protection Agency.
  • 1-415. The National Science Foundation. *etc.

...and you hopefully get the gist. A number of not-usually-considered-national-security departments and agencies have gotten determined to be so. Which, by the law as written, the President can do. Which means also that the public union rules and rights don't apply.

Who does this matter?

Well, for one, public sector unions political action committees (PACs) donate overwhelmingly to the democratic party. $12.5 million vs. $1.6 million in 2023-2024. That's small in absolute political money terms, but shows a significant difference in union institutional support.

But more importantly, about half of all union members in the United States are public sector union members. That's about 7 million public sector members versus 14.3 million total. Further, the ratio of unionization is completely lopsided. Only about 5% (1-in-20) of the public sector employees in the US are unionized. About 33% (1-in-3) of public sector employees are unionized. That's all public-sector unions, mind you, not just the federal government. There are only about 1 million federal public union employees, so 1-in7 of the public sector employees. That's about 14% of public sector employees, or 7% of total union employees. And not all of those will be caught in this recategorization.

Still- last week Trump put in motion a wrecking ball that seems primed to take a major chunk out of what was once a foundational pillar of the of the post-New Deal Democratic party alliance. It seems also likely to defang / weaken some potential internal resistance organizers within the Federal government, which I suspect was the more immediate motive as Trump attempts to shrink the federal work force. But as far as far as the union implications...

Well, not everyone likes public sector unions. Arch-MAGA personality Franklin Delano Roosevelt warned against public sector unions, on grounds that the government couldn't negotiate with itself. The case against public sector unions has been made for many decade. I'll let people read those takes and have their own opinions. What's more important is that these arguments are not new, but have never made significant traction... until last week.

Reactions have broadly been overwhelmed by the media coverage of last week's tariffs and other Trumpian news cycles. The right-leaning City Journal lauds the effort thought it conceeds some of the classifications are a stretch.. The left-leaning Jacobin calls on unions to make a "militant" response. Somehow, I don't think that will exactly dissuade trump, but we will see.

Will this go to court? Already has. Are plaintiff unions liable to find sympathetic judges in the DC district court, where 11 of the 15 district judges were appointed by Obama or Biden? Probably.

Will they win? I don't know.

But I think this does add another bit of evidence that Trump's chaos has some deliberate intent that often gets lost in the media chaos that follows him.

What may raise eyebrows are some of the additions.

Wait, the War Department Department of Defense isn't usually considered a national security department? If that isn't, one wonders what is.

This isn't raising eyebrows to me because a lot of this stuff seems trivially correct.

  • Obviously, agencies with the power to ban all development of certain resources critical to national security qualify
  • Obviously, agencies that are in charge of keeping the electricity and natural gas working qualify
  • Obviously, agencies with the opportunity to destroy the economy over something stupid, like the uncommon cold, qualify
  • Obviously, agencies with the authority to arbitrarily declare food-producing practices as unsafe qualify

Stuff that has more gradual bad outcomes, like the Department of Education (not listed in this order), would be more of a stretch simply because their negligence degrades the country over long periods of time, not potentially overnight.

But I think this does add another bit of evidence that Trump's chaos has some deliberate intent that often gets lost in the media chaos that follows him.

The ultimate problem with Trump II is that he's a reformer in a country that has hit the Snooze button on reform since late 2001 for some or other distraction- blowing up 10-dollar camels with 2 million dollar missiles, causing 30% inflation because some people couldn't be bothered to wear masks, whatever the fuck Trump I was, and Yes We Can discover that black Presidents are just as useless as white Presidents.

I have to admit that I'm a little jealous, since European countries are actively cracking down on reform parties and jailing their members for something everyone does (they're far more progressive-traditionalist than the liberal Americans), the UK public actively prefers Two-Tier state policy, and the Canadians are too busy bitching about checks notes being offered a vote on policies that affect them to bother with reform (which would make it more likely they survive as a whole country).

he's a reformer

Really? Arguably one of the defining aspects of 'reform' in the traditional sense is it's opposition to special and entrenched interests, and a believe in a Chadwickian scientific governance. Free trade is in many ways the paradigmatic reform cause, as it stands against the special protection of a subset of society (manufacturers) in favour of the entire nation of consumers - most of the great reformers were free traders.

By contrast the whole ethic of Trump II seems to be that some of the nation deserves special status and protection (literally), and some of it (the public and service sectors) deserves punishment.

Really? Arguably one of the defining aspects of 'reform' in the traditional sense is it's opposition to special and entrenched interests...

Yes. Really.

Who are "the Swamp" if not "entrenched interests"? Much of complaints about Trump being erratic and not listening to the experts reads to me as "special and entrenched interests" frustrated by Trump's refusal to "stay bought".

This is the death blow to the Democratic party nomenklatura: if it goes through then it will be Trump's Great Purge, utterly destroying the federal government as an institution for generations. Even if Vance loses in 2028 there will be nothing left to rebuild. No one will make a career that can be destroyed on a whim every four years. We will see a return to the spoils system where government appointments are cycled in and out with every new administration as payoffs to supporters.

We will see a return to the spoils system where government appointments are cycled in and out with every new administration as payoffs to supporters

Hey, just like the late Roman Republic!

Trump came too early in the decline of the USA's one. He would have made a decent Nero or Caligula.

Would Nero or Caligula have had the full support of the Evangelical community, tho?

No but on the other hand they would have gotten on a lot better with the Europeans

We will see a return to the spoils system where government appointments are cycled in and out with every new administration as payoffs to supporters.

Every regulation has a corpse behind it. In the case of the Pendleton Act granting civil service protection, the corpse is a Republican President. You do not want to go back to a spoils system.

Every regulation has a corpse behind it.

This is a fully general argument against repealing any regulation. The idea that we need a fourth unaccountable branch of the Federal Government to prevent assassinations by jilted wannabee civil servants is ludicrous.

One obtains a stronger rebuttal by pointing to the dynamics.

Stage one: Politicians seek out and appoint competent administrators to civil service jobs

This isn't formalized and the incentives for politicians are to game the system, leading to stage two

Stage two: A spoils system where government appointments are cycled in and out with every new administration as payoffs to supporters.

The disadvantages of this become increasingly apparent, creating pressure for reform and eventually the Pendleton Act

Stage three: A permanent civil service. This provides a reservoir of experience, damping down swings of the political pendulum. But it is also a source of inertia (perhaps I mean viscosity?) which leads to stagnation. Which tendency will grow with time, leading to the downfall of the Pendleton Act?

Neither. Ambitious men are always seeking power. Traditionally by standing for election. If they win, they have limited time to do something before standing for election again. Ugh! Perhaps there is more power to be had as a member of the permanent bureaucracy. Ambitious men game the new system created by the Pendleton Act.

Stage four: The civil service the fourth branch of the Federal Government, and answers to on-one.

A new President is elected to change the course of the nation, away from the iceberg, towards the rocks :-) But he finds that the fourth branch insists on steering towards the iceberg, and the Pendleton Act gives them real power.

Stage five: err, I don't know

The point is that we should expect bad reforms to fail because they are bad. And we should expect good reforms to fail because of the passage of time. Good reforms work well, curing the problems caused by people gaming the old system; that is what we mean by a good reform. But a good reform changes the system. It may take a generation before people work out how to game the new system, but game it they will. We should expect that no reforms withstand erosion by human cunning.

The current system very nearly offered up the corpse of a Republican President not a year ago. The spoils system was very corrupt, and produced many results that were undesirable, but we cannot be locked to the whims of civil servants forever. And if we're going to be, let's stop calling it democracy and design our autocracy properly.

Luévano v. Campbell turned civil service appointments into a racial spoils system in 1981. America has already gone back to a spoils system.

It does unfortunately seem as if one of the themes of this Presidency will be 'making all the mistakes which the nation learnt to avoid by lessons of experience it has since forgotten'. Given the company he keeps perhaps he'll start asking for a return to the gold standard next.

Still- last week Trump put in motion a wrecking ball that seems primed to take a major chunk out of what was once a foundational pillar of the of the post-New Deal Democratic party alliance. It seems also likely to defang / weaken some potential internal resistance organizers within the Federal government, which I suspect was the more immediate motive as Trump attempts to shrink the federal work force. But as far as far as the union implications...

It seems worth noting that private sector unions are also decreasingly onboard with the DNC.

$12M vs 1M — besides being lopsided, that’s just peanuts. It’s all barely a rounding error.

From the pen of Scott: Come On, Obviously The Purpose Of A System Is Not What It Does

Scott offers several examples of why TPOASINWID results in absurd analysis. His examples are selected for maximal absurdity, so it's amusing that three out of four directly undermine his case, and the fourth is still a pretty good argument against his position.

The purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure two-thirds of cancer patients.

This is a significantly more accurate statement than "the purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure cancer", because numerous considerations mitigate against curing cancer, things like economic considerations, bureaucratic constraints, and the work/life balance of the staff. And even when all these align such that curing this specific cancer is the system's goal, "curing cancer" might not mean what you think. I was especially amused by this exchange in the comments:

The purpose of a system that has egregious side-effects is very likely not aligned with my values. It might not be malicious, but it does not care about what I care about, and it is worth at least looking under the hood to see if what it cares about and what I care about are zero-sum.”

Like chemo?

...written in the comment section of the author of Who By Very Slow Decay. Yes, very much like Chemo. This example, by itself, is probably the one I'd like Scott to address specifically.

The purpose of the Ukrainian military is to get stuck in a years-long stalemate with Russia.

It seems to me that this is a significantly more accurate statement than "the purpose of the Ukrainian military is to defend Ukraine from hostile military action." America and NATO are very specifically and very openly throttling aide to keep Ukraine from being defeated outright, but also from being able to hit back too hard. Stalemate appears to be the deliberate objective, and certainly has been the openly-stated objective of many Ukraine supporters in this very forum.

One could make a similar statement about the Russian military as well. Any description of the Russian military that doesn't account for the realities of coup-proofing and endemic corruption is not going to make accurate predictions about the real world.

The purpose of the British government is to propose a controversial new sentencing policy, stand firm in the face of protests for a while, then cave in after slightly larger protests and agree not to pass the policy after all.

His intention here is to achieve absurdity by narrowing the scope to one specific result, rather than the sum of results, and in fairness, he provides examples of X randos arguing in this fashion. "The purpose of the British Government is to keep a lid on the British People while pursuing goals orthogonal to their interests" seems a more parsimonious description, but even Scott's version seems more accurate than something like "the purpose of the British Government is to execute the will of the British people as expressed through democratic elections".

The purpose of the New York bus system is to emit four billion pounds of carbon dioxide.

Again with the absurdity through inappropriate narrowing of scope. But even with a framing as uncharitable as this, it's worth noting that all systems have costs, and that description of a system that ignores the costs and how those costs are managed is a worse description than one that centers those costs. This is true even for descriptions that only consists of one significant cost, because the benefits of systems are generally far more obvious than the costs and thus the missing information is easier to find.

This is a bad article, and Scott should feel bad.

"The purpose of a system is what it does" is a stupid opinion if it is taken as a general mathematical truth. The concept of purpose assumes intentionality (the purpose of something is the intent of the people who built/used/participated in it) and therefore the opinion assumes the effects of a system are always those intended by the actors, which is obviously false.

Most of the time "the purpose of a system is what it does" instead means that what the actors want is less important than what the system actually does (it provides more prediction power, as you said).

There are some cases however where intentionality is very important, for example if you kill someone the police and the court will be interested.

The concept of purpose assumes intentionality

Unless that includes God or Nature as intent sources, I disagree that this is true.

The conceit of the phrase is precisely that things can have purpose unintended by their creators.

"Intended purpose" is not a tautology.

Unless that includes God or Nature as intent sources

Yes it does if you believe nature or God have intents (it works better with God than nature, as most people who think that nature has intent also think that nature is a kind of god). People who don't think God exists or nature has intents also don't think there are purposes in nature.

Intended purpose means that the way you use the tool now (the purpose it's used for now) is what it was built for (the purpose of its creator). For example if you use your shoes to protect your feet it's their intended purpose, but if you use them to kill a fly it's not (presumably).

The whole article and the phrase which inspired it seem like desperate groping in the intellectual dark for the concept of The Principle Of Double Effect, and an illuminating example of the problems which arise when it is lacking.

The inability to distinguish between intended and unintended effects, and forseen and unforseen consequences, is lethal to a moral evaluation of human action.

Yep, Scott's at his worst when he's complaining about his outgroup. Not that most of the twitterati who employ POSIWID are particularly shrewd analysts, but the concept has plenty of explanatory value.

For another recent example of Scott getting sloppy, see his article on how the BAPist "based post-Christian vitalists" were hypocritical for caring about the victims of the Rotherham grooming gangs when they normally sneer at caring about poor people an ocean away as cucked slave morality. Of course, the obvious counterargument is that the Rotherham victims were white Westerners like themselves, aggressed upon by a far more alien outgroup.

I think he was actually closer to the mark there. You can see the hypocrisy when someone like KulakRevolt, for example, is calling for all of England to be burned down over the Rotherham gangs, as if he doesn't hold promiscuous fatherless girls from the lower classes in utter contempt himself. When all your grievances are formulated around tribal affiliations, you can argue that it's okay when we do it and bad when they do it, but you can't argue that you genuinely care about young girls being mistreated, and that sort of gives the game away when you're trying to convince people they should be outraged at rape and grooming when your actual objective is to stir hatred against your alien outgroup.

If Kulak hated European maidens he wouldn't have constructed his entire identity on the worship thereof. I don't think this is a good example at all.

The idea that you can't really care about your ingroup if you wouldn't care about them if they weren't part of it is a dangerous nonsense.

I ask you, would you love your Mother if she wasn't your mother. And if you wouldn't, how dare you say you love her? It's absurd. Who we are and what relationships we have is important and meaningful. It is not and never has been morally neutral.

I hate this gnostic reduction of our essence to some abstract individual will with every fiber of my body.

The Rotherham girls are not his ingroup just because they're white. He constantly talks about what he thinks should happen to white people who are also not in his ingroup.

His feigned outrage over "European maidens" being besmirched by Muslims is because Muslims are doing the besmirching, not because he actually cares about victimized white girls. If it were Irish grooming gangs responsible, he might contrive some anti-Irish reason to wash the streets in blood (he's certainly flexible like that), but more likely he'd just find something despicable brown people are doing elsewhere.

This like complaining that a Muslim cares about the Umma even though he cares about his sect or tribe more.

How dare people have Ordo Amoris? Their care must reduce to one bit!

Obviously people have circles of concern. And obviously just because someone doesn't extend their total moral community to all of humanity or all of creation doesn't make them abnormal. On the contrary.

Multi level tribalism is a perfectly acceptable and eugenic human behavior, albeit with some much talked about drawbacks. It is not however reducible to nihilism or egoism.

I think you give too much credit. I don't believe people like that feel ordo amoris for anyone at all. It's not about concentric circles of affinity, it's about identifying an enemy and manufacturing a grievance. I might believe some people feel some faint amount of "ordo amoris" for distant white girls because they happen to be white, even if they otherwise hold them in contempt, but not when every other message is about how they're dirt. Oh, now you care because a Muslim touched them? No heat graph meme argument is going to make that convincing.

Well I believe that you don't give people enough credit because they're part of your outgroup and that your standards of what people are allowed caring about without being hypocritical are bad models of people's behavior and therefore functionally useless except as the very sort of grievance they denounce.

The idea that people feeling empathy for the plight of people who look like and feel like them is bad, empty or without meaning in some way is, I believe, one of the great sins of Western civilization. And I don't feel difficulty defending anybody who feels such feelings, wicked as they may be, far from me as they may be.

Indeed, insofar as humanism has any degree of visceral grounding, it springs from this feeling and cannot denounce it without sapping itself.

Well I believe that you don't give people enough credit because they're part of your outgroup

Fair. People who hype genocidal warfare are indeed part of my outgroup.

and that your standards of what people are allowed caring about without being hypocritical

I do not think you understand what my standards of what people are "allowed" to care about are.

The idea that people feeling empathy for the plight of people who look like and feel like them is bad, empty or without meaning

This not what I believe.

More comments

I'll note that, by reputation at least, (often drug enabled)abuse and grooming of lower-on-the-totem-pole teenaged girls is a 'the purpose of the system is what it does' for Kulak's claimed ingroup of reconstructionist pagans.

I don't really intend to go experience reconstructionist paganism. It may well be a false stereotype- and frankly doesn't much affect my (extremely negative) opinion of either reconstructionist paganism or idiot teenagers who experiment with it. But Kulak doesn't seem very upset about it either way. Nor does he seem to care very much about war rapes by the Russian Army, for another example of white people doing this.

Yeah, that's my point. If anyone else was drugging and raping teenage girls (including teenage white girls), Kulak wouldn't care. He just wants to see bloodshed. Also, his recent Braveheart Viking Hells Angel Paganism schtick and telling all his right-wing r3tvrn Christian followers that their religion is fake, gay and Jewish, is almost as hilarious to me as the people who still think he's an OF girl.

Isn't he/they an MTF?

No lol, he just picked an anime avatar and now some of his twitter audience unbelievably think he’s a woman. I don’t think he’s even claimed to be, so it’s not even a grift, it’s just weird or very stupid people.

No.

It's perfectly possible to not-care-if-individual-Xs-comes-to-harm without hating Xs in general, or indeed, if you like Xs. Plenty of people like bunny rabbits, and might even sincerely love their pet rabbits, without turning into animal rights activists.

Would you say people who love pet rabbits in general but still love humans more don't truly love pet rabbits?

All you say is possible, I just don't believe it's an accurate or charitable description of almost anybody's concerns.

Suppose a man loves his pet rabbit, and finds pictures of rabbits abstractly cute, but happily eats rabbit meat without a twinge of guilt, and has never lifted a finger to campaign to ban the hunting or industrial farming of rabbits. Suppose that he has a personal enemy. Now suppose that he learns that this enemy sometimes goes rabbit-hunting; and suppose that, having found this out, he makes a stink, ranting to all who'll listen about how it's outrageous, how the guy must be brought to accounts, and now won't everyone see how much of a monster he is, like I've been saying all along: he's been blowing cute defenseless bunnies' brains out for fun, you can't deny it now.

In such a case I think it's fair to accuse this man of using the rabbit thing as a convenient weapon against someone he hated anyway; and to say his anger has very little to do with a sincere concern for rabbit welfare. Even if he really does love his pet rabbit.

While his criticism kinda missed the mark, I do think there's something inconsistent about it. You can have a consistent ideology of supremacy for your own ethnic group, but in a globalized world it's not really compatible with being a Nietzschean individualist who sneers at caring about the weak in general. The archetypal ubermensch is a pre-Christian warlord - an aristocrat who strides above the petty concerns of his own nation's peasants and paupers. The 'master' isn't interested in whether the daughters of the slaves two counties over are getting raped and tortured, white or otherwise. Unless he considers those counties part of his holdings and, therefore, his alone to rape and pillage.

A guy who's concerned about tortured little girls an ocean away because they're white girls and he considers the fate of the white race his business, whether or not he stands to gain anything from it, has more in common with a guy who's concerned because he considers the fate of all Homo sapiens his business, than with a guy who actually only cares about himself, his kin, and maybe his nation.

People can't seem to get it through their heads that Nietzscheans aren't master moralists, they are would be designers of their own moral codes and specifically reject the impositions of acting as a master, or as a slave.

You are allowed to care for the weak or for anything or anyone insofar as you deduced on your own and not through social mimetism or scolding that this is right and true. But it has to come from you and not from whims but your own self legislated catechism.

I feel like this is the same brand of lazy criticism levied at objectivists for acting collectively despite being individualists. It's like people just imagine what the ideology is and what it precludes instead of actually asking or reading about it.

Wouldn't deducing any moral code after reading Nietzsche by definition not be "on your own, not through mimetism" etc?

He enjoins you to have your own consideration of the moral problem. This, in my view does not recurse because you can look at it and disagree that making yourself moral legislator is a good idea.

There are people in the specific group this thread is talking about that believe in the possibility of a christo-nietzcheean synthesis for instance.

We quickly arrive at topics where logical contradiction is not disqualifying, however, so such logical descriptions are instrumental at best.

I'm aware actual-Nietzsche is more nuanced. But the guys Scott was debating aren't serious Nietzschean scholars, nor do they claim to be. Perhaps I should have just stuck with the tongue-in-cheek Based Post-Christian Vitalist coinage. The point is that these are people who sneer at the entire concept of Effective Altruism and indeed charity. You can't do that and care about Rotherham. It's untenable. If you're an American and you care what happens to the Rotherham girls, albeit only because they're white, then you're not coming from a completely different paradigm than the EAs. You just have an unpopular opinion on who the most relevant moral patients are.

Such as Objectivists would say, altruists, let alone utilitarian ones, do not have a monopoly on caring about people. And their claims that they do are an intellectually dishonest trick to refuse admitting that good natured feelings can be arrived at through other means than their pathology.

I would, actually, say that "altruist" objectively, etymologically describes anyone who cares about other people. It's what the "altr" means. Altruism is a broad church. Some altruists care about shrimps and others only care about humans. I see no reason why altruists who only care about white humans should act like they're something completely different.

It's simple. Non-altruists don't find alterity inherently valuable and it enters differently or not at all into their ethical calculus.

Arguing that they are still altruists because their calculus still leads them to conclusions similar to that of altruists in some cases is intellectual dishonesty.

You can redefine the word to be broad enough as to become useless. But that's not worth engaging with.

I claim that the calculus is the same. When it comes to caring whether perfect strangers live or die, suffer or thrive, in ways that will never affect you - either you do, or you don't. Those of us who do, I'm confident are, in an overwhelming majority, applying the same drives in the same ways. Sure, some of us care about the suffering of our countrymen, others about the suffering of our whole race, others still of the whole human race, and others still about the suffering of all animal life. But the only thing that changes between all those cases is how you draw the border between the people you care about, and the people you don't. It's still altruism even if it's race-specific, much as someone who cares about other humans but doesn't give a fuck about animals is still an altruist.

This isn't to say you can't have genuine non-altruists who, by coincidence, have similar practical aims to altruists. For example, you might object to rape gangs not because you care whether the victims suffer, but due to a deontological objection to rape. Or you might value the survival of your ethnic group, without caring about the suffering of any specific members within it per se, and treat the Rotherham gangs as one facet of a genocidal attack against your race as a whole. I wouldn't call those people altruists. But once you start talking about the suffering of random girls an ocean away as something which in and of itself should make your blood boil, something which you have a moral impetus to stop if you can, even though it's in no practical sense your problem - then, sorry, you're an altruist. Albeit a narrow altruist. And a lot of people screaming about the British rape gangs were using that kind of rhetoric.

(Of course, they may have been lying — perhaps Scott was too optimistic in taking those fragments of altruism as glimmers of an underlying better nature, rather than disingenuous, cynical attempts to play on actual altruists' emotions and win them over.)

More comments

All too often 'systems' in practice get excused by idealism. POSIWID works as a shorthand to cut through that idealism.

Scott seems to be coming at this from some critical angle and I'm not entirely sure what the point of it is. You can wordplay anything into absurdity and uselessness.

Ok to be pedantic and trash Scott's argument, "POSIWID" is especially shortened from "The purpose of a system is to do some or all of the things that it does, while taking all of the other things it does as acceptable consequences."

And the contrapositive: "The purpose of a system is never something that it doesn't do."

Scott is being deliberately obtuse purposefully ignoring the obvious meaning of the phrase.

"The purpose of a system is never something that it doesn't do."

If my car fails to start one morning, that does not mean that my car ceases to be a car (if we define a car as a vehicle whose purpose it is to transport persons). Saying "POSIWID, hence this is not a car, perhaps it is a tiny house or outhouse" is not a good way to handle a broken car. "This thing was designed with a function in mind, but it does no longer serve its original purpose, so what purpose does it serve now, and is it worthwhile to fix it or get rid of it" seems a much more promising approach.

If a life-saving operation has a mortality of 1%, and it ends up killing little Timmy, saying that clearly the purpose of the operation was to murder him, not to safe his life, as "[t]he purpose of a system is never something that it doesn't do" would seem disingenuous.

But if it does break down, then it's something a car does, not something a car doesn't do.

A car doesn't fly. The purpose of a car is never to fly. A car does break down, and so the "doesn't do" doesn't apply.

Purpose of a system

A car is a system.

I always interpreted POSIWID as meaning that sustained normalized deviance is no deviance at all. If, say, a big tech OS project fails to ship year after year and company leadership fails to replace the project's management, then we have to conclude that either 1) the company-system is not under the control of agents with the ability to modify the world to achieve their goals or 2) the purpose of the OS project is not to produce an OS.

Otherwise, why wouldn't the OS project management been nuked from orbit after the fourth or fifth annual failure?

POSIWID doesn't mean, as Scott strawmans, that any side effect of a system is desirable or a failure of a system to fully achieve that goal reveals that goal as a lie. Total nonsense. If a cancer ward were curing only half its patients and despite having funding and expertise refused to install a new radiation machine that would increase the cure rate to 2/3, and if hospital administration tolerated this state of affairs, then we would be forced to conclude that THAT SPECIFIC cancer ward's purpose was not to cure cancer.

POSIWID only works in negation

PISIWID doesn't mean, as Scott strawmans, that any side effect of a system is desirable or a failure of a system to fully achieve that goal reveals that goal as a lie. Total nonsense.

Are you saying that he cherry-picked the tweets he screenshotted, and the median usage of POSIWID is much more nuanced?

Yes. Or more specifically, he demolished the retard version of POSIWID then claimed victory over the nuanced version. That's wrong and called strawmanning

Scott is an utilitarian. My mental model of him says that if you have a charity to rescue cats from trees, but it only rescues one cat from a tree per year despite having an annual 10M$ budget, then it is fair to conclude that their actual main purpose might be something different than rescuing cats. This is a standard critique of inefficient charities from an EA perspective.

Or take research towards fusion power. It has been going on for sixty years, and while we are making progress, we do not have fusion power plants yet. Now, you can take three stances.

  • You say POSIWID, so these people are not working on solving the energy crisis, they are simply publishing papers and earning tenure, not dissimilar to $useless_academic_field, and we should not waste taxpayer money on them.
  • You move the goalpost to some instrumental subgoal which was actually reached, like "we want to increase the plasma confinement time to $whatever", and claim that is the purpose of fusion research. However, this is missing the bigger picture: if all the viable fusion processes were endothermic, and we thus could never build a fusion power plant, and plasma was only studied for its own sake, then society would give orders of magnitude less money to the plasma nerds.
  • You accept that in this case, the purpose of a system is indeed what it has so far failed to deliver on.

Of course, if you take the last stance, then the next problem is alchemists who search for the philosopher's stone. In hindsight, we know that this was a fools errand, and only their lack of epistemic purity lead them to believe such a thing could exist at all. Their whole paradigm was -- not to put to fine a point to it -- dogshit, and if they had read the Sequences, they should have known. (Yes, I know about the woo aspect of alchemy -- but reaching enlightenment seems very much like a consolation prize if you fail to gain immortality et cetera. I am sure they did not emphasize the allegoric aspect to their funding agencies.)

On the other hand, hindsight is 20/20, and the ideas that form the basis of the scientific method would not be developed for centuries, so they were working with the mental tools which they got, and sometimes walking in a random direction is better than standing still until you exactly know which way to go.

Per POSIWID, the purpose of alchemy was to accidentally discover chemical reactions while denying that purpose.

We already have a perfectly good word for the relationship between alchemy and their accidental discoveries. That word is outcome.

Even more bluntly, consider a dog licking a TV screen which shows bacon being fried. The outcome is the dog licking an LCD. The purpose of the action is -- presumably -- that the dog wants to taste the bacon. Describing the system "dog" as a system which tries to taste bacon, but sometimes fails and tastes plastic instead gives us a much better model of reality than just saying "TPOSIWID, thus this dog likes to lick plastic".

And it's hard to imagine anyone sincerely believing the purpose of the dog-TV system is plastic licking. Maybe I'm sanewashing it, but ISTM there's a logical and useful way to understand POSIWID:

  • Let there be a system S, an agent with control authority over the system A, and some outcome X that A claims S is to produce

  • Observe that S falls short of ostensible goal X

  • Let B be an action that A can take to make S produce more of outcome X at positive ROI

  • Observe that A does not execute action B

Given the above, e must conclude based on A's failure to do B that A's purpose for S is not solely X. Maybe B is not actually positive ROI because we lack an understanding of its true costs. Maybe A is retarded and doesn't understand that B is available to him. But, if we assume B is positive ROI and that A is a competent actor, what alternative do we have to concluding that A is optimizing S for some unstated goal Y, not only X?

One might argue he cherrypicked for stupid usages the moment he chose to get his example from tweets.

The purpose of a system is what it does is obviously dumb in a lot of cases- the purpose of NIMBY zoning boards(may they all find themselves dying unpleasant deaths) is to keep property values high. That this results in nothing getting built is an unfortunate side effect, and it does sometimes happen that NIMBY zoning boards allow things to get built. In others its actively absurd. In other cases it's a valuable reminder that mission statements are just bullshit, and in still others it's a description of institutional capture.

This is a bad article, and Scott should feel bad.

Hard disagree.

I think that a grossly simplified way to look at a system might be that it maximizes a particular utility function. Naturally, different people have different utility functions, and so might feel different about a system and the trade-offs it makes. Even though, it is rare that different people assign the opposite signs to a terminal goal, and more often that they simply differ in relative weight. If someone claims that the terminal goal of the NRA is to enable school shootings, or that the terminal goal of gun control legislation is to render Americans defenseless against tyranny, they are missing that point. The truth is simply that tyranny resistance and avoiding school shootings are both worthy goals, and different people will have different ideas about both their relative importance and how gun control might affect them.

Of course, in reality, systems are made out of individual actors who have their individual utility functions (as far as they are rational), and a key instrumental (if we are being charitable) goal of almost any system is to perpetuate its own existence.

But even with a framing as uncharitable as this, it's worth noting that all systems have costs, and that description of a system that ignores the costs and how those costs are managed is a worse description than one that centers those costs.

I think that if I have a page of a book, and either describe it as "a mostly white page" or "a page darkened by ink", both of these descriptions are very inadequate, and it is not very worthwhile to quibble over which one is worse.

This being said, if you have to communicate to a space alien what a dentist does, what do you think is the better description?

  • "A dentist causes people pain and takes money from them"
  • "A dentist fixes tooth decay"

Both of these statements are true and describe things a dentist does, but I would argue that the latter statement is slightly less terrible a description. An actually adequate description would acknowledge that people generally go to the dentist to prevent or fix tooth decay (the latter of which often hurts somewhat), but also that dentistry is a high income profession (thus attracting people interested in making money) and most dentists operate as a business and thus there exists a principal-agent problem e.g. for judging the cost-benefit ratio of secondary services like professional tooth cleaning.

Sibling non-CWR post: https://www.themotte.org/post/1836/scott-come-on-obviously-the-purpose

Wrote a comment there, but another thought:

I think Scott is attempting a kind of meta-joke. TPOASIWID is a very useful lens to interpret systems through, but in widespread DR Twitter use, it's mostly used as a way to ascribe bad intent to systems. And because TPOASIWID, you can only judge TPOASIWID by the use of TPOASIWID on Twitter, and so TPOTPOASIWIDIWID and that's creating bad Twitter takes, which isn't valuable or useful. QED.

Cute, but it misses the mark. It's about finding useful ways to interact with a system, not a universal acid allowing you to weak man any argument or analysis.

Are we going to henceforth lose every intellectual to some genre of twitter brainrot? Place your bets here.

I'm that kind of person that is slightly obsessed following up the genealogy of the memetic slogans like "The purpose of a system is what it does" as it turns out it is minted by Stafford Beer one of the architects of Cybersyn. Let me give you the short version in my view what Cybersyn is. It is societal engineering through computational power. It is one of those horrible ideas that can't be flushed like stubborn turd that floats in the toilet minds of its proponents. It devolves into the Social Credit Score to subjugate the plebs. We are already half way there where consent is manufactured on reddit and other "social media" platforms with content moderation policies and the panopticon social approval of likes/dislikes, there are already reports of people of being debanked for their political opinions. Now we have that memetic idea surfacing again when we got the LLM:s that the failed experiments was missing it and they will fix it this time. It is extremely worrying that an avid reader of Trostsky is quoted again...

Again with the absurdity through inappropriate narrowing of scope.

How can you tell when your scope is appropriately widened? Okay, the purpose of the bus system isn't to emit CO2. Is the purpose to do that and drive vehicles on NYC streets? Is the purpose to do that and pay out bennies to bus drivers? Is it to do that and move paying customers around? Is it to do that and also house a few homeless people? Is it to do that and reduce traffic overall?

And we can't look at the bus system in isolation, right? It's part of the city government, which itself is embedded in layers of government and society. Why is it not inappropriate to even attempt to analyze the purpose of the NYC bus system in isolation of the entire world?

At least I agree that we can limit our scope to planet earth, since there doesn't seem to be any agency being exercised by anyone outside of it. The question is where to set the scope in between busses emitting CO2 and everything that goes on on earth.

Tyler Cowen has a Conversation with Jennifer Pahika on Reforming Government

I will pull one little segment.

COWEN: If someone says, when it comes to regulatory reform, accountability is not the solution, it’s the problem, do you agree?

PAHLKA: Accountability is not the solution, it’s the problem?

COWEN: You put in accountability, everything has to be measured, everything has to have a process. It’s judicial review. Should we have less accountability in government?

PAHLKA: In a certain sense, I would agree with that. I don’t think in an absolute sense. I think the way that we structure accountability is very flawed. I think we are holding public servants essentially accountable to metrics that are not proxies for real outcomes that people care about. When you have a very high focus on accountability that is really about fidelity to procedure and process instead of to the actual outcome, that’s not accountability.

COWEN: Outcomes are heterogeneous, they’re tricky, they’re long term. When you ask people to measure, you end up with a lot more emphasis on process than you want. So, maybe accountability is the problem. To say accountability for outcomes — that’s just going to morph into accountability for process. That’s what I observe, even in private companies. Big, successful, profitable private companies that we’re all familiar with — they have the same problem, as I’m sure you know.

PAHLKA: That they’re held accountable to the —

COWEN: There’s far too much process, bureaucracy, delays. They’re slow. Look at construction productivity in the United States. It’s terrible. It’s declined.

PAHLKA: Yes, I would agree with that.

COWEN: And that’s the private sector.

PAHLKA: Yes. I think one of the issues though is that there is more accountability to process in government than in the private sector, I believe.

COWEN: More in government.

PAHLKA: More in government.

COWEN: Yes, sure.

PAHLKA: Because in the private sector, if you don’t get the outcomes, you are unlikely to succeed financially.

COWEN: There’s a profit — clear goal. In government, it’s not the same kind of outcome. It collapses more into process.

PAHLKA: Yes, it collapses more into process, absolutely. I think also you have — what is it — Goodhart’s Law that says once a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be useful, and you see that everywhere in government. I think that’s part of what I mean about the new public management and the reinventing government in the ’90s was highly reliant on “Let’s set a goal and follow that goal.”

There can be real value in that. I’m not discrediting it entirely, but you do have that erosion of the value of those targets as people try to meet the target without actually meeting the outcome that was intended. I think that a more digital transformation approach that is instead able to change over time more quickly and say, “Wait, this target is no longer helping us get where we wanted to go. We’ve got to iterate on that. Let’s change it.” That can really, I think, get us out of that industrial era of thinking.

I want to pull on some threads in the vein of my previous comments on military research, development, and procurement. They talked about this some, but were also talking more broadly. I think the problem to be solved is perhaps most clearly cognizable in this domain. Reordering the discussion a bit, we'll start from the outcomes, the things that we're trying to achieve:

COWEN: Outcomes are heterogeneous, they’re tricky, they’re long term.

As I put it:

we have a situation where your military is very very rarely 'tested' (in fact, ideally it is very rare). You very rarely get actual feedback. When you do, you do not have access to the counterfactual of what would have happened if you had invested differently.

Look at the lead time for something like a modern fighter jet. What's the chance that the guy who originally greenlit the program is still around to be 'accountable' if/when it's actually used in a hot conflict, such that its performance can be assessed against the competition? Do you handicap that assessment at all? He made his decision a decade ago, seeing a certain set of problems that they were trying to solve. A decade or two later, your adversaries have also been developing their own systems. Should he be punished in some way for failing to completely predict how the operating environment would change over decades? Suppose he made the decision in Year X, and it came into service in Year X+10. It hypothetically would have performed perfectly well for a decade or two, but you just never had a hot war and never saw it. By the time Year X+25 rolls around and you do get into a hot war, it's now hot garbage in comparison to what else is out there? Is he blameworthy in some way? Should he be held 'accountable' in some way? There's a good chance he's now retired or even dead, so, uh, how are you going to do that?

Obviously, there is a spectrum here, but I would argue that a modern fighter jet is more toward the middle of the spectrum than at the far end. Yes, there are plenty of faster-turnaround things, but there are also lots of long lead time things. Even just think about the components/subsystems of the fighter jet. By the time a decision is made to greenlight the larger project, most of these have to be relatively mature. The gov't and company involved can probably take some risk on some of these, but they can't do too many. They want a fair amount of subsystems that they are confident can be integrated into the design and refined within their overall project schedule. That means that all of that investment had to be done even earlier.

Back to that guy who makes the decision. Who is that? Probably a general or a political appointee. Possibly a group of gov't stakeholders. How does he decide what to buy? Remember, he's trying to predict the future, and he doesn't actually know what his adversaries are going to do in the meantime. He has no direct outcomes by which to do this. He doesn't yet have some futarchy market to somehow predict the future. He basically just has educating himself on what's out there, what's possible, what's at various stages of maturity, and where various people think stuff might be going. As I put it in the doubly-linked comment:

There will be a plethora of "experts" who have their own opinions. Some top military folks in the early 1900s will think that airplanes are just toys, while others will tell you that they can change the nature of warfare; how do you know who to believe and where to put your money?

And so, I think Tyler would claim, this fundamentally drives these decisions to be focused on process rather than outcome. The outcome isn't accessible and likely isn't going to be. Instead, people basically just implement a process to ensure that the decisionmaker(s) are talking to the right stakeholders, getting a wide variety of input, not just shoveling contracts to their buddies, etc. Sure, these decisionmakers still have some leeway to put their mark on the whole thing, but what's the plan for adding more 'accountability' to them that isn't just, "Whelp, let's make sure they go through enough process that they don't have the obvious failure modes, and then sort of hope that their personal mark on the process is generally good, because we've built up some trust in the guy(s) over some years"?

Now, think like a company or research org that is considering investing in lower maturity subsystems. It's a hellova risk to do that with such an incredibly long lead time and, frankly, a pretty low chance of having your product selected. You're going to care a lot about what that process looks like, who the relevant stakeholders/decisionmakers are, and what their proclivities are. If you're pretty confident that the guy(s) in charge mostly don't give a shit about airplanes, you're even more unlikely to invest a bunch of money in developing them or their components. Will some crazy company spent thirty years to develop a fully-formed system, getting no contracts anywhere along the way, just hoping that once the generals see it complete and in action (ish, because again, there's not a hot war and you can't really demonstrate the meaningfulness of having a thousand airplanes with your one prototype), they'll finally be 'forced' to acknowledge how effective it's going to be, finally unable to brush it off, and finally actually buy it for bazillions of dollars? I guess, maybe, sometimes. But probably not very often. Thus, I think it's pretty unlikely that the gov't can just completely wash its hands of any involvement in the research/development pipeline and just say, "Companies will always bring us fully-formed products, and we'll decide to buy the best ones." Pahlka touches on a need for the gov't to "insource" at least some parts of things:

There are rumors that DOGE is actually pro-insourcing more tech talent in government. I know you’re not hearing about that now. It may just be a rumor, and it may not be true, so don’t quote me on this. I certainly think that folks in Musk’s world came in and looked at government, and said, “How do you even operate with so little technical competence in-house? That’s crazy.” And it is crazy. They’re right about that.

We’ll either end up, I think, even further privatizing not just the software, but the whole operations as the software and the operations are increasingly melded — again, this is not new — or we’ll be forced finally to gain the internal competence that we have always needed and start to do this a little bit better.

Again, I think she's talking more broadly, but that bit about software and operations being very melded is quite poignant when thinking about military applications.

Getting back to the problem of not knowing what's going to be effective in the future, the traditional solution is to just fund pretty broadly, through multiple mechanisms. Not sure about airplanes? Have one guy/group who seem to like airplanes go ahead and fund a variety of airplane-related stuff. Have some other guy who doesn't like airplanes fund some other stuff. There's obviously a bunch of risky capital allocation questions here, and decisions ultimately have to be made. Those are tough decisions, but how do you add 'accountability' to them? I don't know. I think the easy/lazy way is basically a form of just looking at your 'guys' (your airplane guy, your submarine guy, etc.) and ask, "What have you done for me lately?" The obvious concern is that that makes all your guys focus their portfolios much more heavily toward shorter timelines. But part of the point of the government being 'eternal' is that it should be able to be thinking on longer time horizons, because that may end up being more valuable than just short time horizon things that can be more tightly linked to 'outcomes' or 'accountability'.

I started off being a bit taken aback by the idea Tyler proposed that we should almost just abandon accountability. I've generally been somewhat pro-accountability, and I know folks here have talked about it a lot. But upon reflection, with my pre-existing but not previously-connected thoughts on military procurement, it makes a bit more sense to me that there is a real tension here with no real easy solutions.

I wonder if there's not an alternative way of framing all of this, not as "should we have accountability" but rather, "must accountability be externally legible, and what are the costs and consequences if it must?"

As an example, one of the interesting things about the modern university system is it bolts two incompatible accountability systems on top of each other.

When my wife got her PhD, it was a long, grueling, intensive process. In particular, though, it was expensive in the sense that she had a world class expert in her field who paid quite a lot of attention to her during that multiyear process (she fortunately had a good and ethical advisor). And you can see (if this is working correctly) the outlines of an older system of accountability; in theory, my wife went through an intensive acculturation process by an existing cohort of experts who could, by the end of the process, vouch that my wife had internalized values and norms that meant she could be trusted by the broader cohort of researchers in her field, and thus ought to be able to independently drive a research program. That doesn't mean there's not also lots of peer review and criticism and whatever else, of course, just that she went through a process that, if it worked correctly, meant she should have an internal mechanism of accountability that meant she could be trusted, in general. All of this is much, much clearer in action if you look at universities operating many decades ago, when they had much less money, much less bureaucracy, and generally much more independence.

But clearly the current version of the University is flooded with extra deans, and administrators, and IRB reports, and massive amounts of paperwork, and giant endowments that are lawfare targets, and many layers of bureaucracy, and a bunch of arguably screwed up personal values from cultural evolution the last few decades. And many of those changes are intended to keep everyone in line and make sure everything is legible to the broader system. And so, in those spaces, the older model of producing virtuous professionals who can work cheaply by their own guidance is frequently superseded by this other "trustless society" model. And everything is slow, and expensive, and the values of the bureaucracy is often at odds with getting good work done, for all the reasons discussed in the linked conversation.

Or, to use another example, I've seen this claim made, by certain irritated black activists connected to screwed up urban neighborhoods, that there's just as much crime going on out in the white suburbs, but the cops are racist and just don't enforce laws out there. Which honestly, the first time I read that, was generally just kind of shocking and equal parts hilarious and depressing. Because of course, the entire point of going to a good suburb is that a critical mass of people have internalized an illegible, internal sense of accountability that means they mostly don't actually need cops around all that often. And everyone around them knows that about them, and about themselves. That's literally why certain people find them kind of stifling. (Obviously there are things that happen in suburbs like weed smoking or domestic abuse or whatever. But obviously we're talking about questions of degree here) Meanwhile, in distressed neighborhoods, you simply have to have cops and a legible system because a critical mass of people do not internalize that sense of accountability, and so you need the external accountability of the legible state.

Anyone who has worked in an effective small startup, versus a giant profitable corporation has almost certainly run into these same divides, I suspect.

Getting back to the question of government in this context, a few years ago, I read through Michael Knox Beran's "WASPS: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy", which was a great book, as well as C. S. Lewis's "Abolition of Man". And they were a really nice pairing to capture some of these big questions, about whether a society needs to produce leaders who have an internal sense of morality and virtue, who try to do the right thing at any given moment based on an internally cultivated sense of accountability, versus the transition to a world where accountability is an external, entirely legible thing where independent judgement and virtue can't be relied on and instead bureaucracy and technocracy solve all problems (like, say, the way that Uber driver reviews might, as just one simple example). And I think you can find upsides and downsides to each approach.

a few years ago, I read through Michael Knox Beran's "WASPS: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy"

Thanks for the rec! I've been thirsty for something exactly like this but didn't know where to begin looking. Serendipitous.

You might also be interested in George Marsden's "The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief", Thomas Leonard's "Illiberal Reformers", and Helena Rosenblatt's "The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century", all of which also cover this same era and dig into some overlapping topics and themes.

I've been trying to understand the shift from the worldview of the progressive era (where a lot of our inherited institutions were built and cemented) to... well, whatever emerged in the 60s and 70s, and all of these books were really useful for me in that regard. Leonard's book was a bit dry, but lots of great information. The other two read pretty easily, IIRC.

Excellent post. One thing jumped out at me:

Look at the lead time for something like a modern fighter jet. What's the chance that the guy who originally greenlit the program is still around to be 'accountable' if/when it's actually used in a hot conflict, such that its performance can be assessed against the competition? Do you handicap that assessment at all? He made his decision a decade ago, seeing a certain set of problems that they were trying to solve. A decade or two later, your adversaries have also been developing their own systems. Should he be punished in some way for failing to completely predict how the operating environment would change over decades?

Punishment for failure seems like exactly the wrong way to handle accountability for a project that has a low probability of success. The motivation to reduce a 99% chance of being punished in 20 years to a 95% chance of being punished in 20 years just isn't going to be that large. This is especially true if the people involved are self-selecting into the position - nobody is going to self-select into a position with a near-certainty of punishment in 20 years unless the benefits now outweigh even a certainty of punishment in 20 years, so the punishment just can't be that severe.

Talk about rewarding the guy who made a prescient prediction 20 years ago, on the other hand, and I think the dynamics flip. Going from a 1% chance of collecting a $10M prize in 20 years to a 5% chance of collecting that same prize is substantial and motivational. Think of how hard scientists chasing Nobel prizes work.

Flip the probabilities (i.e. a competent person would have a 99% success rate on a project and an incompetent one would have a 95% success rate) and I think the argument for accountability in the form of punishment makes more sense than accountability in the form of reward. That's sort of how it goes with professional licensing, and it's a pretty solid strategy in that context.

But yeah, "we should abandon accountability" sounds bad and counterintuitive but I think Tyler is right to call out "accountability" in the specific form of punishment for failing to achieve highly uncertain outcomes.

This seems like a solved and understood problem. And Cowen himself is aware of the solution and has had interviews with the people that proposed it.

The solution is skin in the game. The person making the decisions needs to be personally impacted by outcomes.

That impact doesn't have to always be punishment, as @faul_sname points out below.

There is probably some low hanging fruit for accountability. Military projects should be tied to specific generals that care about a good legacy. And possibly a politician as well. Let those names become a curse or a word that means reliability to the grunts.

School boards should require that they have kids at the school. And possibly they should only be elected by those who have kids in school. It's possible that mixing in traditional politician accountability systems has made these positions worse. They should maybe be anonymous, or at least part of the board should be.

We require that politicians live in the areas or districts they represent. That is a decent start. Economic tie ins or closer representational tie ins should also exist. Lords of an area used to share their name with the area.

It mostly just feels that accountability is an afterthought. Something added in as a shitty ineffective process, because no one really cares about the hard work of real accountability systems. This feels backwards. The power shouldn't be allowed to exist in the first place without accountability. The Constitution was written partly as a way to say "this is how we won't make the same screwups as the last government".

Let the people in power figure out their own accountability systems, or just don't let them have power.

Seems like it's time for @faceh to tap his sign again. It must be getting worn down by now, maybe we can buy him a new one.

No idea what his sign is.

This sign

I have less idea than I did before. Shouldn't a metaphorical sign, be, idk, twelve words max?

The solution is skin in the game. The person making the decisions needs to be personally impacted by outcomes.

In short: the elites in our society no longer have skin in the game because they are protected from facing consequences for their failures. And he expects that this will go poorly, so we need to go back to making the elite face consequences for failure.

I feel like "the sign" one taps should be a single sentence. Like the classic tweet:

I meant fuck YOUR feelings, my feelings must be handled gently, like a baby bird.

The solution is skin in the game. The person making the decisions needs to be personally impacted by outcomes.

...

Military projects should be tied to specific generals that care about a good legacy. And possibly a politician as well. Let those names become a curse or a word that means reliability to the grunts.

I don't see how that's really "skin in the game", by your own definition. It doesn't seem similar in kind to your other examples. Take the recent F-47 award. There are specific generals and politicians "tied to" it, at least at the moment of the major decision to award. I guess accountability has been achieved? What about all of my other discussion about the difficulties of judging the outcomes ten to twenty-five years from now? Donald Trump is certainly a politician who is trying to put his name on it. Whether you agree with his name being tied to it, looking at a life expectancy table, he's almost certainly going to be dead by the time some of those outcomes come 'round. Does he have "skin in the game" by your definition?

It's not an either or thing. It's a gradient.

Some things increase skin in the game.

I think tying names and reputation to weapons systems is one way to have skin in the game, but it's obviously not very much skin if it's only a small part of their reputation.

I recently read Barry Lam's excellent pamphlet Fewer Laws, Better People, which has a similar theme around increasing discretion granted rather than focusing on formal discretion-free rules, so that is influencing my thoughts on this. I highly recommend the book

I started off being a bit taken aback by the idea Tyler proposed that we should almost just abandon accountability. I've generally been somewhat pro-accountability...

Two thoughts about what accountability means.

"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." When you make people accountable for their decisions, you encourage conservatism. You target not their results, because nobody totally controls results, you can only punish them for bad process. And this leads to conservative process. You stick with the big reputation contractor, you never take a risk or do anything bold. Defensive medicine. Follow the procedure, check the boxes, and whatever happens happens. We don't like this result.

On the other hand, people point to internal loci of control, we need people to want to act with excellence, with skin in the game. But think of War and Peace, of the Grand Armee marching into Russia. If Kutuzov had been held accountable for the loss of Moscow, we'd all be speaking French. Every other general was worried about being held accountable socially, of being judged a coward. Kutuzov alone was willing to take on the social opprobrium of being judged a coward, of losing Moscow, of running away from Napoleon. Napoleon expected Kutuzov to act like every other brave general he'd faced, afraid of being held accountable, when the right decision was to behave like a coward.

The important thing is to pick the right people, and trust them. Give them discretion to achieve their goals. And then hope for the best.

I always think it's worth noting that out of all the kings of Israel in the bible, there are maybe three and a half good ones. Out of 70-some Roman emperors, only perhaps a dozen were any good. Out of 43 presidents, the majority were pretty mid. Ditto kings of England, or France, or Ottoman Sultans, or Chinese Emperors. History consists mostly of mediocrities, a single great leader sets up the system and everyone coasts off that for dozens or hundreds or thousands of years.

But think of War and Peace, of the Grand Armee marching into Russia. If Kutuzov had been held accountable for the loss of Moscow, we'd all be speaking French. Every other general was worried about being held accountable socially, of being judged a coward. Kutuzov alone was willing to take on the social opprobrium of being judged a coward, of losing Moscow, of running away from Napoleon. Napoleon expected Kutuzov to act like every other brave general he'd faced, afraid of being held accountable, when the right decision was to behave like a coward.

This doesnt really affect your argument, but your example with Kutuzov is really funny: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Andreas_Barclay_de_Tolly#Napoleon's_invasion. In short, Kutuzov continued Barcley de Tolly strategy, but also had fortune of being ethnic russian.

That's why I cited to Tolstoy specifically, rather than the always contested and complicated historical record.

It’s not “accountability” in some nebulous sense. It’s accountability to having done the right process regardless of what happens. And this does skew things away from actually getting things done because there’s always a chance that doing something will result in a bad outcome that could be prevented by doing the processes. So in order to avoid the consequences of being wrong and held to account for a potential failure, you do processes to cover your own ass and who cares if the project gets done at all. It’s a question of the incentives being put in place such that you avoid actual accountability by abusing the accountability system such that you protect yourself from accountability by doing and creating lots of processes and not actually getting things done.

The solution, to my mind is to shift accountability to the results of the project. If you can’t get the job done, you’re accountable for that, and if you can’t do the project right you’re accountable for that. If the project is building a road, the accountability should not be in filling out forms to authorize the road, or quadruple checking that the processes are followed to the letter. Instead shift accountability to the correct, safe, and timely building of the road.

The issue, as they point out, is that outcomes are heterogeneous. If the outcome is a combination of your decision and random noise and circumstance outside of your control, then outcome will be weakly correlated with the actual value you provide. Half of punishments and rewards will be deserved, and half will be simply responding to the whim of fate.

If your punishment/reward mechanism is long-term enough, like say the profits of a company that can accumulate over time and wash out the negatives with positives, then risky but positive expectation behaviors will work. If your mechanism is "fire any CEO who has a year with negative profit, no matter why it turned out negative" then you're likewise going to incentivize conservative behavior that guarantees the bare minimum at the cost of unlucky but smart people who take risks with positive expected value.

Such things can be adjusted on the basis of what the project actually is. If the project is highway construction, then if the road is not functional, or the road doesn’t get built within a reasonable timeframe, then obviously that’s something to be accountable for. There might be more long term projects— I imagine getting drugs approved is more of a safety problem, and I think you could expand the scope of accountability to include long term health effects ten years on.

The trouble with procedure based accountability is that it basically incentivizes foot-dragging by punishing people for not following thousands of procedures, but effectively not caring at all if the results ever happen. I’ll admit that random bad luck can happen, but over a long enough timeframe, say you do ten projects a year, at least half would be successful by chance, and perhaps another quarter could be made to work by careful work. That would give a person on that position a 7/10 success rate, which is pretty good.

Can you provide some sense of what you have in mind for a project like I was talking about, say, a new fighter jet?

I mean im not a military expert so that’s mostly why I’m not thinking specifically about the military process. However, there are things you can do in the case of planes, mostly stress testing them in ways that simulate combat and picking those that perform well. You don’t want a jet fighter that shakes apart at combat speeds or on quick turns, and so you simulate those things. And you can have those tests, im not completely opposed to procedures and tests, but they must be in service to the end goal which in this case is a fighter jet that can handle combat conditions, and has guns/missiles that fire accurately and explode as needed on impact.

As far as generals predicting the future of combat, this is a stickier problem, simply because it involves building when you don’t know exactly what you need. If we go to war with Iran, we need something different than if we go to war with China. There’s no real work around for not knowing what to plan for, though I think the generals have better ideas about how to approach the problem Than I do. Gun to head, I might go with an internal version of a warfare prediction market and listen more to the guys capable of predicting shorter term scenarios correctly. This would be a rough proxy for the ability to predict long term trends.

My point is to get the general systems aligned with accomplishing the things they’re tasked with doing. I want my highway department to build roads, not file endless paperwork on environmental impact, on obscure safety issues, or on the precise details of the demographics of the companies hired to build the road. At the end of the day what I and most of the public want are roads built and maintained that are reasonably safe to drive on.

Accountability based on outcomes can also encourage behavior that increases tail risks. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the popular metaphor for this was “picking up nickles in front of a steamroller.” It involves taking risks with a negative expected value, but where the downside is a costly but improbable occurrence. This can appear to work very well for a number of years, until the improbable happens.

Breaking: all reciprocal tariffs halted for 90 days EXCEPT on China. Tariff rates over 100% on Chinese exports.

So it seems like it’s more of a targeted war against China specifically? Likely giving other nations time to choose (with us or against us), and slapping the nations who chose to align with China with huge tariffs in 90 days.

Interesting choice to make as a country then… do we want cheap goods from China but lose access to the American market? Or do we want to be able to sell to Americans?

The next “stick” will be weaponizing the financial system against China-aligned nations, while China dumps treasuries and tries to spark a financial crisis.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/china-holds-back-retaliation-opts-strategic-messaging-through-white-paper-trade

Watch for staff turnover.

If this really was "the plan all along," I would expect most people to stay put.

If there was some moment where Trump "realized" that this was a massive economic blunder, he'll move or fire people, while still claiming "yep ... plan all along"

There's no way that Trump and his inner circle aren't insider trading on these tariff announcements, right?

Of course. Just give out 100 blanket pardons at the end of your term.

A lot of these earlier crypto announcements were clearly insider traded, cause you can see these crazy flows actually on the blockchain. Tradfi very opaque

He tweeted earlier today, telling people to buy. I didn't realize you were supposed to take shit like that seriously.

I assumed he was saying that in a "buy the dip" and "please stop selling" sense, not that he was actually going to start taking steps to raise the stock market again...

Whatever happened to the fig leaf of "This is not financial advice, but here's what I'm doing..."

I think that’s likely too and doubt he tweeted with the intention of doing this. He spent days saying similar things.

I don't know if it makes it better. "At the time I had no idea I'd cancel the reciprocal tariffs a couple hours later!" But of course, it's also all according to plan.

What’re they going to do, send the SEC after them?

Who cares? "Insider trading" probably doesn't crack the top 5 list of worst examples of corruption, and Trump defenders would furiously denounce it as "lawfare" no matter what it was anyways.

Trump seems to have a legitimate hard-on for tariffs going back decades (as some people point out even most of his 2016 announcement speech was about tariffs and thinking free trade is bad) but he also seems to be a scaredy cat who keeps backing down anytime it causes actual trouble. He's delayed stuff like what, 4-5 times already?

At some point the market is just going to stop reacting because they'll internalize the large majority of tariff threats end up fizzling out. High chance he backs down on China some too, or at least that they allow some obvious workaround like China > Vietnam > US or something.

Edit: And it's already starting https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-says-hell-take-look-exempting-some-larger-us-companies-hit-especially-hard-tariffs

Man, I don't even know. Because "the stock market crashed and a bunch of retirees are mad because that's their nest egg" is, I think, a significant part of the signal Trump is looking at. But the market is considering the impact of tariffs times the probability that Trump actually sticks with them, so if the market stops believing Trump, the market impact of the tariffs stops looking so large, which makes Trump less likely to change his mind, which increases the chance they stick around... feels like one of those cursed anti-inductiveness/self-defeating-prophecy dynamics.

feels like one of those cursed anti-inductiveness/self-defeating-prophecy dynamics.

I believe the technical term is 'negative-feedback loop'.

The term "negative feedback loop" is a technical term for this but a non-specific one. Other related terms are "non-credible threat", "equilibrium selection", and "brinksmanship". I like the term "one of those cursed anti-inductive things", though, because

  1. The situation is cursed
  2. The anti-inductiveness is the main think causing the situation to be cursed
  3. I don't have the math chops to know what the equilibrium actually looks like here, so using proper terms from the game theory literature would be an implicit claim to expertise that I don't have.

Here's how I'm modeling the situation:

  • Trump has two buttons. The first button is labeled "WIN", and announces to the world that an economic disaster will happen. The second button is labeled "LOSE", and announces to the world that the scheduled economic disaster has been cancelled.
  • Trump views himself if a winner if his people love him AND his most-recently-pressed button was the "WIN" button. He cares more about being loved than about winning.
  • Trump wants to be a winner.
  • Trump can press both buttons any number of times.
  • Trump's people are old and their nest eggs have significant market exposure. If the market drops >10%, his people will stop loving him until the market recovers to at least that point.

As far as I can tell, this situation leads to the cycle

  1. Trump presses "WIN".
  2. Nothing happens until market participants judge that there's at least a 25% chance that Trump won't press "LOSE"
  3. Once market participants judge a 25% chance that Trump presses "LOSE", the market drops by 10%
  4. Trump's people stop loving him
  5. Trump presses "LOSE".
  6. The market recovers. Anyone who bet that Trump would press "LOSE" makes money.
  7. Go to 1.

I don't have the math chops to figure out what actually happens in this model as market participants get better at predicting Trump's behavior though. My suspicion is "25% chance the disaster actually happens each time we go through the cycle".

I am worried about this too, but the strength of the favourable initial market reaction to his climbdown makes me hope he might not try again in 90 days again.

Trump thinks he is a genius but he does also think other people (Musk, some of his golfing pals, some other real estate people, some Wall St people) are also geniuses and I guess some combination of them on the phone spooked him.

but he also seems to be a scaredy cat

125% tariffs on all Chinese imports is "scaredy cat" behavior?

If he caves on China then sure, make fun of him all you want.

125% tariffs on all Chinese imports is "scaredy cat" behavior?

If he caves on China then sure, make fun of him all you want.

It doesn't seem like the market believes he will actually follow through given the rally back, and given he's caved multiple times already on other nations (including this recent one) it's a fair expectation when seeing a consistent pattern.

Well we can do a !RemindMe and if he does cave on China (i.e. returning to basically the pre-tariff status quo, modulo perhaps some minor and ultimately inconsequential concessions on either side) then yes, I will acknowledge that the whole thing was dumb and a waste of time.

Decoupling from China is a legitimate and important strategic goal for the US, and I think there are enough China hawks in both the administration proper and the Republican party in general that there is enough political will to see it through.

It's not some 100% guarantee thing. It's possible he goes through with it, but we also have his whole first term to look at where he also did the same exact thing of threatening tariffs on China only to pull back like what happened with Apple https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/13/apple-dodges-iphone-tariff-after-trump-confirms-china-trade-agreement.html

He had said over and over again there would be no exemptions only for the exemptions to come. https://www.politico.com/story/2019/07/26/trump-apple-tariff-waivers-1437284 https://9to5mac.com/2019/09/20/trump-apple-mac-pro-tariff-exemption/

Even if he doesn't drop the tariffs themselves on a technical level, history does suggest there will be meaningful levels of exemptions and workarounds. Most of his actions so far have been to bark really loud and then pull back.

Again, if he does pull back, or if he leaves a loophole so big that the tariffs are effectively symbolic, then I will acknowledge that the whole thing was dumb and a waste of time.

Well good news, not even that much later and it's already starting with talk of exempting large companies https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-says-hell-take-look-exempting-some-larger-us-companies-hit-especially-hard-tariffs

What event are we reminding for exactly, though? If the China tariffs remain large and the stock market fully recovers despite this? My claim is pretty much just that financial markets think the tariffs are bad for the economy and that they are not pricing in the consequences of them staying long-term.

While I would agree that the market does not find the China tariffs very plausible as a long-term policy, we're still well below inauguration asset price levels, so I would interpret the market as mostly saying that a) the 10% tariffs are a major impediment to growth and so are the China tariffs and b) he screwed the business climate up so badly already that there is no fixing it.

Or the market was irrational back then with crazy P/E ratios.

Or that China is not the only important country from a trade perspective.

It’s just his usual negotiating tactic

Make some crazy demand then pause it to use the demand as an anchor from which to negotiate. Door in the face technique it’s called iirc

Door in the face technique

Ok, that's pretty damn funny. I'll have to steal that!

It’s not really stealing, that’s actually what it’s called in psychology.

I see! I'd heard of foot-in-the-door, and thought Magusoflight was riffing off that. I guess psychologists have a sense of humour too.

Wow, the fake news was real. I honestly can’t tell if this was straight luck or a legitimate leak.

I'm guessing leak; it fits in with Trump's usual MO on these things.

So it seems like it’s more of a targeted war against China specifically? Likely giving other nations time to choose (with us or against us), and slapping the nations who chose to align with China with huge tariffs in 90 days

I think this is giving too much credit. Plenty of people in Trumpworld, even people very close to him, have spent the past days insisting that the tariffs are not a negotiating tactic, they are a necessary measure, and even in some cases that the stock market collapse is a necessary correction. I think they just got spooked that the slide had no signs of stopping and went into reverse gear. It's hard to see that 90 days is sufficient to conclude trade deals with most of the countries in the world (TPP took over 8 years to conclude), it's just a panic button.

It's hard to see that 90 days is sufficient to conclude trade deals with most of the countries in the world (TPP took over 8 years to conclude), it's just a panic button.

That depends on whether or not you believe that long trade negotiations occur as a means of negotiating trade, or as a means of furnishing the sinecures of lazy trade negotiator bureaucrats.

We saw the same thing with Brexit and the length of negotiations were all BS there too. In no possible universe is [https://www.gbnews.com/politics/brexit-news-eu-laws-bananas-retained-eu-law “How bendy can a banana be”] a legitimate negotiating question.

That depends on whether or not you believe that long trade negotiations occur as a means of negotiating trade, or as a means of furnishing the sinecures of lazy trade negotiator bureaucrats.

One of the arguments made against reciprocal tariffs is that it was simply too difficult to calculate - given the thousands upon thousands upon thousands of items and so many countries, and the non-tariff barriers that the Trump admin themselves pointed out - by April.

I would be much more confident in the "lazy trade negotiator bureaucrats trying to get paid" explanation rather than "Trump panic button" if Trump had already outperformed the naysayers by putting out a reciprocal tariff scheme that didn't boil down to a simple formula.

“How bendy can a banana be” a legitimate negotiating question.

Well it sort of obviously is a negotiating question. If you want free access to European markets some degree of harmonisation has to occur - whether one party thinks regulation X is pointless isn't really material, the question is are they willing to endanger a trade deal to ditch the bendy bananas regulation. And so the inevitable horse trading.

whether one party thinks regulation X is pointless isn't really material, the question is are they willing to endanger a trade deal to ditch the bendy bananas regulation

Considering what said bendy bananas regulation actually says, it's a good example of something the EU should insist on having as it's all about labeling standards, ie. not trying to pass subpar produce as prime quality.

No, it's exactly as ridiculous as the memes say. I grew up under a lack of EU regulations on the matter, and for some mysterious reason there was no deluge of mislabeled poor quality food (in fact I'm prettty sure the general quality was better).

Produce seems like the perfect example of a place where regulation is not needed. Lidl’s general guarantee plus consumers’ discernment should be enough without Brussels needing to mandate a standard banana

Why is a bendy banana subpar?

I think the bendy ones are supposed o be higher quality.

Plenty of people in Trumpworld, even people very close to him, have spent the past days insisting that the tariffs are not a negotiating tactic, they are a necessary measure, and even in some cases that the stock market collapse is a necessary correction

This is true. However, how effective would tariffs be as a negotiation tactic if they came out and said "don't worry, it's just a negotiation tactic" ?

I'm not one to ascribe genius and 4D chess for every move that DJT does, but this case in particular does have Art of the Deal written all over it:

  1. Start with an extreme position
  2. Pump out soundbites and headlines that suck up all of the attention. Create a sense of urgency to pressure the other side and keep everyone guessing about your true intentions
  3. Walk away if the the deal doesn't satisfy you

This is true. However, how effective would tariffs be as a negotiation tactic if they came out and said "don't worry, it's just a negotiation tactic" ?

So is Trump lying about the tariffs being potentially permanent? Because, if not, "do X or I will continue to withhold Y from you" seems like a perfectly valid and sensible negotiating tactic. It is straightforward and lets your counterparts know exactly what they have to do and you've already shown them that you're willing to seriously harm them if you don't get what you want.

It is the same strategy Trump himself used against Colombia.

If Trump isn't lying that he was willing to keep on tariffs this seems like a pretty good negotiation tactic since he achieves the same certainty that he is serious without the doubt that he's serious/acting in good faith.

If Trump is lying, then what are we to make of his sudden pause after refusing to offer such a thing? It seems the worst of all worlds. You appear insincere and erratic and like you're pulling a negotiation tactic with people being unable to settle on one explanation.

I'm not one to ascribe genius and 4D chess for every move that DJT does, but this case in particular does have Art of the Deal written all over it

Maybe. But one might wonder whether Art of the Deal is what you want here.

It's one thing to highlight leverage. But there is a question of whether you actually want to keep people guessing about what you want in a trade deal, especially when that trade deal will have to be sold to their domestic audience who a) have to accept it as legitimate and b) have to trust that Trump's demands are bounded and that making them eat shit on supply management or whatever won't actually just lead to Trump coming back in a little while because your willingness to fold emboldens him.

Isn't there still a baseline of 10% during these 90 days?

A 10% blanket tax on imports is a mild price increase on Amazon and an inefficient federal sales tax. Not big news.

I think the fact that Trump would not go through with the tariffs were already priced in, and the share prices going up is just the world updating the probability that Trump will cause a worldwide recession.

Also, I think Trump comes across as an asshole in all of that.

  • "You are all not listening enough to me, so I will stop talking with you, effective today."
  • "On further reflection, you have signaled a willingness to discuss this with me, and thus I will postpone my not talking to you by 90 days. Except for Winnie, who is super-duper terrible, so I will not only not talk to him, I will not even look into his direction now. Also, if I see anyone still talking to him, I will possibly become angry at them and stop talking to them."

Given that, the rest of the world might think long and hard if they prefer to trade with the unhinged clown who will threaten them one day only to say "just kidding. OR AM I?" the next, or with a somewhat sinister power who at least pursues their own objectives in a rational, long-term thinking way.

Yes, before, if China approached your country and said you must take your pick: the US or China, you would probably pick the US.

After all of this unhinged clown shit, if the US says you must choose between the US and China, it's a tough call!

Anticipating the outline of the 5D chess explanation: this was the plan all along, training allies to meekly accept US dictates, baiting the disrespectful Chinese into cringe, standoffish behaviour. Now allies, cowed, thankful, will only negotiate 1:1, happy to put tariffs on China to avoid the terrible, terrible flood of goods. Such determination was shown that nobody will dare reduce own vulnerability to another round of similar 'negotiations'.

Luckily MAGA influencers put out so many mutually conflicting explainers for what Trump's strategy actually is that they can always pick one narrative and say that this was the plan all along.

They’d have to convincingly explain why he wouldn’t just say “we’re aligning the world away from China, let’s get tariffs between members of the Free World to 0% so we don’t subsidize the Chinese manufacturing industry that can be used against us” or any version of that, adding or subtracting important information.

With a level of charity that I would myself question the reason behind: "reasonable requests" get indefinitely referred to committees and yield "we'll see" (which means probably no in practice) responses. Witness that American presidents have been encouraging increased EU defense spending for decades, but it took the (IMO very questionable) announcements of the last few months to seemingly cause a change in mindset and priorities. It takes a (perceived) crisis to make people reconsider seemingly "forever" policies: "but we need our dairy tariff to protect our delicate cows and farmers and their ancestral cheese making practices" sounds so nice and reasonable, making it hard to ever get rid of. Neoliberalism is really bad at enacting policies that sound mean.

Even with all that said, I still am not convinced it's worth it. Or even that close to being worth it.

With a level of charity that I would myself question the reason behind: "reasonable requests" get indefinitely referred to committees and yield "we'll see" (which means probably no in practice) responses.

The alternative is not the President politely requesting X in a diplomatic communique and then sitting around, especially if the thing is clearly something people are not inclined to do. It's some mixture of messaging combined with arm-twisting and maybe even tariffs, just without the weird deficit/tariff calculations, the erratic behavior or the opacity or inconsistency in the messaging.

It's not as if this is even unknown in the Trump administration: it is quite clear what his beef was with the Colombian president and why it would end and what he would do if it didn't.

WhiningCoil feels like they're being psyopped by the debate, I feel similar. The debate forces you into arguing about whether the American president is incapable of coercing nations or manufacturing crises for them without this level of uncertainty or incompetence.

People literally cannot say what Trump's goal is for sure, but we're all forced to play this game.

Looking at this, I wonder if it’s not some kind of reverse rug pulling, where insiders buy on the dip, knowing reversal is coming.

More seriously, I wonder how aware Trump is that this constant flip flopping is destroying his ability to make credible threats in future.

"Trump is acting in a way which maximizes his ability to rip off the stock market through insider trading" is as good an explanation as any.

Him becoming not credible is only a problem for the US, not for him personally. If the stock market stops reacting to his announcements he can always order the US military to occupy Greenland to get their attention back.

The intellectual leader of MAGA has basically already confirmed your line of thinking.

All told, this was an excellent exercise in letting the markets price my risks. Since the initial announcement, I haven't bought or sold stocks-- because I'm saving up for some personal risks, but also because there's no sense panicking when the market isn't. SPY is down about ~15% from the peak rn, which sucks, but it's "economic contraction" territory rather than "economic disaster" territory.

Idk when the S&P dumps 20% in a week it’s a pretty good buy signal. Especially if you’re on a longer term time horizon

I didn't panic sell, but I'm on a month-and-a-half time horizon, and that's why I didn't buy.

Apparently call volumes spiked about 10m before the report.

Maybe this is Trump's plan to balance the deficit -- create massive economics swings and profit by whispering hints about it.

Interesting choice to make as a country then… do we want cheap goods from China but lose access to the American market? Or do we want to be able to sell to Americans?

I'm not sure I follow. A Vietnamese firm can import mostly-finished doo-dads from China, do the final step and then send them off to the US.

As of now, sure. But if it’s really a trade war against China, then an obvious escalation would be tariffing any other country that trades with China. Encourage other countries to turn their backs on China to keep access to US market.

I wonder if it was another real estate guy who said something like ‘this is going to be very bad for Manhattan real estate’. Can’t think of anything else.

Musk got through?

Watch to see if Navarro survives I guess.

Musk really needed / needs a reprieve on the China tariffs, Tesla will continue doing poorly in Europe regardless because of his perceived politics.

Even going from the complete insanity of, like, a hour ago to something that is merely extremely risky would be beneficial from Musk's point of view.

Likely giving other nations time to choose (with us or against us), and slapping the nations who chose to align with China with huge tariffs in 90 days.

If that was the plan, it's pretty dumb. First you can't really un-declare a (commercial) war. Second, if you want people to side with you, you don't start a fight with them. Third, it puts everyone except China and the US in a better negociating position with those two, because they can play one against the other.

What a huge rally. I am wishing I had been more aggressive. I bought on the dip on Monday. FNGA , which is a 3x tech etf, but I should have bought some 0-days when the story broke.

This is why you always got to keep some powder on the sidelines. You can do nothing for a year and then the opportunity arises 100x your money.

This shows the importance of not being whipsawed when investing. Stick with the plan if you're DCA (in which you generally want declines if you're young).

I don't think this will be resolved anytime soon, but what the market cares about is that things do not get worse.

Apparently China only accounts for 12 percent of imports/exports:

In 2024, US exports to China and imports from China accounted for 7.0 percent and 13.8 percent of the US total exports and imports for the year respectively

http://english.scio.gov.cn/whitepapers/2025-04/09/content_117814362_3.html#:~:text=China%20is%20the%20US's%20third,imports%20for%20the%20year%20respectively.

So with the 90 day pause on other countries, the actual inflation tally as reflected by CPI will be much less than originally feared and limited to only a handful of goods.

So it seems like it’s more of a targeted war against China specifically?

Imputing any kind of reasoning behind anything Trump does seems insane to me.

These sort of comments are popular but don’t make sense to me. Trump is simultaneously a political genius who can win two elections with the deck stacked completely against him, and also a blathering idiot with the critical reasoning and planning skills of a 3rd grader.

Not to mention his cabinet being comprised with very intelligent people and industry veterans…

a blathering idiot with the critical reasoning and planning skills of a 3rd grader.

These things massively aid him in being able to lie and make unachievable promises without doubting himself. If he was smarter there's no way he'd say the things he says or he would be plagued with doubts and counterarguments. There's no way he'd have got to where he's got.

Most people who are geniuses in one area are kind of mediocre in other areas. Trump's a genius at entertaining and getting votes, and he's terrible at economic policy. Why are those two particularly related?

So you have no theory of mind for Trump, his team or his supporters?

I have read hundreds of different pet theories on the "strategy" behind what has happened with the tariffs, and the vast majority of the time, I've come to the conclusion that the theory is basically a reflection of the writer's own bias.

I think in all likelihood this is simply a result of everyone agreeing (even his supporters) that you simply can't trust anything that Trump says as a reflection of his own motivation. I'll add a caveat, though, that there are some people who insist that his actions are entirely consistent with his rhetoric, but I have not yet been convinced.

So it's not so much "no theory of mind", as much as "no mind worth theorizing about". It's intellectual terrorism. People are bending over backwards spending precious thought cycles that could be spent on work or with their family trying to rationalize what can only be reasonably described as irrational.

I'll even add my own pet theory to the end here: Trump wants to push buttons and feel powerful. House Republicans have blessed him with the "tariff" button. Trump pushes it. Trump feels powerful. The end.

(Edit: this sort of dovetails with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_theory, first associated with Nixon. Maybe great for foreign policy, but when practiced on your own electorate, I think "intellectual terrorism" is a fair descriptor.)

That seems greatly distinct from what he said; "Trump is running on vibes and obsessions rather than means-ends reasoning" is a theory of mind, and an analogous statement is true of many people (at least in a lot of situations) regardless of whether it's true or not in this particular case - this is the simulacrum levels 3 and especially 4.

I've largely ignore all the tariff talk the last, jeeze, two weeks? Three weeks? It's just repetitive top level posts really adding nothing over and over and over again, everyone so certain they know what's going to happen.

Nobody knows what's going to happen. Did anyone know this would happen? Does anyone know what happens next?

I'm just so tired with everyone's vapid obsession with tariffs. To the point where it feels like a psyop. I've repeated my criteria for the Trump administration, and my hesitancy to rush to judgement too quickly. I'm waiting until the mid terms to see if my life has gotten better, or worse. I don't care about twitter post, I don't care about stock market swings, I do care about inflation, but in the "Has my pay risen faster than my grocery bill" sense and not a "Here's how the federal reserve is lying with statistics" kind of way.

Can we all reflect, for a moment, about all the breath and ink that has been feverishly spilled over this topic the last two weeks, to come to what? Do we even know what this point is supposed to represent? Or what tomorrow's tweets will be?

We've had topic bans before, and honestly I wouldn't be opposed to a month long ban on tariff discussion. Or putting it into it's own thread. Might as well be arguing alternate histories as far as I'm concerned.

Look, I understand finding a topic uninteresting but we're talking about a thing that could upturn the whole world economy. And the reason there is so much uncertainty about it is because the president of the united states is intentionally yoyoing us back and forth across the precipice. It's not a psyop that this is being discussed, some thing are actually genuinely important.

But it is very tiring to see people suddenly pop up acting like they're experts after months of low/no engagement, just because they suddenly have a stick they can hit people with.

I keep asking them tariff questions from last year and never get a response, because they never cared about tariffs until this week.

  1. Before 2001, most people had never cared about airplane cockpit security.
  2. Before 2008, most people had never cared about mortgage-backed securities.
  3. Before 2020, most people had never cared about coronaviruses.
  4. Before 2025, most people had never cared about tariffs.

Why is 4 different from the others?

I still don't care about coronaviruses or airplane cockpit security; the threats were wildly overblown by a single high-profile incident. We didn't need to respond to covid at all(and indeed, the correct response- both with the information available at the time and with benefit of hindsight- was to just shoot the chicken littles trying to shut down society over it and declare it 'not a big deal') and 9/11 can be safely considered a one off event.

So the real question becomes 'why are tariffs more like mortgage backed securities than covid?'

I actually don't follow in terms of how mortgage-backed securities are different than the other two examples here. If anything I think the tariffs are the odd one out here, since my modal expectation is that Trump walks them back and there is approximately zero long-term impact (at least relative to the other three examples). If you had said "4 is different because it's a nothingburger" I would admit you might have a point -- but to say that tariffs are nothingburgers like 9/11 and covid, not real like the GFC... I notice that I am confused.

My original point was just that there is frequently some Event which impacts everyone, and where everyone gains strong opinions about Adjacent Topic where they didn't really have an opinion on Adjacent Topic before Event, and so pointing out that people had no opinion about Adjacent Topic before Event isn't particularly informative.

Mortgage backed securities are different in that they actually had an effect different from people reading too much into them following a high-profile news story. You couldn’t have just ignored sub-prime mortgages in ‘08 the way you could have the virus in 2020.

The cockpit security doors are less obviously insane than most of the anti-Twin-Towers measures. There's a drawback in the whole "pilot suicide" issue, but pilot suicides are a lot less bad than ramming attacks and are in some ways easier to stop.

Yes, the Flight 93 scenario is the norm now which makes it far harder to pull off a lookalike, but some defence in depth isn't crazy.

The cockpit security doors are less obviously insane than most of the anti-Twin-Towers measures.

As far as I know they are the only such security measures to have resulted in the loss of an aircraft Germanwings 9525 with all aboard. Pilot suicides might be less bad than ramming attacks... but it's an open question about whether they are less common, or if the security doors enable more suicides-with-all-aboard than they do mitigate ramming attacks.

Pilot suicides might be less bad than ramming attacks... but it's an open question about whether they are less common, or if the security doors enable more suicides-with-all-aboard than they do mitigate ramming attacks.

They are much more common but the right comparison would be between pilot suicides and ramming attacks if the latter was still possible. But the safety doors don't really matter for pilot suicides, they happened just as much before and logically you don't need a long time to crash a plane. You couldn't do it the way the germanwings guy did it but the SilkAir way would still work.

References: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_by_pilot#By_pilots_in_control_of_whole_flight

More comments

There's a drawback in the whole "pilot suicide" issue, but pilot suicides are a lot less bad than ramming attacks and are in some ways easier to stop.

This doesn't even seem to be that big of a problem in the US. The largest differences from the Germanwings flight being:

  1. There are always two people on the flight deck now. Even when one pilot has to take a relief break a flight attendant steps onto the flight deck. Even if the FA has no idea what is going on, the added sense of shame from committing the act in front of another person is a strong deterrent. I also assume the FA would at least notice when the plane starts calling out "Terrain terrain. Pull-up Pull-up."
  2. Roughly (1,000 + 500) + 1,000 flight hours to fly a 737 or A320 size aircraft. Through a combination of rATP, ATP, and scope clause/regional captain restrictions. There would have been substantially more time to detect the Germanwings pilot unfitness with US airline levels of flight hour requirements. He only had 630 hours at the time. This would barely be enough to fly a clapped out Cessna 172 on pipeline patrol in the US.
  3. The FAA making it practically impossible to hold a first class medical after a severe depressive episode like the Germanwings pilot had. There's some argument for allowing pilots with minor problems to seek help, but not everyone is suited to every job. You've got to draw a line somewhere.

The thing is, to me it seems that high tariffs are obviously bad for me, in a way that many of Trump's other policies are not obviously bad for me. I'd prefer to keep buying cheaper products, as opposed to more expensive products. I have no desire to go work in manufacturing. And I care almost nothing at all about the US becoming self-sufficient in national security-related products because as far as I am concerned, the oceans and the nukes are all we need to keep the US safe from any major threat.

Given that tariffs offer me nothing that I value, and only seem to offer me bad things, of course I go criticize them online. It's not some general attempt to bash Trump on my part, it's a specific criticism of a specific Trump policy that I would really prefer he dropped.

Tariffs weren't really a huge deal until last week. They were generally considered bad policy with a couple edge cases and much of America's presence in the world was preaching free trade, which in practice meant no to low tariffs. Trump's hallucinated list of tariffs imposed on us notwithstanding there was bipartisan consensus that they were bad policy outside of very specific targeting. When the bear wakes up from its long hibernation and begins mauling people it is unsurprising that bear related discussions go from very rare to quite frequent.

But it is very tiring to see people suddenly pop up acting like they're experts after months of low/no engagement, just because they suddenly have a stick they can hit people with.

Trump blowing his own foot off and staggering around bleeding while the stock market tanks and his supporters flood the internet with contradictory asspulled copes about what he might be trying to do isn't actually tiresome or boring, no matter how little some people want to talk about it. If you guys don't like it, minimize the subthreads like everyone else does for everything else they don't care about.

This is a news discussion forum and this has been the biggest news for a while, clearly it’s going to be the central topic.

I've repeated my criteria for the Trump administration, and my hesitancy to rush to judgement too quickly. I'm waiting until the mid terms to see if my life has gotten better, or worse.

Then I'd recommend utilizing the little bar next to any post about Trump for the next eighteen months to minimize discussions on it.

This is such a weird reversal in the demand for hugboxing, that I'm seeing on Twitter and IRL as well. Where I felt like last year the story was "SO WHAT IF BIDEN DOESN'T KNOW WHO THE PRESIDENT IS, WHAT ABOUT FASCISM!?!?" Now I'm seeing so many right wingers telling people to stop talking about the tariffs because idk there's a trans fencer or something.

Has there been a topic moratorium in years? As I understood them, the topic moratoriums were put in place to soothe a plurality of people uninterested in (or uncomfortable with) the 10th weekly HBD/trans thread. A vestige from a more complex environment where mods had to account for significant differences to keep the peace. Most of those interests are gone along with the contributors that enjoyed those efforts. Unlike the dark arts behind HBD poasts this is an active and developing news item that has immediate and potentially long-lasting impacts on the world.

Taking the grill pill is fine. Welcome. Embrace the grill pill and accept what will be. To fully transcend you must let go the desire to rain on other parades.

There has not been a topic moratorium ever on themotte. There was one in the culture war thread in the slatestarcodex subreddit.

We have implemented rules about single issue posting for specific users that can get annoyingly stuck in a single issue.

We have sometimes had containment threads, but there isn't tons of enforcement of that containment. I don't think anyone has ever had so much as a warning for violating those.

It’s fun to see opinions in real time.

Be boring if we all held our breaths until everything is over.

I mean, I get that, but I don't.

Like, I get that if we're talking about a court case. Diving into the minutia of which legal arguments the Supreme Court will agree with, and which justices will go which way. Less so when it comes to individual court cases, like Rittenhouse, although I understand they are good drama and lightning rods for the culture war. I certain dove all in on some of them.

I get it when it comes to hot conflicts like Ukraine and Russia, and debating tactics, strategy and capabilities. Especially because reality quickly asserts itself.

The tariff discussion though... all I know is that all the same talking heads who've been wrong about everything insist tariff's will destroy the economy. They quote that the last time we did this was 100 years ago, and that simultaneously that's how we know it's a terrible idea, but also that the world has changed so much tariffs won't work like they used to when Trump brags about how great they were 100 years ago.

Fact of the matter is, Trump is a singular figure in history. He doesn't compare to anyone else. As well, these tariffs, coming from him, with the state of the world being what it is, is a singular moment in history that cannot be compared to any other. 10 years from now, some people might rise to the top as "having been right about the Trump tariffs". Some of them might have even done so on purpose! But I would also not be shocked if they lead to outcomes nobody predicts and nobody gets it completely, or even half right. You might as well be arguing about the next number at the craps table.

Ok, but until he climbed down the expert consensus was exactly right on what the reaction of the markets would be.

I struggle with economic discussion in general because

A. I know almost nothing about economics and what I do know makes the entire system seem like a massive fraud i.e. it's a ponzi scheme when I do it but they're treasury bonds when the feds do it

B. The kinds of people who are able to discourse about economics are overwhelmingly PMC and will represent PMC interests and when economics are discussed at all then what is considered to be "good policy" will be policy that doesn't take into consideration blue collar workers

I haven't been taking my opinions on the tariffs from talking heads. It just seems evident to me from first principles that the tariffs are more likely to hurt me than help me. I can't think of any way in which they could possibly help me. I don't want to work in manufacturing and I don't care about increasing US national security from its current level of "almost completely impregnable" to "so ridiculously impregnable that it's hard to imagine it being much more impregnable, barring the invention of effective anti-nuke defenses".

Congratulations, you just made the worst argument in the world for the millionth time. "You don't care? That makes you a bad person."

I don't care because I already lived through worse in 08, assorted points during Obama where we nearly "broke the buck", COVID, and most recently at points in 2022 where all the gains of my portfolio were wiped out going back to 2017. These tariff hiccups don't even take my portfolio back to the beginning of 2024.

Also, it's not a loss until you sell. Which if you do, you're a chump. Panic selling the bottom is how they get you.

I don't care about daily stock market swings because they are fucking retarded, and you shouldn't either.

  • -16

I also didn't see your post as insinuating he was a "bad person". I don't know how he came to that conclusion or what he means by that.

Sure, I wouldn't care either if I didn't have hundreds of thousands invested in the market, like millions of other people do through various retirement accounts.

Maybe I read too much into it. That just pattern matched to "millions are suffering and I care like a good person should". And I refute both points. Retirement accounts are not lost in a day unless you sell the bottom like a hysterical woman, and we've seen worse event in recent memory, much less living memory.

Shit man, if you are 59 years old you really ought to have figured out what a bad person is by now. Or at least have some inkling. I am similarly confused if you meant you don't understand what he meant by 'insinuate you are a bad person'.

at points in 2022 where all the gains of my portfolio were wiped out going back to 2017

What the fuck you invested in? Year end 2017 S&P 500 was below 2,700, the low point in 2022 was over 3,500.

These tariff hiccups don't even take my portfolio back to the beginning of 2024.

Until Trump climbed down today the slide was showing no signs of stopping whatsoever. We're barely more than a week removed from the original announcement.

Until Trump climbed down today the slide was showing no signs of stopping whatsoever. We're barely more than a week removed from the original announcement.

I will say, having my net worth in term deposits (because I'm a pessimist, if largely for other reasons) has served me well this week.

I'm not sure that @newintown is saying that if you don't care, you're a bad person. At least, that's not how I read it. To me it seems that he is pointing out why he cares.

I'm just so tired with everyone's vapid obsession with tariffs. To the point where it feels like a psyop.

"It feels like a psyop"? Oh good heavens.

I feel like you're only upset about the topic because it reflects poorly on your ingroup, and it's providing fodder for your outgroup. Democrats were practically wallowing in despair for several months after the election, but Trump's buffoonishness was such a blatant shoot-myself-in-the-foot moment that suddenly the Dems were getting very talkative again, and almost became triumphant. They were practically egging on a crash, and reality was largely granting it to them until Trump waffled.

I doubt your reaction would be similar if the shoe was on the other foot, e.g. if Biden suddenly tried to force 1 in 20 people to undergo a sex change in the name of diversity.

I doubt your reaction would be similar if the shoe was on the other foot, e.g. if Biden suddenly tried to force 1 in 20 people to undergo a sex change in the name of diversity.

As rude and susceptible to partisan bias as it is to speculate on someone's partisan motivations, I find myself agreeing with your assessment of WhiningCoil in most of this comment, but this last part is pretty ridiculous. I'm not sure there's a level of behavior about tariffs that any POTUS could do that would come within an order of magnitude as extreme as actually forcing anyone to undergo sex changes, which would be legit authoritarian overreach in a way that the tariffs or even Trump's recent behavior with respect to deportations aren't. To say nothing of forcing millions of people to undergo sex changes. Like, even if Trump decided to enact Graham's Number% universal tariffs one second and then 0% the next second and varied wildly between them 3600/hour for every waking hour of his presidency, that wouldn't be anywhere in the same ballpark (though certainly it would provide a ton of legitimate fodder for conversation!). Yes, they're both examples of politically shooting oneself in the foot, but you're comparing doing so with an assault rifle and doing so with a nuke. And the precise examples of comparison isn't the point, but using such an obviously absurd hypothetical makes this comment appear in bad faith. Which is unfortunate, because, again, I think the main thrust of the comment is accurate.

I'm not sure what the equivalent of Trump's recent tariff behavior would be from the Democratic end. Something like a wealth tax on some ridiculously low amount of wealth that would apply to a majority of households, for the purpose of funding entitlements, maybe? That'd certainly be worth discussing plenty, and certainly there would be plenty of Democrat-aligned people trying to minimize the discussion as much ado about nothing as a way to distract away from something that made their side look bad, though I'd hope that no one on this forum would do so (and I'd honestly guess none of the regulars would do so).

OK sure, my particular example was dumb for the reasons you pointed out. I wanted to think of something that had partisan valence in the other direction, but at this point Republicans are mostly only pro-business as a historical accident. Most of the base hates "Wall Street" and "Big Business", so I think their response to Bernie-style economic leftism would be relatively muted compared to, say, 20 years ago.

That's a pretty good way to spin writing a dumb comparison and then admitting that you can't think of a better one. But not good enough to actually distract me sadly.

though I'd hope that no one on this forum would do so (and I'd honestly guess none of the regulars would do so).

While we have quite a few good eggs around here, a brief look at the past 8-9 years should be enough to dispelled most of this hope. We've had regulars argue against Damore, against Nick Sandman, in defense of BLM burning down that police precinct, that Kavanaugh was a rapist, and I don't recall more than a handful of progressive/liberal-leaning posters saying anything about it (and the ones that did probably wouldn't be recognized as progressive/liberals by other progressives/liberals).

I'm just so tired with everyone's vapid obsession with tariffs. To the point where it feels like a psyop.

When the market posts the biggest decline since Covid or 2008, of course people are going to care . It was the market crash that got people talking about it. And the fact the tariffs were so much more onerous compared to past tariffs.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats