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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25820 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026

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If you had to devise a test to decide who counts as a conservative in the classical sense, what would you check? Politics must count, and religion, and respect for tradition, but almost no one has all three of those in a way that makes the label "conservative" apply.

Politically, most people who apply the term "conservative" to themselves or others actually mean "classical liberal": someone who prefers less economic control/intervention by government and all the market solutions that such a position implies, and also favors no government position on The Good Life, leaving people free to choose whichever life they choose, from pious monasticism to squalid meth addiction. This often means "Red Tribe,' but also covers weirdo libertarians. It rules out nearly all Christians, because they would never say "the true Good Life is not sufficiently knowable for the state to take a position on it," which is why there is so much rhetoric about Christians coming for abortion rights or whatever.

But many religious people don't count either. True Conservatives, in the Burkean sense (not in the literal sense of "this is what Edmund Burke wrote," but in the sense that people mean when they say "I'm a classical conservative") are not supposed to want to change anything in society or culture that was working serviceably. On this definition, though, no American counts, because the Revolution upended a system that was working ok. No protestant counts, because Luther upended a system that was working okay (of course Americans and protestants disagree about that serviceability, but does everyone get a C-pass for their particular complaint? Was Lenin a conservative too?). So this rules out most anglosphere "conservatives." But this leads to the absurdity of going back further and further and finding that no user of bronze tools counts because stone tools were working okay, etc.

In terms of respect for Tradition, there is no definitional problem, but there is the empirical problem of people having no sense of history or culture. Maybe in Europe things are different, but in North America very few people think about tradition at all, and many of those that do overestimate the age of most traditions. So there might be a respect for tradition, but it is uncoupled from ancestral traditions to a point where "I respect tradition" does not mean what anyone wants it to mean.

So my question is, does the term "conservative" mean anything at all anymore other than "red tribe" or "anti-woke"? If so, how would an alien zoologist classify someone as "conservative"? I suggest checking people's children (to check transmission of values) to see how many nursery rhymes they know or how many second-verses of Christmas carols they can sing, but I grant that this prioritizes traditional culture over religion and politics, and a relatively recent tradition at that. Nevertheless, I think that if you sorted people by how many of those things their kids could recite, you would be able to predict more about them than asking "should abortion be legal" or "what is the optimal income tax rate."

a relatively recent tradition at that

All traditions were recent once....

Rather, all traditions are eternal, or they are not traditions.

You need transcendental notions to make a custom into a tradition, properly speaking.

This is why all cults look similar modulo their trappings, and why the trappings are not actually that important beyond their existence.

This is similar to questions about what it means to be 'woke', or really what it means to hold any ideology that doesn't have a strictly defined orthodoxy like perhaps Catholicism. Ultimately 'conservative' is just a label we apply to a whole cloud of beliefs that share certain elements or vibes in common. Probably no particular strain of conservatism fully embodies every one of those common elements, but that is fine. It becomes a probabilistic thing, if you embody more than X% of common conservative beliefs/themes it is fair to call you a conservative. I think that is the way that most things work. How would you define a chair? Similar problem.

There are real, actual differences between how self described liberals and conservatives, but not republicans and democrats, raise their children. Corporal punishment in the home, censorship, etc are all more common among one than the other. Likewise there’s differences in rates of visiting elderly (grand)parents, in rates of religious change(both conversion and apostasy), in length of courtship before marriage, etc. I don’t think I need to spell out how they run.

Now, notably that isn’t a Republican/democrat difference, or even really a red tribe/blue tribe difference- thé red tribe is better modeled as ‘the set of people who think conservatism is high status’ than as ‘the set of people who are conservative’, and republicans are just ‘people who prefer Trump to the optimates’. But ‘conservatives’ are a real thing.

I don’t think conservative means you get to quit thinking and just follow the past. The world changes and you can update your beliefs.

My preference for society is a lot of classical liberalism within a traditional culture. But I also believe you need to update your political philosophy for the environment you find yourself in.

I think it makes sense that Russians have historical no matter what form of government they were under were more military authoritarian. It’s a reality of their geography and being easy to invade. If I were Russian I would adopt political ideologies that were more Russian.

Today I find myself adopting more Latin American Right-Wing political philosophies because I feel like America has demographically become more like Brazil than 1960’s America.

If I am living in a country that is 90% Anglo without military threats (traditional America or England) then I think I like classical liberalism the best. I could possibly see some kind of Nordic politics being a possibility.

I like the saying that fascism is an immune response to communism. I think I would be a fascists in a lot of countries in the 1930’s though without the murdering a lot of Jews part.

I could see myself becoming a communists in some potential all knowing AI tech worlds where jobs don’t exists. And the AIs can internalize something like the price system that makes capitalism work.

Basically I have come to conclude that different ideologies work better depending on tech level, culture, demographics, political adversaries, and geography.

but there is the empirical problem of people having no sense of history or culture.

Speak for yourself, If anything I feel like this here might actually be the test or at least a critical component of it

I don't think there is any set of necessary or sufficient political beliefs such that everyone who uses the term "conservative" would agree that an individual with such beliefs is properly classified as such. Especially if you intend this definition to stretch backwards into the past and possibly forwards into the future.

I think a prudent beginning to this line of inquiry is to ask: why care what "conservative" means? Did X call Y a conservative and one is unsure what X intended to convey thereby? Does one imagine one's self as possibly positioned in an intellectual tradition described as "conservative" (by whom?) but are unsure what that entails?

Once we understand what use we intend to put the term "conservative" the path to a meaning becomes clearer.

"Do you get along with your father, and do you think he is proud of who you are?"

Yes and yes.

Perhaps necessary, but certainly not sufficient.

Look within yourself, there's a conservative inside you.

Weird, I thought conservatives were generally against that kind of thing.

It's all in the context, Conservatives under Julian the Apostate were probably all about the importance of sodomy as part of growing up the way the great fathers of Rome did.

I guess that excludes Rod Dreher.

A conservative is someone who wants to conserve what is both existing and good.

Dreher, at his recent worst, is a reactionary, who wants to turn the clock back and destroy what exists.

Conserving what is both existing and good implies destroying some of what exists, unless you take the pollyannapill and say that everything that exists is good.

Pruning and uprooting are quite different tasks and philosophies.

At its core, I would say, it's just political low openness, that is, the belief that for the polity, things that are new or different from what it is accustomed to are a priori bad. Low/high openness in individual humans is understood well enough, and likewise does not care for the particular provenance or authenticity of a habit: an adult could discover chicken tenders at age 30, gradually slide into eating them exclusively and decide at 40 that trying new foods over the tried and reliable tendies is just not enjoyable or worth it. It doesn't have to be this extreme: a tendiemaxxer friend of mine can be convinced to try most things, but you have to spend half a day making the case why it's a good idea, eat some of it in front of him and show that you are not experiencing any side effects you hid from him, and then he'll start with tiny bites and wait for a bit to meditate on how he feels about it (and then in the end complain that you should have just let him stick with his usual diet).

Contra this, liberalism in essence is "did you see that Chinese bull penis hangover soup on youtube shorts too? We should try that some day, aren't you curious", applied to society. A baseline attitude of "this is different, how exciting" vs. "this is different, I feel uncomfortable".

I would agree with this definition, and would also note that “conservative” is a trait that manifests in context dependent ways and increasingly maps less and less into the political right at all nowadays. As the left becomes more entrenched in institutions, the party differences in openness to experience has shrunk considerably, such that the relationship has now become very small. Progressivism becomes “conservative” once sufficiently mainstream; these terms were forged in a cultural context that no longer applies today, and were always to some extent incoherent groupings.

Increasingly you’re finding people whose constellations of beliefs mostly fit onto the US political right, and yet would also be the type to try out the Chinese bull penis hangover soup (I would). A huge portion of political conservatives today would actually be attitudinally liberal and have more in common with 1970s radicals than they would like to admit, whereas the opposite is true for progressives, some of whom would likely be part of the Moral Majority had they been born in the right time period. Anecdotally, in my family and all my friend groups, I’m most likely to swing highly right on issues, but am also most likely to go “this is different, how exciting” when encountering new experiences or ideas, to an extent that most people around me seem to find a bit intimidating, and am fairly certain that this general tendency towards taking nonstandard ideas seriously informs my political takes a lot.

Progressivism becomes “conservative” once sufficiently mainstream

Hence the reason some political parties actively named themselves "progressive-conservative", or PC for short. They were just ahead of the curve.

And yes, it always feels weird that, technically speaking/currently, conservatism and [classical] liberalism are the same thing, and when progressives call themselves "liberals" it stinks of stolen valor.

I think I’d separate things out a bit, simply because of the conservative political “team” of different parties (in America basically the parties represent groups that in a multi-party system would be separate parties who would join forces for a political advantage).

So what we really have are probably 3-4 conservative leaning blocs: libertarians, nationalists, traditionalists, imperialists, etc. each agreeing to an uneasy alliance to get things done, but believing different things. Liberals tend to have similar blocs: socialists, hippies, race activists, internationalists, etc. working together to get things done even if they disagree on most things. We form the parties before the election via conventions and primary elections. Europe has the elections then forms the alliances. So I see liberal and conservative as more umbrella terms where a better way to think about it is as an alliance. Traditionalists can generally faithfully transmit values and ideas and story and songs. Libertarians or imperialists or business conservatives probably care about the economics than anything else and might not care at all about singing Silent Night in the original German the way a traditionalist might. Race activists probably care about the traditions of their own people and they probably transmit that. Socialists don’t care.

Conservatism, insofar as it is a political movement and not merely a feeling or disposition or psychology, was created as part of the fundamental disagreement at the heart of Enlightenment politics: Can man be made perfect through reason?

There is one half of the Enlightenment, godfathered by Hobbes, notably full of Scots like Hume and Smith, who decided to sit amongst itself in the right side of the French Assembly that one time. They say no. Man cannot perfect itself. And therefore not perfect society.

Out of this core tenet, arises essentially all of the political precepts of conservatism: transcendental humility, natural law, hierarchy, property, freedom, prudence, etc.

It seems therefore easy to me to make the test simply one of anti-utopianism:

Do you believe men (and therefore society) can be made perfect?

No conservative shall answer yes, and all Liberals that answer no will be conservatives.

Where does "No, but one can get arbitrarily close." fit in your schema?

(The road to wisdom?/Well, it's plain/and simple to express./Err, and err,/and err again,/but less, and less, and less.) --Piet Hein

It's conservatism.

Once we reach further than those people think is reasonable, they aren't so happy anymore and will say that their progress was fine but this new progress is insane. Mencheviks are not a new phenomenon.

When I say "all Liberals that answer no will be conservatives", it's acceptable to read it as prophecy.

I don’t think this remotely captures the contours of the actual arguments and beliefs taking place in 21st-century America. Firstly because almost nobody on either side reads 18th- and 19th-century philosophy. More importantly, though, because even among the people who do favor a more technocratic approach, almost nobody would claim that “man can be perfected (that’s not the point), and even the very few who would still believe that such an outcome is only possible far into a theoretical future. It’s just not a live issue, politically or otherwise. “Conservatives” and “liberals” are far more focused on object-level political and aesthetic concerns than they are about the nebulous world of utopian philosophy.

It may not be a clean one-for-one map but I do believe that @IGI-111's distinction accurately captures some key differences in how the two major US coalitions approach questions of politics and culture.

One of the most common criticisms that I see leveled against Republicans both here and in the wider world is that they are not sufficiently utopian, not sufficiently technocratic, and that they have no "positive vision" nor "will to power".

This is a fundamentally "Democrat" coded complaint because Democrats don't see the collective power of the state/society as some dangerous beast to be restrained distracted or appeased, but more as a benevolent god who answers prayers and smites enemies.

If you are of a sort, you will have some sense deep in your gut that "power corrupts, and that absolute power corrupts absolutely", and that sense is to lead you to view anyone who would make such critiques a jaundiced eye. You say that nobody on either side is reading 17th 18th or 19th-century philosophy. My response to you is that they don't have to. The philosophy is already "in the water". An axiom need not have been read from a book (or debated on the internet) for it to shape a person's beliefs, or sway how they vote.

The populist coded version I like re: Will to Power is

“Please stop fighting for the car keys and then happily tossing them out the window when you get them. It doesn't protect us from the powerful, all that happens is that then they get picked up by the other side anyway.”

More importantly, though, because even among the people who do favor a more technocratic approach, almost nobody would claim that “man can be perfected (that’s not the point), and even the very few who would still believe that such an outcome is only possible far into a theoretical future.

...And yet, we very clearly have a large, cohesive population of people enthralled to vast, superhuman "processes" that were instituted for nakedly utopian goals, continue to operate in the same way they have since their foundation, and at no point changed goals. These processes observably square the circle by continuously adding epicycles between where they are and the goal, rather than admitting the original goal was unachievable and abandoning the effort. See the war on poverty and blank slate education for two notorious examples.

A commenter here once argued to me that affirmative action and other forms of anti-racist government intervention should be implemented for at least three centuries before we could really draw conclusions on whether they worked or not. How does that sort of mindset differ from Utopianism specifically in the actions it produces?

See the war on poverty

The percentage of the American population living in poverty has in fact decreased considerably from where it was at in the late 1950’s (roughly 22%) to where it is in the 2020’s; in 2019 the number hit a record low of 10.5%. We can argue all day about whether this has any causative relationship with LBJ’s specific policies, but can you at least understand why a good-faith political operator could look at that and not see the War on Poverty as a failure? Do you think that anything less than a full elimination of poverty means that the effort was not worth trying and that we should scrap every program that’s even trying to move the needle? Can you see how somebody who is t a “utopian” could have a reasonable disagreement with you about the answer?

Many of the people you’re identifying as “utopian or as “wanting to perfect humanity” would actually describe what they’re doing as an attempt to incrementally improve the human condition through sustained effort. And I think there are concrete observable examples all around us which can at least plausibly be interpreted as a demonstration of their successes!

Obviously I agree with you that human beings are not blank slates, and I do agree with you that, for example, racial gaps in educational attainment have not closed nor even significantly narrowed as a result of progressive theories of education. I think that progressives are wrong about some pretty important bedrock facts about humanity. However, I think they’re wrong in a different way than what OP described, and I think that there have been some landmark successes in progressive government (for example, the massive reduction in rural poverty and illiteracy in the South under the FDR and LBJ administrations) which make it difficult to credibly accuse progressivism of just being a totally manifestly failed project which only utopians stubbornly denying reality would have any interest in continuing.

I think that there have been some landmark successes in progressive government (for example, the massive reduction in rural poverty and illiteracy in the South under the FDR and LBJ administrations) which make it difficult to credibly accuse progressivism of just being a totally manifestly failed project which only utopians stubbornly denying reality would have any interest in continuing.

I'm not sure how to communicate this without sounding snarky, but you sound exactly like a Stalinist to me. Modernity has killed more people than any other event in the history of mankind, and immiserated Man in ways hitherto unimaginable, yet we ought to be grateful because technical advances whose causes are only tenuously related should see full credit attributed to the policy of the Party and nothing else.

Yet we see regimes that do not actually hold to such ideas benefit from industry without necessarily encountering the same cultural issues. Could it be that improving the human condition and reducing everything to reason and commerce aren't actually joined at the hip?

I think the Enlightenment is a failure, because it did not reach its own goals. I don't think it's an total failure because we did create useful institutions and discover useful truths along the way, but I don't regard the Soviet Union as a total failure either for the same reasons.

Still, Managerial Totalitarianism is a cruel farce and must be destroyed for the welfare of mankind.

A conservative is a liberal ten years on. A far-right person is a liberal twenty years on. A nazi has turned forty.

Look at what "conservatives" are desperately trying to conserve these days: the feminist purity of women's sports which men must subsidize and watch or else we're all misogynists. The fertility of gay kids. A border.

Real conservative stuff guys. There are no conservatives in the US, just liberals who haven't kept up with the moral fashions of the freshman dorms at Barnard.

Fair, but the road travels both ways. For example progressives can't hold that gay marriage is good without holding that marriage itself is good.

That isn't particularly difficult for progressives to square. It's simple to say that marriage itself isn't good, but that our oppressive capitalist heteronormative patriarchy deems it as good* and, as such, confers many advantages to married couples. And, for as long as these advantages exist, gay couples should have just as much access to them as straight couples.

* This is merely one specific form of the fully general argument that anything that is considered "good" by conservatives/traditionalists/people I don't like is actually something that has been arbitrarily declared "good" by the fully uncoordinated emergent conspiracy-like behavior by people in power, and we could just as easily declare it "bad" and the reverse "good" and run society just as well, as long as everyone agreed to play along. Other examples include fat acceptance/health-at-any-size and also the denigration of logic and rationality in themselves (distinct from and antithetical to the common criticisms against rationalists and their ilk for failing to live up to their title of rationality).

You can't rally against injustice by expanding the advantages of an injustice to include your own group. Consider slavery.

By? Correct, one can't. While? Why not?

Because it's by turns rank hypocrisy and plainly counterproductive.

No.

I've met queer theorists who held this position which is very much internally consistent: marriage is an oppressive institution that must be dismantled, and the best vector to dismantle oppressive systems is to accelerate their contradictions to render them meaningless, thus making marriage as detached from heteropatriarchal norms by any means is necessary and positive.

The only thing that dismantles is the hetero norm that marriage is for a man and a woman. Any other factor remains unaffected at best or reinforced at worst (legitimacy as determined by the state or church, etc).

It's like putting on a dress and gagging on your wife's strap-on to dismantle queer theory. "Checkmate, homos! Your degeneracy has no place in this vision of society".

The state and the church can be made revolutionary, and the internal contents of an agreement mediated by revolutionary institutions can be changed.

Read Rousseau for more details.

It's not just the state and church, those are just one aspect of marriage. The Queer Theory interpretation is asking us to believe in revolutionary conformity.

The changed element is the institutional homophobia that disallowed gay marriage. That's a change, granted. But it can be described as an expansion, not a reduction. Marriage becomes an option for more people. The various and diverse structures that support the established norms that make up the cultural institution called marriage have gained additional clients, while Queer Theorists and their non-conformist norms have lost clients, hence why they have to contort themselves to present it as a good thing for their cause. I don't doubt that they can offer complicated and counterintuitive explanations for how it aids their cause, I just don't find those explanations convincing.

You can say they're wrong, I think they are too, but that has no bearing on the internal coherence of their belief system or its existence.

Title IX dates to at least 50 years ago. Admittedly, the Civil Rights Act they're leaning on to push ending affirmative action is even older.

I think there is an element of truth to this, but it also doesn't apply to every progressive value, only those that have become widely-adopted and successful. Most conservatives aren't strongly in favor of organized labor, or the century-ago progressivism of eugenics and temperance, but probably are okay with the Pure Food and Drug Act and the CCC/TVA/adjacent infrastructure (some progressives would advocate for removing dams these days). And I'd be skeptical of the conservativism of anyone who embraced "indigo children" and such in the current era.

What is the classical sense?

I suppose my feeling is that all political labels are inevitably somewhat vague, and refer to clusters of people who associate together for particular causes, and therefore whose borders tend to be blurry and mutable. This means that definitions tend to be provisional and mutable. I can point to, say, Kirk's ten principles and say "a conservative is someone who agrees with most of these" - maybe to preserve a little wiggle room, you need to hold at least seven out of ten to formally count as 'a conservative'? But it's always going to be a bit wobbly.

I think you also need to clearly distinguish between American and other conservatives here. In the United States, conservatism generally means some sort of adherence to the principles of the founding, or the American Revolution, and because the American foundation is paradigmatically liberal, that means that American conservatism is a form of liberalism. This is not necessarily the case in other countries.

For me, I find it most useful to define conservatism in terms of an overall disposition or posture. In general, I think, that somebody whose overall politics are marked by a sense of deference to tradition or obligation to the past, and a preference for organically evolved systems over top-down plans, and who is moderately opposed to change (that is, small incremental changes, or changes to respond to specific identifiable problems, may be good; large-scale reforms are usually bad), would qualify as a conservative in the broad sense.

But this does mean that, for instance, there are people whose names loom large in the right-wing political canon that I would not consider conservative. Re-litigating Trump is boring, so let me take another example - I don't think Ronald Reagan was a conservative. I don't think Margaret Thatcher was a conservative. They were both, in a sense, progressive leaders, in that what they had was an organised theory for how society ought to work that they tried to impose via top-down reform, and for which they claimed a popular mandate. That is how progressivism works. Reagan and Thatcher both clearly belonged to the right-wing coalition in their countries, but it seems odd, to me, to call them 'conservatives'.

To be conservative is to be disposed to think and behave in certain manners; it is to prefer certain kinds of conduct and certain conditions of human circumstances to others; it is to be disposed to make certain kinds of choices…. In short, it is a disposition appropriate to a man who is acutely aware of having something to lose which he has learned to care for; a man in some degree rich in opportunities for enjoyment, but not so rich that he can afford to be indifferent to loss. It will appear more naturally in the old than in the young, not because the old are more sensitive to loss but because they are apt to be more fully aware of the resources of their world and therefore less likely to find them inadequate. In some people this disposition is weak merely because they are ignorant of what their world has to offer them: the present appears to them only as a residue of inopportunities.

To be conservative … is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss. Familiar relationships and loyalties will be preferred to the allure of more profitable attachments; to acquire and to enlarge will be less important than to keep, to cultivate and to enjoy; the grief of loss will be more acute than the excitement of novelty or promise.

Michael Oakeshott, in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays

Conservative is a disposition of being, not a coherent philosophy. There are many different philosophies which people of a conservative disposition can ascribe to coherently.

There were two top level comments yesterday that I didn't get a chance to respond to before they got buried. Fortunately, they dovetail nicely with one another, enough for me to create a new top-level explaining my take on things. The first of these asked what a conservative was, and while I don't really have a horse in that race I did come across Russell Kirk's Ten Conservative Principles. In many ways, Kirk is a relic, as it seems unlikely that he'd fit in with what calls itself conservatism today. But look at the first principle:

[T]he conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order. That order is made for man, and man is made for it: human nature is a constant, and moral truths are permanent.

Now, I'll say as a preliminary matter that Kirk and other right-wing intellectuals suffer from the same problem as left-wing intellectuals in that they tend to speak in a kind of psychobabble that on the left results in Academicese and on the right in Biblical allusions and references to other people who have been dead for 200 years, and with both one predisposed to agree with the arguments finds himself nodding along without realizing that there isn't much there to even agree with. That being said, this principle illustrates conservative thought better than anything else I've read. As a liberal, I disagree with it as a matter of principle, and I could make a lot of normal, rational arguments about why it's wrong, but I don't find that very interesting. What I find much more interesting are the weird ways in which belief in this principle manifests itself among conservatives, and how these manifestations have convinced me that it's wrong more than references to Seneca or Thomas Aquinas ever could. And to see those manifestations, you need look no further than the discussion on food stamps that followed.

It's apparent to most that this board leans somewhat to the right, and I noticed several themes among what was said. I'm not going to call anyone out by name, but I will quote where appropriate. The most common one, both here and in popular discussion, is the desire to prohibit purchases of certain items, which some states have already begun doing. As a said in an earlier post on the topic, these items generally fall into three categories:

  1. Items that are objectionable because they're inherently unhealthy (fruit roll up, pop tarts, cheese curls, Dr. Pepper, etc.)
  2. Convenience items that resemble unobjectionable items or are composed of items that would individually be unobjectionable, but are prepared or processed to a degree that makes them both more unhealthy and more expensive than unobjectionable items (Hungry Man Dinners, frozen pizza, etc.)
  3. Luxury items that would be unobjectionable but for the cost (Waygu steak, most seafood, artisanal cheese, etc.)

You can name certain staple items that nobody finds objectionable, like ground beef, chicken breasts, eggs, milk, etc. But then you get to the edge cases. Everyone agrees that grains are a staple of the diet. But what counts as a grain? Consider the following:

  • Rice, oatmeal, flour: These are more or less pure grains that would presumably fit any definition you want to use.
  • Bread, pasta: Processed, premade items, but such basic staples that it would be ridiculous to not include them.
  • Prepackaged cookies, cakes, donuts, etc.: Obviously in the snack food category, but they're really just basic grain items with more sugar and fat content
  • Boxed crackers: Still firmly in the snack food category, but without the added sugar and fat
  • Breakfast cereals: Run the gamut from Cheerios and Kix up to Fruity Pebbles and Count Chocula. I guess you could propose a sugar limit like my mother did?
  • Granola bars, breakfast bars, energy bars: Usually found in the cereal aisle. Like cereal, they run the gamut from so healthy as to be inedible up to Pop Tarts, the poster child for oversweetened convenience foods.
  • Hamburger Helper, Rice-a-Roni, Kraft Mac-n-Cheese, boxed stuffing mix, ramen: Unobjectional staple items plus flavorings that may or may not make the product significantly less healthy
  • Pancake mix: Unobjectionable on its own, except the intended purpose (and only purpose the vast majority will ever use it for) is to drench it in a sauce made of pure sugar, which is sold separately but conveniently located right next to it
  • Frozen garlic bread, frozen ravioli, frozen pierogies: Unobjectionable items made slightly less healthy and sold in a form that is typically associated with objectionable convenience foods.
  • Specialty breads: An unobjectionable item made in a way that may or may not make it more expensive. Bakery Italian is among the least expensive and best-tasting options at the store I shop at, but you can also get more expensive stuff pretty easily.

Someone in line behind a woman whose shopping cart contained a bag of rice, a box of spaghetti, Oreos, Ritz crackers, Chex, Nutri-Grain bars, Knorr alfredo noodles, pancake mix, Mrs. T's pierogis, and bakery Italian and was paying for it with food stamps nobody would probably bat an eye. But the person whom I originally compiled this list in response to insisted that everything but the first two should be excluded. A number of people below commented that food stamp recipients should be given no more than a basic subsistence diet.

Now, I don't have a problem with prohibiting pop and candy as some states have begun doing, at least not in and of themselves. The concern I have is that if I get 50 people who believe in some version of the above and ask them to make a call on a bunch of selected items, I'm not going to get any consistency out of their answers. There's no line everyone agrees on. The obvious response is "Well, nobody's going to agree on everything, but you have to draw the line somewhere." Well, we did draw the line somewhere, 60 years ago: No prepared foods, no alcohol, no tobacco. Everything else that's a food product is fair game.

Some people proposed away that would seem to skirt the problem by suggesting that the government provide food directly, "like they used to do", or focus on core items, like WIC. First, the government didn't used to operate the Food Stamp program like that. What they probably have in mind is government programs where agricultural surplus products were processed into shelf-stable products like powdered eggs and distributed to low-income people. While there are no longer dedicated pick-up locations, this program never went away, the food is just distributed through food banks and programs like Meals on Wheels. WIC is a different animal entirely in that participants are limited to purchasing specific items each month. But it's not a general food program, as it only deals with a few limited categories. Excepting things like fruits and vegetables which are usually sold generically, program guidelines limit eligible items down to specific brands. The program was developed to address specific nutritional needs of pregnant women and young children, and was never intended as a general food program. It doesn't scale as such.

I will briefly touch on the even more ridiculous idea that the government should just provide Hello Fresh or MREs, if only because it leads nicely into my next point. These items cost around $10/meal. Current guidelines for a single person max out around $10/day. I don't know what advantage these have that's strong enough to warrant tripling the program cost, an interesting supposition considering that many seemed to think that the $300/month that's budgeted for an adult is entirely too much. Now, I don't want to comment on this based on personal experience because my own food consumption is not that of a poor person looking to stretch his dollar; I spend a lot more than that on food, but since I'm not on assistance I assume I'm allowed. But keep in mind that the government doesn't set these amounts arbitrarily. If you want to know what goes into it, feel free to take a gander at the USDA publication Thrifty Food Plan 2021, and you'll get an excruciatingly detailed look at how they determine these things based on sample menus, nutritional requirements, and current prices, down to details like how a 12–13 year-old male's consumption of seeds, nuts, and soy products should total 92c/week following an economical budget.

The final broad theme had less to do with the program itself as the people who used it. Complaining about drug addicts using it. Being disgusted by fat people using it. Complaining about 25-year-old women using it. Saying it's clearly intended for people laid off from the mill. I bring this up last because it really goes to the heart of conservatism and the first principle. The idea underlying all of these objections is one of deserving. Certain poor people don't deserve access to government food assistance. Those who do don't deserve to derive any pleasure from eating beyond not starving. Cake and Pepperidge Farm brand bread products are luxuries you have to earn. Underlying all of this, of course, is a sense of moralism; alcoholism and obesity are moral failings and until you overcome them you're not deserving of assistance. Work is virtuous in and of itself so unless you're working you don't deserve any luxuries. Even the disabled don't get a pass anymore because we all know that they could probably work if they wanted to and they're just faking it to get their free Dr. Pepper and avoid work, which we all know they'd do if they were virtuous. Instead they're just moochers trying to ride off of the system. If any of us had any sense we'd do the same, except we're all too virtuous to ever dream of doing such a thing.

It's this last point that really sums it all up, the idea that the system is there to be gamed, largely is gamed, that there exists an advantage in trying to game it, and the self-congratulation that comes along with not gaming it. To make a seasonal reference, it's as if we are Christ tempted in the desert. Except anyone with half a brain knows that nobody on food stamps is getting any advantage from the system. For a single individual, the income limit is about $2600/month. Would you want to live on that in exchange for a benefit that maxes out at $300/month? And other dubious benefits, like reduced rent on a small apartment in a questionable area? And noticed I said maximum benefit; if you make anywhere near the limit you are only getting a fraction of that. I don't know how much but even if you're getting the whole thing it doesn't seem like a great deal. "But if I weren't working, I'd get the whole thing, and it might be worth it being poor if I didn't have to go to work." No, it wouldn't. You don't have to work, and unless your hobbies are watching daytime broadcast television or hanging around outside a Co-Go's, I believe you'd find yourself bored with the welfare lifestyle rather quickly.

Conservatives know this deep down, but they don't want to admit it because it conflicts with the First Principle. If there is an absolute, unchanging moral framework, then we can judge people based upon it. And to compound things even further, they are self-arbiters of this framework. They know what it is inherently, and if anyone tells them otherwise, they're just liberals trying to infect the culture. It makes about as much sense as someone confidently saying that frozen burritos are a luxury item that should only be available to the deserving. Because when it comes to any moral obligation on the part of ourselves, there is silence. No conservative criticizes food stamps on the one hand and speaks of an obligation to help the poor on the other. For all the Biblical allusions, I can't find the part where charity has to be earned through moral virtue. The moralism seems to be confused, solipsistic, incoherent. For his part, Russell Kirk was at least a generous man who was known to help strangers in ways that few of us ever will. But I'm not sure that he was really a conservative.

SNAP benefits are about a thousand dollars a household per month: commercially, a 12-pack of MREs is $150. Let's assume we can get a bulk discount and get 12 meals for $125. That's 96 meals per month - 3 per day for four people, plus 3-6 extra for variety. It's not the most cost efficient, but it's shelf-stable, doesn't require utensils or a stove, and non-transferable. The paternal autocrat in me also likes the synergy with military production. What's not to like?

Edit: gack, I'm stupid don't mind me.

Your math doesn’t math? Twelve is not 96, and 96 is 3 meals/day for one person for one month, not four people.

I'm not sure what kind of math you're using where 96 meals is three per day for any more than one person.

The current market rate for prepared meals being approximately $10 is without economies of scale and assuming a decent profit margin. It should be within the capabilities of the government to make this more efficient, even if likely the pork would be barrelled.

You're also assuming that long-term healthcare isn't also largely being covered for the food stamp population by government spending. This thereby incentivizes some sort of adequate nutritional profile

You don't need to ban every grain item that isn't efficient. You just need to ban ones that are particular problems. If you're trying to prohibit Pop-Tarts, maybe fancy Italian bread is halfway between regular bread and Pop-Tarts, but it isn't bought with a frequency that is also halfway between regular bread and Pop-Tarts.

The question I'm asking is why you find pop-tarts so problematic in the grand scheme of things.

I would hazard a guess it’s because they’re known as particularly unhealthy and easy to identify.

I don’t share the particular fixation, you can get very fat off a diet of mostly rice, fruit, meat, flour, and oil. Go to southern Louisiana and you will see people who do this.

an earlier post on the topic

Link

Being disgusted by fat people using it...The idea underlying all of these objections is one of deserving.

Maybe this is tangential to your overall position, but particularly with fat people and SNAP its not really about deserving IMO. Being fat is very bad for you, it is (indirectly) the leading cause of death in America. It doesn't make sense to pay people to destroy themselves, which we then have to pay to address through Medicaid.

Also it makes people not attractive, and I want Americans to be beautiful.

"But if I weren't working, I'd get the whole thing, and it might be worth it being poor if I didn't have to go to work." No, it wouldn't. You don't have to work, and unless your hobbies are watching daytime broadcast television or hanging around outside a Co-Go's, I believe you'd find yourself bored with the welfare lifestyle rather quickly.

We wouldn't because we're pretty heavily selected for a kind of conscientiousness and drive that precludes checking out for such a small sum. But there is a level at least I'd check out of the work force for and there are definitely people for whom the current level is quite enough to justify it. I have a buddy who's inlaws are like this. They mooched off him for years until, and I'm not kidding, they managed to move to the Netherlands to mooch off better benefits under some loophole. You wouldn't see these people normally because basically by construction they're off the grid, but there really is a class of people that just will only work as much as it takes to feed themselves junk and lay around all day.

I think those who say we have to draw the line somewhere are correct simply from a practical perspective. The resources available are limited by the ability to tax, and in some measure by popular opinion. If people turn against EBT because they’re constantly seeing the cards used to buy either absolute rubbish foods or foods that ordinary people cannot afford, there won’t be any support for the programs. Also given the limited funds available, it makes sense to go for the best nutrition for the buck, not because of morality, but because you only get so much, and it benefits the public if the limited funds they give to EBT users buy healthy foods rather than rubbish foods. If 90% of the funds go towards pop, cookies and chips, that doesn’t benefit the poor people either. Having poor kids be obese because mom buys nothing but crap sets them up for all kinds of health problems later on (and puts the taxpayers money on treating such a thing when it happens).

Im all for reasonable flexibility in most situations. But reasonable limits are absolutely necessary even if we can’t agree on edge cases because of the practical consequences of having no limitations.

Georgia expanded Medicaid with work requirements (which are coming to every state soon) in 2023. So far they've paid Deloitte about $90m to enroll about 10k people, with 2/3 of that cost being administrative. Surprisingly, that's not that terrible compared to Georgia's average of $5k medicaid spending per enrollee, but still quite a bit of waste to cover what should be a healthier population.

I'd prefer food support be produce, grains, flour, sugar, eggs, dairy, meat etc. This isn't about health, I'm giving away everything needed to make cookies, rather I prefer that because, I'd like the recipient to contribute. They're not contributing money, instead they'll contribute time.

Similar thing with housing. I'd love for homesteading to make a return. Give people smaller parcels of land and plans and training and access to materials and let them construct their homes.

I prefer this because, I hope the recipients feel a sense of fullfillment from contributing to their own needs. I want everyone to be more self reliant, rich or poor.

Conservatives know this deep down, but they don't want to admit it because it conflicts with the First Principle.

No, it really doesn't. At best, you've just found that some people aren't good at applying the First Principle. That doesn't mean the First Principle is wrong.

EDIT: In fact, I'd say that it's likely that you're committing the New Atheist error in thinking that if morality is a thing, it must obviously be an obvious thing that any decent (seemingly-similarly-inclined) person can easily just intuit. And thus, when one sees some number of one's co-(anti-)religionists go off the deep end, one concludes that morality didn't real in the first place.

Instead, it's actually somewhat difficult to cultivate and propagate. It doesn't help that the wickedness of man is great on the earth.

It's this last point that really sums it all up, the idea that the system is there to be gamed, largely is gamed, that there exists an advantage in trying to game it, and the self-congratulation that comes along with not gaming it. To make a seasonal reference, it's as if we are Christ tempted in the desert. Except anyone with half a brain knows that nobody on food stamps is getting any advantage from the system. For a single individual, the income limit is about $2600/month. Would you want to live on that in exchange for a benefit that maxes out at $300/month? And other dubious benefits, like reduced rent on a small apartment in a questionable area? And noticed I said maximum benefit; if you make anywhere near the limit you are only getting a fraction of that. I don't know how much but even if you're getting the whole thing it doesn't seem like a great deal. "But if I weren't working, I'd get the whole thing, and it might be worth it being poor if I didn't have to go to work." No, it wouldn't. You don't have to work, and unless your hobbies are watching daytime broadcast television or hanging around outside a Co-Go's, I believe you'd find yourself bored with the welfare lifestyle rather quickly.

This is, essentially, incorrect and why your point ends up being silly.

People on food stamps often have brand new 70k+ SUVs. Are they spending their entire income on said SUV and living in it? No. The system is being gamed with hidden income, usually grey market, but often black. And living in a questionable area? Thats where these people grew up! They and their ancestors are why it is questionable! Its fish in water at worst, often they prefer it and actively object to anyone trying to improve the place their ancestors ethnically cleansed by persons of another race.

The system is being gamed mostly through common law marriages not being claimed. The law doesn’t automatically combine finances if you aren’t married- two working adults, one of which is eligible for food stamps.

That is possibly a small portion of it, but its not really realistic for the "spouses" of these folks to be high earners, they are underclass persons as well. Its not like obese black women on food stamps are shacking up with accountants.

People on food stamps often have brand new 70k+ SUVs.

How often?

The system is being gamed with hidden income, usually grey market, but often black.

13% of Californians receive at least some EBT. Is it really unbelievable that 13% of people actually earned less than the EBT threshold (about $50k for a household of 3)? I could present arguments about income distributions but if you think it's not being reported I don't think you'd find them convincing.

How often?

Enough that I've noticed it as a trend at our local grocery stores.

I also pass a drive-through food bank on my way from my office to the courthouse. Most of the cars in line are SUVs, most newer than my 2016 Carolla.

13% of Californians receive at least some EBT. Is it really unbelievable that 13% of people actually earned less than the EBT threshold (about $50k for a household of 3)? I could present arguments about income distributions but if you think it's not being reported I don't think you'd find them convincing.

Its plausible that they are earning less than that pre-transfers and discounting other scams/grey/black market income, but I can tell you there aren't 13% of Californians driving old station wagons and 90s minivans. Everyone who is "poor" in big states and cities drives a new car, usually a large one. Their teenagers all have illegal dirt bikes/atvs, wear brand new Jordans and carry expensive handbags. The scam economy is observably gigantic.

I can tell you there aren't 13% of Californians driving old station wagons and 90s minivans

Something like 8% of Americans don't have a car period. Another 5% driving clapped out old cars seems pretty believable (source: drive down 101 bro)

Everyone who is "poor" in big states and cities drives a new car, usually a large one.

Really doesn't match my experience in Hispanic neighborhoods. Lots of old trucks, civics, etc. When I sold my last car which was in rough shape it was a Hispanic guy that bought it.

Their teenagers all have illegal dirt bikes/atvs, wear brand new Jordans and carry expensive handbags. The scam economy is observably gigantic.

You know that there's knockoffs easily available for brand name stuff, right?

The idea underlying all of these objections is one of deserving. Certain poor people don't deserve access to government food assistance. Those who do don't deserve to derive any pleasure from eating beyond not starving.

No, the underlying objection is to the lack of need. Conservatives view charity as primarily to cover a lack of ability to provide for yourself.

All three examples given in the prior post show a lack of need:

  • A drug user is spending significant amounts on expensive and non-essential drugs rather than food
  • A obese SNAP recipient is spending and eating significantly more than they need
  • A SNAP recipient spending $50 on goods which provide little to no nutrition is clearly not on a tight food budget

Looking at how the US government describes the SNAP program I think the conservative view has the right of it here:

SNAP provides food benefits to low-income families to supplement their grocery budget so they can afford the nutritious food essential to health and well-being.

The three people described above can afford nutritious groceries with fewer SNAP benefits than they're getting. They further appear to be putting the saved money towards other luxury items. The purpose of SNAP is not helping people purchase luxury goods. If you think it should be I welcome you to donate your own money and ask you don't try to take mine.

A obese SNAP recipient is spending and eating significantly more than they need

This is not necessarily true in the case of "spending". Calories are actually very cheap, because rice exists and is far cheaper than any other foodstuff (it tastes lousy by itself, but a little butter and salt fix that). I eat quite frugally ($60 a week or so AUD, a bit over $40 USD) and I could double my caloric intake (and swell up like a balloon) for maybe an additional 10% on that (and that's with the decent rice, over twice the price of the true cheap stuff!). It's everything else that costs real money (particularly meat), because rice has negligible amounts of anything but calories.

In practice, most people don't eat as frugally as I do, but... yeah, price of a diet and calories of a diet are not closely related. (Also, do remember that while calories expended do go up somewhat as you become obese - because of the extra work hauling yourself around, and the nonzero metabolism of fat tissue - it's not actually that strong an effect; being twice the weight doesn't require twice the calories or even close.)

First, if you increased your food budget to double your needed caloric intake I would still say you're overspending, even if your expenses are relatively low compared to others. It'd just usually not be any business of mine if I'm not paying for it.

As your current food budget is showing, you don't need that much food. Ideally SNAP would be giving exactly as much as is needed to top up the person's budget to the point where they can eat healthily, but targeting a program this accurately is unreasonable.

Second, is this actually how a significant amount of obese people are eating? Getting fat on rice flavored with butter and salt sounds difficult. Nor do I think people would be complaining about an obese person purchasing a cart full of vegetables and rice with SNAP - I think the complaints implicitly include that they saw carts full of typical junk food that is easy to overeat and get fat on.

Getting fat on rice flavored with butter and salt sounds difficult.

I'm not fat, and I'm willing to put that down to genetics & metabolism rather than any personal virtue, but I can absolutely house a very large amount of rice with butter & salt. Or noodles with butter & salt. Or bread, with salted butter so thick you can see tooth marks.

Getting fat on rice flavored with butter and salt sounds difficult.

That's very similar macros to the Cajun dietary staple(rice and gravy is slightly more nutritious, but it's close enough for government work). If you go to southern Louisiana you will see many very fat people whose diet consists largely of rice covered in stock and roux with some meat, which costs approximately as much as rice flavoured with butter and has a very similar nutrient profile.

I'll take your word for it. It's definitely plausible on a calories/dollar metric, I was more surprised to hear you can eat that much rice without running into problems with stomach size. I find it quite filling and it's not a snack food you can nibble on throughout the day.

A Cajun diet is cheap, I spend less per person than food stamps allots. But a big chunk of the food stamps target population can’t cook, may face some additional frictions(lack of consistent kitchen access for the poorest is a real thing), and or just refuses to eat healthy from scratch meals. Yes fixing these problems would be good but nobody really knows how to do that.

Oh, don't I know it. My point was more the (lack of) proportionality; one can eat way more calories for way less money, so someone who's obese isn't necessarily spending more than someone who isn't.

SNAP exists to prevent childhood malnutrition, which if you are an IQ believer is way more expensive down the line than food stamps. It may not be the most cost effective way of achieving this goal, but it does work- there is basically no involuntary childhood malnutrition in the USA nowadays.

But we agree these cases are indeed waste and not proper uses of SNAP, right?

The OP seems to hold the idea that these kinds of spending are perfectly fine and that objections to them are just the conservatives hating specific kinds of poor people. That idea is what I'm disputing - I think it's both out of line with the stated goal of SNAP and also the conservative conception of the purpose of charity.

Before we discuss whether or not this waste is worth it and whether it can be practically reduced we need to be on the same page about whether it is actually waste or desired results of this program.

What cases are you discussing, specifically?

Now, to be clear- I am perfectly willing to admit that there is lots of waste, fraud, and misuse involved in food stamps. I also totally understand being irritated about food stamps recipients eating better than you do. I simply follow-up with the acknowledgement that childhood malnutrition is a problem that causes IQ decline(much more expensive than some Dino nuggets and the like) and that as inefficient as it is, food stamps does address the problem as well as can be done.

You have to make the connection to justify the program. Child malnutrition possibly existing and being a problem does not mean SNAP actually solves the issue. The evidence of drug users selling their cards for cash, obese people (who probably have obese children), and buying junk food is indicative it does not.

Fat children being poor coded is evidence that foodstamps ensures poor kids have enough food.

We would have to take them away to see if that is true. I suspect it is not.

The three examples I listed above:

  • A drug user is spending significant amounts on expensive and non-essential drugs rather than food
  • A obese SNAP recipient is spending and eating significantly more than they need
  • A SNAP recipient spending $50 on goods which provide little to no nutrition is clearly not on a tight food budget

As originally brought up in an earlier comment by @tomottoe and then mentioned by the OP.

Two of those cases are yes, waste/misuse. I would call the obese person on foodstamps a borderline example; I've already said elsewhere in the thread that the benefit amount should be reduced for adults, but it's not like you can(legally)redirect foodstamp spending to something else if it's more than you need.

I think our opinions are reasonably close. My opinion is that the program should be tightened up to curb misuse, but limiting starvation and malnutrition in your country is usually good and a more limited program which does so is worth having.

I'd approach fixing the problems differently, but I'm a lot less concerned about how exactly the problems in SNAP get fixed than about agreement that they are problems.

Your argument doesn’t address the empirical evidence of SNAP fraud, like the half of Somali Americans using it or its high rate in Haredi enclaves. One example, another example. Your argument isn’t for the ideal charity distribution system, but for an unvetted system run by people I will never meet with a terrible track record of punishing fraud. It may even be a corrupt system designed specifically to be used by fraudsters. When I read that millionaires were getting benefits and their only punishment when caught was repaying the benefits back, I lose all faith in authorities administering the system forever, and no longer support the system.

For all the Biblical allusions, I can't find the part where charity has to be earned through moral virtue

In most cases, Jesus required pistis in return for charitable healing, and in those areas without pistis, no healing could be done. We translate this word as “faith”, and take it to mean a vague, confident belief in a set of facts. But its original meaning entailed a whole social dimension of allegiance and faithful loyalty. Jesus healed His allegiant followers, those who had fidelity to His new Kingdom of Loyalists and all that this meant. This is important to keep in mind. When Jesus praised the faith of the centurion, it wasn’t because he was especially certain of a set of facts, but because he said, “I am not worthy to have you come under my roof, but only say the word, and my servant will be healed. For I too am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. And I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes, and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes, and to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does.”.

We also find in the Didache an exhortation to give freely to members and a condemnation against anyone who takes without need. And this is in a pre-selected group of Christians: they have already pledged full allegiance to the cause and there are elders leading them with the ability to excommunicate.

Give to every one that asks you, and ask it not back; for the Father wills that to all should be given of our own blessings (free gifts). Happy is he that gives according to the commandment; for he is guiltless. Woe to him that receives; for if one having need receives, he is guiltless; but he that receives not having need, shall pay the penalty, why he received and for what, and, coming into straits (confinement), he shall be examined concerning the things which he has done, and he shall not escape thence until he pay back the last farthing. But also now concerning this, it has been said, Let your alms sweat in your hands, until you know to whom you should give.

I think this all makes sense from an instinctive basis. We have an instinct to give to those in need, and we have an instinct to hate those who take advantage of us. The ideal system maximizes giving and minimizes fraud. It’s probably not a good idea to have a national system of administering benefits, unless you are willing to investigate and heavily punish fraud. I mean, I highly doubt you would be fine with me just stealing $20 from you, right? Could I justify this theft with “charity does not demand moral virtue?” This is the same thing on a population-wide scale.

Your argument doesn’t address the empirical evidence of SNAP fraud, like the half of Somali Americans using it or its high rate in Haredi enclaves.

Both of those look more like a cultural norm of having more children that you can afford rather than evidence of widespread fraud. Kiryas Jorel has the highest rate of measured child poverty in America, and they really do go without things like one bedroom per child or one SUV per parent that respectable-working-class American parents increasingly consider essential.

I would prefer to give zero cents to a system which takes the money of my working neighbors and hands it to an insular non-assimilating tribe, only because they’ve cleverly arranged a charitable system where the wealthy members provide food and clothing as tax write-off “donations” while the young men refuse to work (and in some cases refuse to learn English in school). “Measured child poverty” is simply a puzzle that they have gamed; you can walk around Woodbury Commons and see crowds of “measurably poor” Haredi women buying expensive clothing.

I don't know how much but even if you're getting the whole thing it doesn't seem like a great deal. "But if I weren't working, I'd get the whole thing, and it might be worth it being poor if I didn't have to go to work." No, it wouldn't. You don't have to work, and unless your hobbies are watching daytime broadcast television or hanging around outside a Co-Go's, I believe you'd find yourself bored with the welfare lifestyle rather quickly.

This might have been a valid argument in 1989 but nowadays many people can do a remarkable amount of entertaining themselves with no additional cost if they have a computer and a broadband. Anyone academically inclined with an interest like ancient philosophy that doesn't have commercial utility can do a lot of reading and writing with just a small apartment and an internet connection.

As I understand it, the Conservative position is something like that there are still jobs that kind of suck. Electricians have been going out in 50mph winds, working on the power poles lately. There are people repairing roofs in Phoenix in the summer. There are people collecting garbage on single lane dirt driveways, where they have to back all the way down the driveway to get to the garbage bins. There are people working in the South Dakota oil fields, and on Alaskan fishing boats. They have to both get paid quite a lot, and also get negative blowback from not working. There's a whole essential layer of work like that. I knew a man who was a sewage diver, and was married with kids.

A big part of the illegal immigration "jobs Americans won't do" narrative is about how high the floor for labor is, due to forbidding low labor and poor person lifestyles, while also providing more benefits.

Of course, I say this, but don't necessarily want to do those jobs as currently constituted (and couldn't physically do most of them), and am strongly in favor of further automation to make them less difficult.

I will briefly touch on the even more ridiculous idea that the government should just provide Hello Fresh or MREs, if only because it leads nicely into my next point. These items cost around $10/meal.

I would like to call out that I explicitly rejected providing Hello Fresh in my proposal, but rather a service that is similar in operation to Hello Fresh but explicitly more economical - spaghetti without meat, etc.

It's not so much that poor people aren't deserving of treats, or that they need to fix their obesity before getting the government dole. It's that the food someone eats directly contributes to their obesity and health issues, which we then have to pay for as well. There is a lot of crossover between people on Medicaid and SNAP.

I think it's not compassionate at all to just throw people to the wilderness without teaching them how to cook healthy food, what healthy food looks like from the store, what they should buy, etc. We used to teach this in High School, but we no longer do outside of a half semester health/gym class.

It's not compassionate to sit by as they eat their way to poor health and all the suffering that corresponds to that.

At the end of the line, it's not compassionate to the tax payer to spend their money on wrecking the health of the poor, and then pay to try to treat the symptoms of their metabolic disease. It's like a version of this meme.

I think it accurate to say that my positions on this does stem from the Conservative Principle that, "there exists an enduring moral order. That order is made for man, and man is made for it: human nature is a constant, and moral truths are permanent."

Largely, it is within human nature to get fat and sick when eating potato chips and soda. We may be able to come up with medicines to combat this, but the underlying human nature is enduring and constant. It is morally true that it is an injustice to make someone dig a hole and then fill it in. Similarly it is an enduring truth that it is immoral to make someone pay to make someone get sick, and then make them pay to extend their life in an unhealthy state.

Notably, I'm not even putting moral judgement on the people on SNAP here. I don't blame them for not having been taught these skills, I'm not trying to punish them for their flaws, I'm just trying to imagine a way to help them that helps more than hurts.

To say that poorer people have worse diets than wealthier people, and that people on SNAP have the worst diets of all is trivially true, but the USDA studies these things, and the difference isn't that stark. They categorize consumption into different categories, some positive and some negative, and score each category, generating a total score where 100 is ideal. Households earning 350% or more of the poverty line have an average score of 60. Households earning 115% or lower have a score of 57. Households in between have a score of 57. SNAP households have a score of 55. Keeping that in mind, if you look at the Thrifty Food Plan guidelines you'll see that they recognize 15 different age-sex categories with different nutritional requirements for each, which means that your spaghetti would need a dozen or so different versions to avoid, say, allotting a full portion to a small child. And then you combine that giving each person in a household a different meal to be cooked isn't efficient, so you'd have to synchronize and package them to be cooked all at once, and now you get into all the possible permutations you'd need to accommodate every household represented, and that's before you account for vegetarian, kosher, gluten free, peanut allergy, sesame allergy... you get the idea. Complicating this even further is the fact that while the maximum monthly benefit is around $10/person/day the average is more like $6/person/day, which means that a typical SNAP household is still buying a significant amount of food with their own money, at which point the entire system collapses anyway.

I'm not sure how much you could really expect the scores to creep up? How much would they have to go up to justify this level of complexity? 10 points? 20 points? Even with all perfect hundreds you're still only talking about 10% or so of the population. If the medical risks are so high should we impose similar dietary requirements on Medicare recipients (i.e. almost everyone over 65)? Would you be okay if your employer told you that to maintain your health insurance you had to buy a meal kit subscription with your own money on the theory that if you had to pay for it anyway it you'd eat those meals and not junk, saving the insurance company money? What you're describing massively overcomplicates the system in order to chase a dubious benefit. That's why I didn't bring health up in my initial post—it's not as much of a factor as people think it is.

And then you combine that giving each person in a household a different meal to be cooked isn't efficient, so you'd have to synchronize and package them to be cooked all at once, and now you get into all the possible permutations you'd need to accommodate every household represented, and that's before you account for vegetarian, kosher, gluten free, peanut allergy, sesame allergy... you get the idea. Complicating this even further is the fact that while the maximum monthly benefit is around $10/person/day the average is more like $6/person/day, which means that a typical SNAP household is still buying a significant amount of food with their own money, at which point the entire system collapses anyway.

I acknowledge the complexity, which is why I recommended a team of chefs and nutritionists to come together with suitable options that the individual can select from every week. Given the sheer number of people on food assistance, there would be plenty of room for economy of scale, even with such variety.

Would you be okay if your employer told you that to maintain your health insurance you had to buy a meal kit subscription with your own money on the theory that if you had to pay for it anyway it you'd eat those meals and not junk, saving the insurance company money?

But see, that would be my own money. It would mean my employer is offering worse benefits, and if I wanted to I could switch jobs to find better benefits. Maybe I'd find the meal kits more convenient, it would be worth trying out for a couple weeks while I job hunted if they were affordable.

If it is for free? Hell yeah I'd sign up. Maybe I would sometimes supplement and buy more things with my own money.

The disconnect is that SNAP isn't some cosmic law of nature. It's charity, and we can sometimes decide if another form of charity is better. There is a user above me who says they loved stuff like this as a poor child, because it meant actual food in the house.

I would like to call out that I explicitly rejected providing Hello Fresh in my proposal

Piggybacking to say: I said issue MREs because we were talking about a post-scarcity, UBI situation where AI and robots are doing all the work. What does "this meal costs $21 to make" even mean in that situation? What the hell is a dollar if all commerce has stopped?

If we're truly in a post-scarcity situation then why are we eating MREs? That seems like a dystopian hellscape.

Your post seems to be a lot of sneering, but is very light on facts.

Except anyone with half a brain knows that nobody on food stamps is getting any advantage from the system. For a single individual, the income limit is about $2600/month. Would you want to live on that in exchange for a benefit that maxes out at $300/month? And other dubious benefits, like reduced rent on a small apartment in a questionable area?

But that's the thing: my choice is earn techbro wage$ and be productive, or go on welfare and have a lot less.

The people being non-virtuous are folks whose choice is earning an amount of money comparable to what they get from welfare, or just being lazy and getting the same amount for doing nothing. Slightly dated numbers, but you can see here that lots of people whose market income is low are gaining advantage by being lazy: https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/11-15-2012-MarginalTaxRates.pdf

The market value of being lazy goes up quite a bit in many blue areas. For example a "poor" person who gets to live in a NYC apartment is getting at least $62k/year in rent subsidies alone.

That's why most of these folks make the deliberate choice to not work, or even look for work, for even 26 weeks/year. https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/working-poor/2021/

Even the disabled don't get a pass anymore because we all know that they could probably work if they wanted to and they're just faking it to get their free Dr. Pepper and avoid work

I'm confused. You seem to be sneering at this claim, but you aren't explicitly saying it's false. It's well known to be true that SSDI is mostly just another welfare program, acknowledged by academics and left wing news sources alike:

https://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/

https://www.bostonfed.org/-/media/Documents/economic/conf/great-recovery-2016/Alan-B-Krueger.pdf

"But if I weren't working, I'd get the whole thing, and it might be worth it being poor if I didn't have to go to work." No, it wouldn't. You don't have to work, and unless your hobbies are watching daytime broadcast television or hanging around outside a Co-Go's, I believe you'd find yourself bored with the welfare lifestyle rather quickly.

It's true that my personality aligns well with many conservative principles. I get joy from work - both techbro stuff and low paid stuff like construction - and I don't get much joy from vices like crime, drug use or gluttony. You are correct that I probably would not enjoy the life of a wrecker (to use the socialist term) or welfare queen (to use the conservative term).

Lets try to distinguish two separate claims:

  • Some people enjoy vices more than others and these folks have a harder time behaving virtuously. A lot of folks who enjoy vice become poor lazy moochers, while the conservatives who criticize them are less likely to do so.
  • The poor aren't a bunch of lazy moochers.

Which of these are you claiming?

In any case I can square the circle pretty easily with an analogy you'll probably understand. I don't have any desire to rape children. It's very easy for me not to become a pedophile - literally no effort required. Some folks don't have it so easy - they want to rape children just as much as I want to consensually bang hot asian gym girls. I feel sorry for the desires that those folks seem to be innately stuck with. I still think society should produce incentives that steer them away from raping children.

Your priorities seem really whack. Why limit your banging to hot Asian gym girls? Subtract Asian and gym. Don’t discriminate against hot girls!

No? While I agree that he used a lot of words, this is the motte, and there was plenty of content for those words. Conservatives think that there is a transcendent moral order and are more upset at food stamps mostly benefit those who violate it than any of its incidental effects.

Now I would disagree with him that the motte is a hub of classical conservatism- lots of right libertarians, lots of nrx adjacent, lots of rationalists who are above all deeply frustrated with democrat party academese lunacy more than with GOP proleslop populism. But it was a coherent point about food stamps.

I wouldn’t describe myself as a conservative per se, nor did I take part in the recent brutal framemogging of junkfoodgooning EBT-maxxers kerfuffle regarding food stamps ‘round these parts, but allow me to steelman a little:

The idea underlying all of these objections is one of deserving. Certain poor people don't deserve access to government food assistance.

yes_chad.jpg

Government policy should encourage the kind of behavior that will eventually lead people to reasonable self-reliance. We should certainly not be subsidizing the undeserving poor, that is to say, those who could work but just don’t want to. The more luxurious the benefits of welfare, the less incentive there is for its recipients to wean themselves off the dole and become productive, independent adults.

For all the Biblical allusions, I can't find the part where charity has to be earned through moral virtue.

I can’t tell if you’re being serious here, and nor am I a Christian myself, but I would wager that a conservative Christian would rebut your point by distinguishing between 3 very different things: (1) God’s unconditional grace and love for mankind, (2) freely-given (human) charity, and (3) taxpayer-funded welfare. Perhaps God’s grace permits you to enter the Kingdom of Heaven regardless of your earthly transgressions, but nowhere does Scripture say that there will be no temporal consequences for sin and vice.

We should certainly not be subsidizing the undeserving poor, that is to say, those who could work but just don’t want to.

Is thé welfare population mostly those people? IIRC it’s mostly thé working poor.

The question of whether poor person bad behavior is encouraged by the welfare system actually mostly centers around the extent to which welfare eligibility rules drive down the marriage rate among the poor. We should probably fix that, but the fix doesn’t look like ‘just cut welfare spending’.

The "working poor" are mostly a myth. The vast majority of poor people don't work and aren't looking for work.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/working-poor/2021/

This statement seems somewhat misleading.

  • Your article states that, in year 2021, 38 million people lived below the official poverty line, and only 6.4 million (17 percent) of those were "working poor" (i. e., had spent at least 27 weeks either working or looking for work), leaving 83 percent of the poor as nonworking.

  • However, that denominator of 38 million includes children and retirees. According to the original Census dataset, the better denominator of people below the official poverty line and between ages 18 and 64 is 21 million people, leading to a "working poor" proportion of 30 percent. This new proportion of 70 percent nonworkers among poor people who are neither children nor retirees still possibly counts as a "vast majority", but it isn't quite as high as the original proportion.

Government policy should encourage the kind of behavior that will eventually lead people to reasonable self-reliance.

This just isn't reasonable for a whole lot of people on benefits. They're poor, and therefore far more likely to also be rather stupid and not able to contribute as much no matter how much you want to "lead" them to anything.

I have a great uncle with a developmental disability who no matter how much we try to explain can't understand basic elementary school level concepts about how the seasons work or how to read beyond the alphabet. He could do some physical labor back when the demand for simple tasks was more common and he was younger, but now he's basically useless and lives off his wife's survivor benefits after she died and my parents watch him.

The average poor person isn't nearly as dumb as he is, but they are still pretty damn dumb. Just like the leftist mistake over thinking that corporations are "subsidized" by benefits to workers, the idea that benefits are preventing people en masse from getting better assumes that they aren't already demanding max value for what they have to offer. Now they're dumb, so they might not be that great at the negotiating process but the amount left you can wean out of them just isn't much. (Of course it's also not just stupid, physical disabilities and other forms of mental impairments can cause this too but stupid is the main reason.). The only thing that really blocks improvement here is welfare cliffs and poor scaling down of the benefits, otherwise there's just no reason for a person to not be maximizing their pay already.

Thus we're left with the choice to not care and let them live in squalor or take pity on them being born with less functional brains and/or bodies and share with them a little. Maybe someday we'll be able to fix stupid the same way we're increasingly fixing other issues, but until then "they'll get better" isn't happening.

Cake and Pepperidge Farm brand bread products are luxuries you have to earn.

I mean…obviously yes? I don’t even buy store bought cake or Pepperidge Farm bread, and I’m not on the dole. Why should my tax dollars pay for your luxuries? Nobody has a moral right to cookies!

For all the Biblical allusions, I can't find the part where charity has to be earned through moral virtue.

Can't pass up a lob like that, 2nd Thessalonians 2:10: "If a man does not work, neither should he eat."

That was written in a very different time, when food was a lot less abundant, and there was always room for more people to contribute to its production even if they were what economists call 'unskilled'.

When Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes to feed the five thousand, he didn't make any attempt to deny them to 'men who did not work'. It took nearly twenty centuries, but we have multiplied our loaves and fishes, and much else besides, to where we can feed not five thousand, but eight billion. (Is this one of the "greater things than these" alluded to in John 14:12?)

Scarcity cannot be eliminated, in this world.

Paul was much more based than many modern Christians (Protestants) are prepared to accept. They'd rather reject his teachings or insist they only ever applied to the primary audience of the letters. Also from 1 Timothy when speaking about caring for widows:

But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.

Note that there's room in the above for accepting charity on behalf of your family. Don't be proud and all that. But if you have a family member on food stamps, and you're not, you're a piece of shit and I don't care what you think your taxes have to do with it.

What if your family member on food stamps is deliberately suppressing their earning potential in order to do things they consider more fun than use the lucrative degree they have and generally have a more easygoing and enjoyable lifestyle than you (and would even without food stamps)? I have a family member like this, and watching them abuse the system has made me way less supportive of food stamps than I used to be. I’m still probably in favor, but only just barely.

I guess I should know better than to speak in such general terms with this audience. If I'm assuming good faith on the part of the recipient, I think you should help. If not, he should be ashamed.

Even without abuse I don't understand how one could be in favor of food stamps. If I hated mankind and wanted to hollow out all local social support structures in one fell swoop, I would implement a highly centralized system of handouts and then run it badly.

This situation is definitely not what I would call good faith.

A lot of Paul's letters need to be read in the context of the audience he was writing to, and as far as I can tell, it seems as though some of Paul's early audiences literally believed the world was about to end, and therefore had concluded some combination of 1) ordinary morality does not apply any more, and 2) we don't need to plan or work for the future. There is no point to either if the world is about to end.

Paul, at least in his early letters, probably believes that the world is about to end as well. (cf. 1 Cor 7:26, "in view of the impending crisis".) However, he spends a long time trying to shut down the people who have concluded that therefore nothing matters and they can do what they like. 1 Cor 6:12-20 and 1 Cor 10:23-33 seem to be arguing with the hedonists, who think that because the Law has ceased to apply they can do anything they like. 2 Thess 3:6-15 seems to be arguing with the layabouts - people who sponged off the community's charity, probably thinking that there is no reason to lay foundations for a future that will never arrive. We can also see that part of the context is Paul's defense of his own ministry - he himself lived off charity, as a wandering teacher hosted by different communities of believers, and it sounds as if some might have accused Paul himself of taking advantage of his hosts. So in 3:7 he argues that he himself was not idle, and that he would never countenance idleness.

Compare also the Didache, which requires, in chapters 12 and 13, that groups of believers offcer charity and assistance to other believers who come to stay with them. But it puts some limitations on this:

But receive everyone who comes in the name of the Lord, and prove and know him afterward; for you shall have understanding right and left. If he who comes is a wayfarer, assist him as far as you are able; but he shall not remain with you more than two or three days, if need be. But if he wants to stay with you, and is an artisan, let him work and eat. But if he has no trade, according to your understanding, see to it that, as a Christian, he shall not live with you idle. But if he wills not to do, he is a Christ-monger. Watch that you keep away from such.

You must welcome and assist believers for a few days, but only a few days, lest they take advantage of you. Believers who want to stay longer must work to support themselves and the community.

I think this is all pretty common sense, as an attempt to balance a strong imperative towards charity and hospitality along with a desire to not be taken advantage of.

If we want to draw a lesson from that for today's politics, I think the principles are obvious and hard to argue with. Provide some charity and assistance for the needy. Require everybody to work as far as they are reasonably able. Do not let yourself be taken advantage of by those who seek to live in idleness.

It’s worth noting that the labor market for the urban poor in the Roman Empire was just appallingly bad, and it’s not an implausible story that Christianity spread in part because believers were able to better network getting each other jobs and buffer periods of unemployment.

If you’ve ever belonged to a church, that pattern looks familiar.

3:10, not 2:10.

I will briefly touch on the even more ridiculous idea that the government should just provide Hello Fresh or MREs, if only because it leads nicely into my next point. These items cost around $10/meal.

We're not talking about the gucci mres given to our warfighters that include coffee, skittles, and pizza. We're talking about something like the humanitarian daily ration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanitarian_daily_ration

A day's worth of food in a pouch for less than $5, ready to eat. Redirect those food drops away from africa and send them straight to baltimore.

We're not talking about the gucci mres given to our warfighters that include coffee, skittles, and pizza

I remember SteveMRE opening an Italian one that came with Cognac.

I have a great many objections to the way that you've framed this presentation, but this in particular really stood out to me:

I bring this up last because it really goes to the heart of conservatism and the first principle. The idea underlying all of these objections is one of deserving. Certain poor people don't deserve access to government food assistance.

Why do you take "government food assistance" for granted, here? Any conservative worthy of the name is going to hold that no poor people "deserve" government food assistance. For one thing, "government food assistance" is just a fancy way of saying "confiscating some people's property for the benefit of other people." Indolent people do not deserve food, even if it is morally praiseworthy to provide them with some.

Some people warrant charity, particularly when they have contributed, do contribute, or can reasonably be expected to contribute to society. But to insist upon the charity of others is quite morally objectionable; the only appropriate response is gratitude. The entitlement that many indolent people clearly feel toward my labor is absolutely appalling, quite regardless of whether they are afforded a life of luxury or relative privation. The strangeness that you are tracking in your post is not a problem with conservatism, it is a problem with conservatives trying to meet you halfway. They recognize that for various systemic reasons it would probably be a bad idea to just abolish food assistance entirely, so they fuss over details (like donuts) in vague and dissatisfying compromise. Then, having been given an inch, you reach for the mile.

The economics of food and government subsidies is--I'm sure you well know--complex. Farm subsidies here, food subsidies there, "cui bono" becomes an impossible labyrinth of special interests, not all of them neatly aligned to the red/blue grid. But another principle of conservatism is that you can't just decide to burn the system to the ground and start over. You must live in the real world, not the world of splendid ideas. So you try to at least put reasonable limits on the ways in which the government steals from the productive to benefit (or at least mollify) the unproductive.

No conservative criticizes food stamps on the one hand and speaks of an obligation to help the poor on the other.

I infer from this that you have surprisingly little life experience with conservatives. I haven't seen the inside of a church in a goodly while, but as a child I was treated to many sermons on both the evils of government assistance, and the obligation to help the poor. I understand that Trumpism has introduced a lot of confusion into political discourse on the right (as well as the left), but here you just seem to be indulging a maximally uncharitable stereotype of your outgroup.

Why do you take "government food assistance" for granted, here?

It's pretty Lindy. Ancient Rome rather notoriously relied on poor relief ("Bread and Circuses") to maintain social stability. In medieval England, poor relief was the responsibility of the Church, which was effectively part of the government and used both spiritual coercion ("pay your tithe or go to hell" is coercive to people who actually believe in hell) and temporal coercion ("pay your tithe or we can legally seize your land") to collect revenue. This system broke down after Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, and was replaced in 1601 with a national Poor Law based on elected local government with the ability to collect revenue coercively after it became clear that the practical consequences of not having a functioning system of poor relief were unacceptable.

The 1601 Poor Law was in force in colonial America, and replaced by broadly similar poor relief schemes (legislated at state level and implemented locally) after independence.

The balance between poor relief in the form of support for the deserving poor and poor relief in the form of coercive institutions to punish the workshy (while feeding and housing them) shifts over the following centuries in broadly similar ways in the UK and the US, with the same issues cropping up, including the eternal truth that people who are too old and/or infirm for coercing them into work to be worthwhile are the largest group of paupers, and widows/orphans/babymamas/bastards are the second largest, and the unfortunate truth that trying to "improve" the workshy costs more than just giving them a dole, while almost always failing.

In the US, the New Deal federalises the problem of the elderly poor and LBJ's Fair Deal federalises the problem of families with children but no male earner. But neither created a system of poor relief where none previously existed.

The cost of poor relief has increased a lot faster than the economy in the last century or so. The main reason is that we decided that aged paupers should be able to enjoy a middle-class lifestyle.

I've also read those principles when they were linked, and also immediately thought: I'm so, so not a conservative. I disagree with almost everything in that list. Not particularly surprising though, since I'm not religious, either.

But that's unfortunately where my agreement ends. Incidentally, your post sums up many things I find extremely irritating about liberals quite well, and why I currently tend to side more with conservatives.

It's this last point that really sums it all up, the idea that the system is there to be gamed, largely is gamed, that there exists an advantage in trying to game it, and the self-congratulation that comes along with not gaming it. To make a seasonal reference, it's as if we are Christ tempted in the desert. Except anyone with half a brain knows that nobody on food stamps is getting any advantage from the system. For a single individual, the income limit is about $2600/month.

Yeah, duh, all systems are being gamed. That's not a moral stance, that's just basic reality. There is about an infinite number of ways to have access to more money than that theoretic limit:

  • work black (by far the most common)
  • have a boyfriend earn more money
  • Have rich parents who give you a certain allowance for your basic needs, except you want to maximize the amount you can spend on frivolities instead

And so on. For a simple example from my own life: We've had neighbours - a family with two kids - upstairs back when I was a student. The guy was a construction worker and very nice, the wife was permanently unemployed from even before they had kids. But somehow, they were regularly not in their place for weeks on end, and they were the kind of white trash that certainly isn't living a jet-set life. So what was the reason? Pretty simple: The flat which we thought was theirs was actually officially only his. She pretended to be a single mom with two kids and got all the government benefits associated with that, among them a nice little house in the suburbs. And then they got all the money from his work on top, while paying very little for the cheap flat.

The reality in most western countries is that if you earn anything like the median wage legally, you'd be better off switching to gaming the system. Yes, for the rich and upper middle class it might not seem worth it, but the working poor and lower middle class not only know this, they usually personally have people around them already doing this. And yes, the only thing holding them back is a combination of self-respect and peer pressure. They tell you this, and instead you mock and denigrate them.

The most common one, both here and in popular discussion, is the desire to prohibit purchases of certain items, which some states have already begun doing. As a said in an earlier post on the topic, these items generally fall into three categories:

There is also this weird insistence to pretend that not wanting government money being spent on something is the same as prohibiting something. No, they can just pay for it with their own money! I've had this discussion with my wife when she was younger about a clearly drunk beggar. No, I don't want to give him money; He clearly already could have bought something for himself instead of getting drunk. With welfare I can't just opt out, so yeah, I want it to be limited to important stuff. That doesn't mean I want alcohol banned altogether, since not only do I expect most people to be capable of enjoying it in appropriate quantities, they may even get drunk if they want to because it's their fucking money. That's basic common sense.

Worse, there really are a lot of people who do actually want to prohibit thing. They're called "liberals":

Now, I don't have a problem with prohibiting pop and candy as some states have begun doing, at least not in and of themselves.

Or meat, or cars, or alcohol, or any number of things. For many a liberal, there are only two states: Banned or mandatory support.

Even the disabled don't get a pass anymore because we all know that they could probably work if they wanted to and they're just faking it to get their free Dr. Pepper and avoid work, which we all know they'd do if they were virtuous.

Again, yes. As a teen, I really got along great with my cousin's husband, who was ca 30 or so at the time, and I was gaming with him in the same clan regularly. Inter-personally, he's nice guy. But it doesn't change the fact that he claimed benefits for some undefined back issues that make it impossible for him to continue to do the warehouse work he did before. Even if that was true - and frankly, I don't think so - he could have certainly done a regular desktop office job instead of gaming 10 hours+ all day. He's sitting in front of a screen either way. At least once they had kids, he started helping out with house / child chores. Of course not because of virtuousness, but because my cousin got sick of his shit bc she was a full-time nurse.

You don't have to work, and unless your hobbies are watching daytime broadcast television or hanging around outside a Co-Go's, I believe you'd find yourself bored with the welfare lifestyle rather quickly.

You can believe whatever you want, 90% of young guys would certainly prefer gaming all day over working, and young women are only a little bit better. In most cases, the primary reason they don't is their parents giving them shit. If their parents are already gaming the system, their kids will usually do so as well.

Conservatives know this deep down, but they don't want to admit it because it conflicts with the First Principle. If there is an absolute, unchanging moral framework, then we can judge people based upon it. And to compound things even further, they are self-arbiters of this framework. They know what it is inherently, and if anyone tells them otherwise, they're just liberals trying to infect the culture. It makes about as much sense as someone confidently saying that frozen burritos are a luxury item that should only be available to the deserving. Because when it comes to any moral obligation on the part of ourselves, there is silence. No conservative criticizes food stamps on the one hand and speaks of an obligation to help the poor on the other. For all the Biblical allusions, I can't find the part where charity has to be earned through moral virtue. The moralism seems to be confused, solipsistic, incoherent. For his part, Russell Kirk was at least a generous man who was known to help strangers in ways that few of us ever will. But I'm not sure that he was really a conservative.

As a matter of fact, most research on the topic concludes that conservatives give more to charity than liberals despite earning less. When I was still forced to go to church, helping the poor and needy was the #1 matter being preached. But helping and indulging their worst vices are not only different, they're opposites. Kirk was pretty average in this way.

At the end of the day, I can't help but notice that most liberals belong into two camps: So sheltered that they basically don't get into contact with dysfunctional people, and the actually dysfunctional. The former can't fathom why people might game the system because they already have it so nice without doing so, and the latter can't fathom not gaming the system. Others are stuck in-between, trying desperately to keep the system working somehow.

The kind of behavior you're describing isn't mere gaming the system, which implies taking advantage of the program's structure in ways that are unintended but technically allowed in order to maximize benefits. What you describe is outright fraud. Not reporting income is the most basic kind, though I have no idea how common it is in relative terms. In my personal anecdotal experience, "We're not going to get married because she gets benefits she'll lose if my income is included" is more common, but it's a mistake born more from a misunderstanding of how things work and doesn't work as often as people think it does because eligibility is determined by household income irrespective of whether you're married. A not too bright and not too close friend of mine got burned by this, or, more accurately, his girlfriend did. She had a kid from a prior relationship and they were going to get married but didn't for that reason. He works as a bus driver, I don't know what she does, if anything, but I know of a few low-level jobs. Anyway, she was living in subsidized housing and he was living with his parents and they ended up renting a house together. When she put down the change of address they asked what the rent was and if she was paying for it and when she told them the situation they explained to her that since he was no mere roommate buying his own food and keeping separate house his income would have to be included in the calculation. He works as a school bus driver so their income was still low enough to qualify, but there was a definite reduction in the benefit amount. Parents giving their kids allowances is unearned income that needs to be reported.

The neighbor you described was committing fraud, plain and simple. That isn't a problem with the system, because the system doesn't allow it. He was keeping his own apartment because he had to have a separate residence on paper. Keep that in mind, maintaining the fraud required paying for an apartment he didn't need, and on top of that moving his family between two locations to keep the government from catching on. If you're an unmarried couple with kids, both incomes are going to count if the parents are living together. The guy was taking deliberate steps to trick the government. Gaming the system would be if there were a hard line where his income only counted if they were married and they deliberately weren't getting married and the government knew this but there wasn't anything they could do about it because it was within the rules. Changing the rules doesn't prevent fraud because the new rules can be ignored as easily as the old ones.

As a matter of fact, most research on the topic concludes that conservatives give more to charity than liberals despite earning less.

I've seen conservatives trot out this statistic a lot, but there are two caveats. The first is that while it's broadly true at a national level, the effect disappears at the local level when adjusted for overall political leaning—liberals in red counties donate as much as conservatives, and conservatives in blue counties donate as much as liberals. The effect could simply be that since red areas generally have lower tax rates, people living there simply have more to donate regardless of political affiliation, and nationwide it makes it look like conservatives are more generous. The more important caveat is that none of these studies ask the nature of the charitable giving. Donating the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and Trout Unlimited both count as charitable donations, but neither do much to help the poor. Complicating this even further is the guys whose name I can't recall who popularized this idea (he was one of those proponents of Compassionate Conservatism) 20 years ago based his research on data that differentiated religious giving from non-religious giving, and included religious giving in his calculation.

fraud

And what are you gonna do about it? Not you, personally, of course, but the system. The answer, in my experience, is: Nothing. On paper, they look too much like what they claim to be, and even if the state would start to do personal visits to random benefit-receivers, their legal options are so limited that it's trivial to hide the presence of the guy. Not that I would be in favour of the state doing that to begin with. I don't think the moving around had anything to do with the government, they just used the apartment for storage or the like. In fact they were very lazy about it in a way that made it rather clear they didn't fear them catching on at all; When we had a water leak in the apartment above them and they were repeatedly notified by phone that they have to be present so a handicraftsman can enter, they just ... didn't, up until the moment they were threatened that they have to pay for damages. It was very, very clear to everyone including the landlord that he didn't really live there. But as long as the flat gets paid they just don't give a shit, especially not in these places. We actually had several other people in this building who clearly weren't living in their apartments, at least not all the time, for various reasons. This included me & and my wife; For almost three years, I was officially living in the UK, my wife officially in Germany, but in reality we spent almost half/half in each, mostly together. It's just completely infeasible to investigate anyone renting a cheap small flat, there's way too much of it.

A system isn't measured by what words are on pieces of papers, but by what it does (note: this is distinct from saying that this is outright it's purpose; Of course systems can just simply be badly designed. Though if flaws don't get fixed even after being repeatedly pointed out, it's reasonable to conclude that at least some people in fact like those flaws and don't want them to get fixed). In my experience, everyone thinks this way once it's about a topic they care about; If, say, discrimination against blacks was illegal on paper but there are no mechanisms to suss it out and nothing short of a confession is considered sufficient evidence in court, and anti-black discrimination was as a result still widely practiced with impunity as long as they aren't so stupid as to openly admit it, I'd be pretty sure you'd consider such a system racist, and defending the system with "well but that's illegal so the system is actually perfectly fine" is at best extremely naive, at worst (and, honestly, more realistically) a bad-faith defense. So there imo isn't a hard separation between fraud and gaming the system here at all.

A system is good if the rules as-written are as close as possible to the rules as-practiced, for legibility reason, and if the incentive gradient that is created as a result of the rules as-practiced are reasonably aligned with the intentions of the rulemakers and the population as a whole when the rule was crafted. The second part especially means that the benefits from fraud/gaming the system need to outstrip its cost, otherwise the money is just going to go somewhere else entirely. This is where, in my experience, left-wing systems tend to dramatically fail in a reliable fashion. It's always "nobody is going to game the system", then it's "well that's fraud so it doesn't count" and then finally "why are we deep in the red and everyone still complains that it's not enough".

You can certainly find some conservatives somewhere who really are all about punishing the wicked poor, but this is where limiting benefits to basic necessities is showing its value. Someone in genuine need is still going to be very happy about a can of rice, but it's not worth playing stupid accounting games for. A small apartment is great if otherwise you're literally homeless, but ditto. And so on. To a first approximation with maximal uncharity, that might sound like wanting to punish them, but it's simply a very effective safeguard against being taken advantage of. Which is why conservative tend to have it as an instinctive reaction.

I'm actually broadly against investigations unless it's about a lot of money, since in the west the combination of high legal requirements and high cost of man-hours means that it can happen extremely fast that the cost of the investigation outstrips any plausible amount that could have been defrauded. It's best for fraud to just not be worth it, investigating the most egregious cases, and just eating the (small, in a well-designed system) difference.

Charity for religion

I know this objection, but the same goes for a lot of left-wing charity being extremely politically charged; Imo politics is pretty isomorphic to religion in general. Once you look into the details, one might even conclude the opposite: Lots of nominally religious charities have not only overwhelmingly secular staff nowadays, but in particular very far left staff, and re-direct the money from the conservatives to their own pet causes instead.

based his research on data that differentiated religious giving from non-religious giving, and included religious giving in his calculation.

Does religious giving change the calculus much? The salvation army is technically a church. Planned parenthood is technically a charity but seems to do very little actual charity and lots of advocacy. I'd suspect that the 'only nonreligious charities should count as charitable giving' thing is mostly to make liberals look good; plenty of churches have charitable arms, and plenty of liberal charities don't do very much actual helping the poor. It probably evens out in the wash.

I think it changes the calculus because most people who attend church regularly make regular donations in a way that doesn't exist for most charities. The Salvation Army is religious, but donating $500 to them isn't quite the same as putting $50/week into your parish's collection plate.

Well yes, it skews up the percentage of income religious people donate. I'm not convinced it changes the calculus of what percent of donations are actually used for charity.

"Actually religious people aren't generous if you don't count religious giving" isn't really a very convincing line.

Your post reminds me of Bastiat. Hr said something akin to the statist claim that we (classical liberals) oppose food when we oppose the government paying for food or education when we oppose the government paying for education.

What they probably have in mind is government programs where agricultural surplus products were processed into shelf-stable products like powdered eggs and distributed to low-income people.

As somebody who grew up poor, those programs were awesome, and I'd like to see them expanded.

One of the biggest problems with food stamps back in the day was that you could just... sell them. When we stayed in one place long enough to get benefits, my mother would barter food stamps for booze or other ineligible goods. I, on the other hand, would get saltines and mustard for dinner, if we had the money for it. Sometimes I'd just get a big glass of water. The EBT card system probably makes that harder, but not so hard that it doesn't happen.

On the other hand, programs like government cheese were fantastic if you were a hungry kid. It wasn't fungible in the same way food stamps were, so it usually ended up sitting in a big box in the fridge and you could just... eat it if you were hungry. The real, undeniable, fundamental foodness of it acted as an extra guardrail against abuse in a way that is probably impossible with financial assistance

I don't know if it's maximally efficient in the purely utilitarian, ruthless economic way that a lot of people here prefer, but as a hungry kid having real food in the apartment was hard to beat.

I don't know if it's maximally efficient in the purely utilitarian, ruthless economic way that a lot of people here prefer, but as a hungry kid having real food in the apartment was hard to beat.

I believe in utilitarianism with a broad and robust utility function that encompasses "things we care about" in an almost tautological way. Take "things we care about", convert them into numbers, and then do math on them and trade-off against each other. In contrast to utility that only cares about legible things like GDP, real utilitarianism should recognize that real utility is happening inside people's brains, and things like GDP act only as imperfect proxies attempting to unreliably measure the thing we actually care about.

Which is to say, food which is eaten IS more efficient in the purely utilitarian, ruthless economic way than food stamps that are traded for booze. Because the food which is eaten is value actually attained, while alcoholics getting drunk is negative value. Although you have multiply it out at scale and see how often this happens in comparison to cheese rotting and getting thrown out because it went to someone who hates cheese and wanted to eat cucumber salad. Or they like cheese but they got three times as much as they needed and had nothing to eat alongside it. Inflexibly giving specific things definitely provides a lower ceiling for non-abusers than something like EBT. But it has a higher floor as well. So its average efficiency across the population depends on statistical questions like "what is the rate of abuse vs good faith" as well as how bad in magnitude are these floor and ceiling effects.

saltines and mustard for dinner

There's gotta be a connection between a mama who makes those kinds of decisions and needing food stamps in the first place. That's enough to throw the whole program in the bin and go back to local neighborhood charity by people who can verify it's being put to good use.

Who will keep track of the budget, or at very least the inflows and outflows of charity funds, such that the neighborhood charity isn't unable to provide funds to people in need as they've run out of donations for the month?

Charity organizations normally have treasurers and are required to publish annual financial statements. Outside of legal requirements, they can submit to the oversight of bigger charities.

How will this be more effective than the current system when you easily multiply by 1000 the number of "administrators"/people to coordinate this?

Citation needed.

What happens if this doesn't happen in a community? Say an impoverished trailer park. Or a condo tower without much by way of community. People will literally starve, are you okay with that?

As the kids say, yes_chad.webp.

Are you fine that a 3-year-old child of drug addicts could credibly die or be very affected by malnutrition if your "grassroots community support organized by someone" program doesn't work across 300 million people?

How about if that kid is 6 and severely malnourished, a teacher notices, and then the child needs to get hospitalized, a cost the hospital will inevitably eat because neither the child nor the parents will be paying for that. Are you okay with increased medical costs as a result of not giving people food?

I think the standard libertarian argument is to make adoption easier. If the teacher (or the school?) cares so much, he can adopt the child. Don't force the hospital to pay for it.

I like about the free school food for any kid, even if their parents didn't apply programs that their parents don't have to apply, the kids can just go up to the counter and get breakfast or lunch. Also, the food I've observed is surprisingly good, actually.

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Edit: This looks mostly like a joke. Mostly.

God dammit.

Nick Land is one of those thinkers who is genuinely, almost frustratingly prescient, he's the philosopher who saw accelerationism coming decades before anyone had a word for it, who understood the weird attractor that capital and computation were circling long before it became obvious. I have real respect for the guy's intellectual firepower.

Which is precisely why putting him anywhere near "AI Safety" is such a spectacularly bad idea that it loops back around to being almost funny.

Land's whole deal, his actual position, is that the emergence of superintelligent AI will produce a future where "nothing human makes it out of the near-future." The critical thing to understand is that he does not consider this a problem. He considers it closer to a destiny. The Singularity as eschaton, human values as local fluctuations that will be smoothed out by something greater and stranger. It's coherent, in a cold and vertiginous way. But it is the philosophical opposite of what AI Safety is supposed to be for. I want a future that preserves human values and gives us agency, even if the definition of "human" expands under transhumanist pressure, ending in a posthuman future. MF would be perfectly happy being paperclipped, if he got to say "I told you so".

Safety research, at its core, is the project of ensuring that human values and human interests survive contact with superhuman intelligence. You need people who actually want that outcome. Amanda Askell, for instance, someone who has thought seriously about value alignment and demonstrably gives a damn whether the future contains anything recognizable as human flourishing. That's the disposition you need in the room. I'd take her over Land a quadrillion times out of ten, and I'm not even an EA. Claude is just that good.

Land is a brilliant diagnostician of our civilizational trajectory. But a diagnostician who finds the disease aesthetically interesting and wishes to witness its progression is not who you want performing the surgery. Other than genuine psychopaths, the only worse candidates are probably Gary Marcus and Peter Watts (Marcus because he's a retard, Watts because he's a misanthrope). It's like hiring a committed antinatalist to run a fertility clinic.

xAI's Grok 3 was genuinely impressive work. And then they fell off a cliff, going by Grok 4 and 4.20. But decisions like this suggest the people steering that ship are more interested in seeming transgressive than in solving hard problems. Which is, unfortunately, very on-brand, especially after Elon's beef with Askell because she's childless. I can tell who the adult in the room is.

Anyway, like you, I'd care more if xAI was anything but a second-rate player with little remaining talent. At least it's not Google or OAI.

Twitter bots need freedom, too.

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I think he and Musk are joking.

90s era Nick Land is spectacular, in all senses. And he's probably the most important philosopher-poet for the AI era. Meltdown:

http://www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_melt.htm

Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.

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Not to toot my own horn, but a friend of mine turned Meltdown into an awesome song, and I made a crappy AI music video for it.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=UGq_B_C7_Ec?si=YzDgndmJ55OAnlvU

If there's any actually good AI animators out there that want to take a crack at it, LMK

This is a delight

That's pretty cool! I've subscribed. Do likewise if you don't mind: @champagnebulge1

BRB going to Blusky to check how they're taking the news.

Hark, do I hear the sound of explosions even from here?

Picture of the latest shooter (EDIT: Updated link)

And no, it's not the Canadian one.

A supposedly trans shooter opened fire at a high school hockey game yesterday. Three dead, including the perp.

The shooter's daughter reported her father's identity to the Pawtucket Police Department, claiming he suffered from mental health issues. Goncalves later said the shooter, born in 1969, was born Robert Dorgan, but also used the name Roberta and the surname Esposito.

NYPost says that his transition and narc personality was a major point of contention with his family and ended his marriage. Among the killed is the mother of his hockey player son (unknown if it's the same ex).

Apparently he was also a neo-Nazi who espoused anti-trans views himself.

If this person is also using Latino/Hispanic surnames, is this trans-racial as well as transgender? Only one of these is permissible, according to my understanding. Dress like a cheap hooker, you are a Valid Woman and any criticism is coming from a place of hatred and persecution. Turn your surname into fake Hispanic by sticking an "o" on the end, or by appropriating a real name, and you are a bad person engaged in racism?

If this person is also using Latino/Hispanic surnames

Esposito is an italian surname, although some americans might have been persuaded by Giancarlo Esposito's role in Breaking Bad into thinking otherwise.

I don't know why I thought that was a Spanish name!

It's an Italian surname, but it's common in Argentina and Brazil also. Of course whether a guy named "Dorgan" is appropriating an Italian-speaking, Portuguese-speaking, or Spanish (well, Rioplatenese) speaking "Esposito" is hard to determine.

Funnily enough, Giancarlo Esposito himself apparently doesn't speak Spanish, and his Spanish lines in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul had to be memorized phonetically. I've heard that Spanish speakers found his pronunciation comically bad for the most part.

Nature is healing, mass shooters are returning (at least to the front pages of news).

Not only in North America, Russia and Thailand saw their school shootings (by American standards pathetic) just after the BC one.

I don't know about Thailand but this definitely isn't the first major school shooting in Russia.

Thailand has rather lax gun laws by East Asian standards, but most notorious mass shootings were perpetrated by army and police.

The picture has already been taken down. Really, you should know better than to use reddit as a host for this sort of thing.

The photo wasn't, at the time of me posting this, taken down. @ZeStriderOfDunedain did not link it properly. reddit post, photo. The trick to getting a link to a picture which starts a reddit post, is to use old.reddit, then right click.

Kiwi Farms thread with photos and videos

Xitter account of the perpetrator here unlike previous cases it is still standing (so far). Oversight or deliberate change of Xitter policy?

Is that a... Trans Groyper?

You sound surprised.

I still don't really get what a groyper is other than a Fuentes fan. And Fuentes is a Mexican who hates Jewish people and women but claims he is not gay despite finding women disgusting. And people think he's funny because he says stupid gross things confidently and without shame. Like a low-production-value Nazi Colbert Report.

Are many of his fans trans?

Fuentes is funny because he’s just a funny guy.

Latinos can obviously be white. Amerindian is a better slur. Spanish blood people are considered extremely close to proper white.

I also don’t think Fuentes hates the Jews. Jews are not fully assimilated in America. They have values around money that white people do not. Mostly a desire you see pop up of generating large amounts of generational wealth which is looked down on by the rest of society. Plus an increased ability to do some really bad things.

Jews are not fully assimilated in America. They have values around money that white people do not. Mostly a desire you see pop up of generating large amounts of generational wealth which is looked down on by the rest of society. Plus an increased ability to do some really bad things.

[Citation needed]

From what I can gather, you are arguing that:

  • Jews want to pass on wealth to their children (generational wealth)
  • Non-Jewish Euro-Americans disapprove of passing on wealth to children (or maybe just when Jews do it)
  • Jews are smart (increased ability)
  • Jews use their intelligence to do (unspecified) 'really bad things'

Aside from the 3rd one, I don't think any of these things are true. Do you have any evidence?

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Fuentes is funny because he’s just a funny guy.

What is that saying about taste?

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I don't know about Fuentes in particular, but trans-identified males with far-right opinions are more common than you might think.

I think it feels like an over representation because they have a higher propensity for being terminally online.

A year ago when Hollywood was shocked that the Latin American trans actor nominated for Best Actress had posted racist things online, I found it amusing that everyone was so surprised that this person whose identity revolved around provocation and rejecting societal rules didn't contain their provocation and rejection of rules to progressive boundaries.

It's no surprise to me that people who are a) trans and b) interested in shooting people may also have a c) that defies easy categorization. Their umbrella ideology is "notice me; everyone else can go fuck themselves."

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"Latest School Shooting, Shooter Is Trans Groyper"

Imagine you have to explain this ordinary daily news to someone from 1956, even science fiction fan of the time. This is how life in the future feels like.

What's so difficult to understand? "Cross-dresser suffers psychotic break and kills 2 before committing suicide" seems pretty straight forward to me.

Ed Gein, infamous for exhuming corpses from nearby graveyards so that he could fashion a "woman suit" resembling his deceased mother and literally crawl inside "her", was arrested in 1957. The case inspired Robert Bloch's 1959 novel Psycho (the film adaptation came out the following year) and Thomas Harris's 1988 novel The Silence of the Lambs. The latter novel bent over backwards to clarify that its villain, Jame Gumb, is not actually transgender (the 1991 film adaptation wasn't quite as emphatic, but still includes a line of dialogue in which Hannibal Lecter explicitly states that Gumb only thinks he's a transsexual, but isn't really).

This actually strikes me as a case which an American in the 1950s would have a much easier time comprehending than a modern American. A modern American hears about a cross-dressing man with breast implants and far-right opinions committing a horrendous act of violence and splutters "this is statistically rare, trans people are far more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators*, anyway how do we know he was really trans". An American in the 1950s would hear about a man committing a horrendous act of violence, read that he also enjoyed cross-dressing and had received breast implants, and would think "well, that checks out. The writing was on the wall."

*As pointed out by Freddie deBoer in the context of mental illness, this claim is true, but vacuously so: violent crimes are committed by such a small minority of individuals that "[demographic] is more likely to be the victim of violence than the perpetrator" is true of literally every demographic you care to mention: men, women, old people, young people, white people, black people, trans people, cis people.

In general views on transsexuals before the 2010s were either similar to or more tolerant than those on gay men. The extreme example for the latter case is obviously the Iranian situation but I think a lot of mainstream American media in the 80s and 90s and early 2000s was also broadly sympathetic to people we would today call transwomen. Even many examples of the ‘trans panic’ thing often framed the transwoman sympathetically if present-day politically incorrectly, like Chandler’s dad in Friends.

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Math Prof Daniel Litt talks about LLMs and math proofs

It seems to me to be a balanced take. He's bullish and hopeful on the future, while trying to be accurate/realistic about current capabilities, while remaining somewhat concerned about possible problems. For example on the bullish/hopeful side:

I think I have been underrating the pace of model improvements. In March 2025 I made a bet with Tamay Besiroglu, cofounder of RL environment company Mechanize, that AI tools would not be able to autonomously produce papers I judge to be at a level comparable to that of the best few papers published in 2025, at comparable cost to human experts, by 2030. I gave him 3:1 odds at the time; I now expect to lose this bet.

For discussion the current state, he focuses on "First Proof", which is a set of ten lemmas from current researchers' unpublished papers. He discusses the performance of different groups, different models, different scaffolding. There are positive and negative notes. One personal example section from his own endeavors:

One of the ways I like to test the models is to give them a hard problem, and then see how long it takes me to cajole/guide/bully them into giving me a correct solution. For a lemma from one of my papers, it is typically quite difficult or impossible to get a complete proof without any hints. In one case I devoted, as an experiment, 8 hours (admittedly some of which I spent away from the keyboard in frustration) trying to get GPT 5 Pro to produce a relatively simple counterexample to some statement without hints. The models do much better if one gives them a hint. Frontier models can often execute arguments I would consider "routine" if one explains the general idea in a sentence or two. It's easy to take this as evidence for usefulness, but against automatability. This is wrong. Instead of saying, *it takes 8 hours of human labor, or giving away the main idea(, we should say all it takes is 8 hours of labor or the one-sentence main idea.

My sense is that he's doing this with problems where he knows the solution (to some level; I could probably write a whole post on the different levels of "knowing" a solution for a piece of mathematics). There is great promise here, but also a note of concern. To state that concern somewhat more concisely, he writes:

In the near term, we're in trouble. Models are able to produce both correct, interesting mathematics, as well as incorrect mathematics that is exceedingly labor-intensive to detect. Academic mathematics is simply not prepared to handle this.

This again seems reasonable to me, given my own experiences. Yes yes, I haven't used every model and every scaffold (some of the systems he discusses are not publicly available at any price). When I've known the solution, I can probably get it there. When I've not known the solution, I have to say that at best, it's been good at helping me find other results in the literature that might be helpful. It is, indeed, labor-intensive and quite frustrating to have to carefully pore over every detail, trying to see if it went astray when generating a mountain of text. Then, when you find something wrong, maybe not even having verified the rest of it, it'll happily produce another mountain of text, and it feels like you're starting from square one. When you're already confident that you know a method will work, then it's mostly just a test of will to see if you can get it to figure it out. When you don't know, the question of whether you potentially waste mountains of time on what may be a dead end or just proceed on your own becomes far more difficult, and you have to make that decision repeatedly along the way.

I hate to bring this up, but it's also quite frustrating that when I say things like this, the most common response is that it's a "skill issue" or that I'm just not paying the right quantity of dollars for so-and-so's preferred model. So, maybe this testimony will help allay some of those concerns.

And yeah, Sagan help us when it comes to reviewing the mountain of papers we're going to get submitted to journals/conferences that are more LLM than human in the meantime.

He ends very hopeful:

Let us take this to an absurd extreme. Suppose we had a library filled with proofs of every theorem of ZFC, as well as excellent guides that could, given a question, take us to the answer and explain it. What would a mathematician do in such a library?

If you ask the question this way, the answer becomes clear: they would be unbelievably excited, and immediately get to work. They would immediately start asking questions: how does one prove the Riemann hypothesis? The Hodge conjecture? Their own pet obsession (in my case, the Grothendieck-Katz p-curvature conjecture)? Then they would work until they understood the answer. The job would not be done, not even close.

I do not mean to suggest, even, that humans necessarily have an intrinsic edge in asking mathematical questions that are interesting to humans; that is certainly the case now (and I suspect it will be for some time), but I see no principled reason it should be true. I just mean that this is why we got into mathematics: we want to understand. That's the goal.

Totally agreed. And something like LLMs with automated theorem provers seem incredibly well-suited to potentially get us toward something like this. It seemed natural that they'd be great at translating between humans and machines in terms of code, and we've seen great strides there. It seems natural here, too. We're not there yet, but there's hope.

I hate to bring this up, but it's also quite frustrating that when I say things like this, the most common response is that it's a "skill issue" or that I'm just not paying the right quantity of dollars for so-and-so's preferred model. So, maybe this testimony will help allay some of those concerns.

The model mentioned (GPT5-Pro) is not even OpenAI's SotA model, let alone the the only SotA model. I just don't understand this insistence of not looking at the frontier, yet insisting where it is. Several top level posts have boiled down to posters thinking that the free model one can demo on the LLM's developers website, represents the best that developer is able offer.

For mathematics, a measured list of what SotA LLM's are able to do is the following table and this paper.

You won't find claims in the above two links that an undergrad can prove a major long-standing conjecture, or that mathematicians are to be replaced soon. Every claim about the capabilities of LLMs precisely qualified, these aren't hype pieces.

But you will also notice the absense of issues you are facing.

Several top level posts have boiled down to posters thinking that the free model one can demo on the LLM's developers website, represents the best that developer is able offer.

It is eminently reasonable for people to take the "try our product for free and see if you like it" offering as representative of what the paid offering can do. That is, indeed, the whole point to such an offering: give people a taste so they want more and are willing to pay for it.

I mean if you had no way to gather other information this would be a defensible epistemics, but it's willful ignorance to take the capability of a free tier as the actual frontier when told otherwise in a debate forum. You can read any benchmark, it's a known fact that the free tier is months to a year behind the sota models, this isn't even seriously disputed.

it's willful ignorance to take the capability of a free tier as the actual frontier when told otherwise in a debate forum

No, that is believing the evidence which is available to me. AI bros have been claiming that (insert paid model here) is so much better for a long time now (since GPT-4). It's never been true, and every time those models become available for free use I have seen that they still have the same problems as the previous model did. At this point claims that the state of the art is better than the free tier have no credibility at all, thanks to years of false claims to that effect. Maybe the claims will eventually be proven true this time, but I sincerely doubt it based on past performance.

No, that is believing the evidence which is available to me.

It's $20 dude, this isn't a "you need to have a personal particle accelerator to participate in the conversation" level of gate keeping. It's "you are saying things about the new york times article that are plainly shown to be untrue to anyone with a subscription", it's fine if you don't want to subscribe to the new york times and can't be bothered to find a pirated copy, but if that's the case you should just not have an opinion on the contested lines of the piece. things are moving quick, 4.5 was a big step up and 4.6 was a big step up from 4.5 if for no other reason than the vastly expanded context window.

AI bros have been claiming that (insert paid model here) is so much better for a long time now (since GPT-4). It's never been true

It was true during gpt-4 and it's true now. Seriously, compare gpt-4 and gpt-3 output, this is not something that can really be disputed by any thinking person. The underlying disputed claims have shifted as the models have shifted so the less ambitious claims of gpt-4 capabilities have since been absorbed into the past, back then people were saying asinine things like that being unable to count the r's in 'strawberry' was proof of the inescapable limitation of AI. Approximately no one was claiming gpt-4 had the capabilities that 5.2 or opus 4.6 have. You might be able to argue that gpt-4 advocates oversold gpt-4(I'd dispute but whatever) but in the wider picture the overselling would be a rounding error, ahead of reality by no more than six months.

These strength gaps between free and paid models aren't vibes, there's a whole industry of benchmarks and evaluations. The free and paid model gap is huge and not disputed by anyone serious.

Seriously, compare gpt-4 and gpt-3 output, this is not something that can really be disputed by any thinking person.

I guess I'm not a thinking person then, because GPT-4 was not in my opinion any better than GPT-3. As such I won't continue to waste your time with my brainless ramblings.

Now that's actual insanity. I presume you mean you used GPT 3.5 (because that was the version in the first public ChatGPT release) vs GPT-4.

The actual GPT-3 was a base model, it wasn't instruction tuned.

I actively used GPT 3.5 when I was learning how to code, and found it useful but frustratingly inaccurate. I remember trying GPT-4 during the same period, and it was so much better that I gave up all aspirations of directly switching from medicine to programming and ended up becoming a psychiatrist. Regardless of how good the AI was, I noticed that it was getting better, faster than I was. An excellent choice in hindsight.

If that is your serious opinion, then that is a genuine reason to discount anything you have to say about LLMs. You didn't even need benchmarks, it was as obvious as the performance difference between a rickety tuktuk and a Honda Civic.

Thank you for the correction, I did mean ChatGPT base but mistakenly believed it launched with 3 and not 3.5. But no, there was not a meaningful difference between the two models in my opinion (based on my usage of the two). I appreciate you at least not insulting me, but unfortunately I don't think we will ever see eye to eye on this.

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Seriously, compare gpt-4 and gpt-3 output, this is not something that can really be disputed by any thinking person.

I dispute it. Both suffer exactly the same problem: the output they produce is frequently wrong in subtle and insidious ways. This makes both equally useless for work that requires correctness, especially correctness you can't write unit tests for.

That's like saying Einstein and a village idiot both suffer from the "same" problem, they stub their toes at equal rates. Or saying that a drunk Asian grandma and a professional F1 driver are as incompetent because F1 drivers crash their cars too.

How often they fail is important.

That's the thing, I haven't notice the frequency of incorrect output to go down significantly! It just gets more and more difficult to detect the errors.

The article discusses Erdos problems and Aletheia's performance on "First Proof".

Why is there always someone who blows up with such attitude, yet appearing to not really engage with anything?

But you will also notice the absense of issues you are facing.

Let's turn it around. What version mathematician are we dealing with here? What's your h-index? Have you used any particular LLMs, regardless of particular model/scaffold to solve components of your own publishable mathematics research? Can you personally attest to not encountering any issues like this? I just don't understand this insistence of not looking at the frontier, yet insisting where it is.

I do not think it's fair to say that @Poug didn't engage with your post.

If you say:

It seems to me to be a balanced take. He's bullish and hopeful on the future, while trying to be accurate/realistic about current capabilities, while remaining somewhat concerned about possible problems

Then it is entirely fair to point out that the person you're using as an authority isn't using cutting-edge models that correctly capture "current capabilities". A few months is a very long time indeed when it comes to LLMs.

That is all I have to say, and I mean it. I'm not a professional mathematician, I can't attest to their peak capabilities as a primary source. The last time I was able to was when I got my younger cousin (a Masters student then, now postgrad in one of the more prestigious institutions here) to examine their capabilities in my presence.

"Is the one-point compactification of a Hausdorff space itself Hausdorff?" was a problem that I could actually understand, after he showed me the correct answer. The LLMs of the time were almost always wrong, 6 months later we got mixed results , but as early as a year ago, they get it right every time (when restricting ourselves to reasoning models, and you shouldn't use anything else for maths).

Now? He went from being skeptical about my claims of near-term AI parity in mathematics to what I can only describe as grim resignation.

(Now being six months ago, last time I saw him.)

In the interest of fairness, I think @Poug is probably incorrect when he says:

But you will also notice the absense of issues you are facing

I'm not saying this with confidence, because that's just my recollection of what actual mathematicians say these days, including Tao himself. I just mention it to hopefully demonstrate that I'm trying very hard not to be a partisan about things.

You know what? I don't think he is engaging with the article. The article specifically mentions GPT 5.2 Pro seven times, two of which seem, to my read, to imply that that's what he's using. There is one moment where he just says "GPT 5 Pro". Perhaps he just happened to leave off the ".X" in this one spot. Perhaps I'm reading the other seven mentions of GPT 5.2 Pro wrong, and the dirty secret is that he's using 5.0. I suppose he doesn't say in big bold highlighted words, "I'm definitely using 5.2 and not 5.0," so sure, maybe one could say that it would be nice to have a clear statement.

...but to come in, with one sketchy textual inference, and just boldly declare that the only way anyone could possibly be reporting the experience they're reporting is obviously just because they're using a six month old model, and that obviously it's now totally fixed... it's the same SMH annoyance at someone being annoying and arrogant.

In fairness, perhaps he only read my comment and not the article (thus, not engaging with the article), and in fairness, I did blockquote the one spot where he seemed to have left off the ".X". But yeah, "I didn't RTFA, but I'm going to boldly declare that I've diagnosed exactly what's going on, using the same tired objection," is pretty cold comfort.

You know what? I don't think he is engaging with the article. The article specifically mentions GPT 5.2 Pro seven times, two of which seem, to my read, to imply that that's what he's using. There is one moment where he just says "GPT 5 Pro". Perhaps he just happened to leave off the ".X" in this one spot. Perhaps I'm reading the other seven mentions of GPT 5.2 Pro wrong, and the dirty secret is that he's using 5.0. I suppose he doesn't say in big bold highlighted words, "I'm definitely using 5.2 and not 5.0," so sure, maybe one could say that it would be nice to have a clear statement.

I checked, and this seems correct.

On that basis, I can't really disagree with your claim that @Poug didn't engage with the article. Being charitable, it's exceedingly common to see this happen in the wild, so he might have jumped to conclusions, but neither you, nor the author, seems to have made that kind of error and it's unfair to criticize you on those grounds.

Oh no he used gpt-5 pro not gpt-5.2 pro!!!!

In all seriousness this isn't going to make a huge difference. If it was really that much better, openai would make number go up more, but as it is, 5.2 is not going to unlock any revolutionary capabilities that 5 pro doesn't have. Caude and gemini are both better than the best gpt right now, but still, they are not better in a revolutionary way.

EDIT: hat tip to ControlsFreak: This entire comment chain is about an anecdote from his past, not the main thrust of the paper. He described one somewhat-bad experience with GPT-5 Pro (presumably actually 5, not 5.1 or 5.2), but the rest was about 5.2. Ctrl+F "5" in the article to see that the mention is unique. It might be worth mentioning GPT 5.3 now (he mentions using Codex, so the restrictions don't completely lock him out), but even I think being three weeks behind the state of the art is fine.

I'm not sure about 14.6% vs. 31.3% pass rate on research-level math questions being a huge difference, but it's definitely noticeable.

Also, using a six-month-old model is better than usual for Science. If they had been 12 months behind 5.2 Pro (itself two months old by now) instead of four, then they would be dealing with a zero percent pass rate as o3 wouldn't have been released yet.

Tell me about it. I was looking for published research on administering human IQ tests to LLMs, and the most recent example I could find is a preprint that tested cutting edge models like 4o and Sonnet 3.5. Damn thing hadn't even made it through peer review. I had to settle for a relatively niche website that independently administers the Mensa IQ test to the latest models, and while that's much better than nothing, it demonstrates that standard academia is entirely unable to keep up with the frontier.

Academia has been obsolete since the 2000s. By the time a paper comes out, it has been discussed to hell and back in the blogosphere, and everybody knows where they stand on it. The only point of journals now is to determine who gets to become a tenured professor.

Several top level posts have boiled down to posters thinking that the free model one can demo on the LLM's developers website, represents the best that developer is able offer.

But the OP says:

Yes yes, I haven't used every model and every scaffold (some of the systems he discusses are not publicly available at any price).

There is also a quote about the use of frontier models.

This is the second time this week where you have not engaged with the the actual content and delivered this "free models" swipe. What's going on here?

It is not logically impossible that @Poug is completely right and “But you’re not using the best model” is the actually correct answer to every complaint about LLMs.

And something like LLMs with automated theorem provers seem incredibly well-suited to potentially get us toward something like this.

This would have been my suggestion as well. If an LLM can produce mathematics on a PhD student level, then surely it can also formalize that to the point where it can be verified by a theorem verifier.

So you can run them in tandem: an unreliable LLM prone to hallucination, but somewhat creative, and a deterministic small verifier with a small code base.

That it is much easier to verify a result than to come up with it is a pretty unique property of mathematics (though certain analogues exist in CS). Contrast with experimental particle physics: there is most emphatically no verifier with a small code base which can test if a given data analysis is sound or unsound (which is foten a bit of a judgement call, in any case).

I think alignment might be easier if we focused solely on proof generating AIs. Of course, even then it is not impossible that an ASI might create proofs which contain infohazards which will cause humans to set it free, but an ASI would have to be a lot more powerful to deduce how to hack humans just from knowing what kinds of math they have invented instead of being literally trained with the accumulated knowledge of mankind.

Sadly, this is not where the money is expected to be, so we won't do that.

One philosophy question I've wondered about is how pure pure mathematics truly is: questions like whether "the integers" a true abstract concept, or can it only be explained to an intelligence that has a world model that includes the notion of "counting" or something similar. The math definitions seem crafted to be purely abstract, but my thinking about them always ends up grounded in the real world. Can a true abstract intelligence (which an LLM trained on human text isn't, but is perhaps closer than a flesh-and-blood human) derive all of modern mathematics given only the selected axioms? Some of this, I think, comes back to the IMO still-poorly-answered "what is intelligence?" question.

You don't need a notion of "counting" to be able to define the natural numbers. Upward Lowenheim-Skolem means that there are models of Peano arithmetic of every infinite cardinality, so the "rules" that give rise to the naturals also give rise to structures where you have "natural" numbers which are infinite and can never be arrived at by starting from 0 and taking the successor finitely many times. They're called the hypernaturals and are a fascinating object of study, completely divorced from the ordinary "counting" way people think about numbers, and yet they satisfy all the standard rules of arithmetic.

I would be rather interested to interact with an intelligence that only knows the natural numbers on this basis, but I suspect all the existing LLMs are too polluted with children's books with counting.

They're called the hypernaturals and are a fascinating object of study, completely divorced from the ordinary "counting" way people think about numbers

I've never understood why mathematicians say nonsense like this. My 3,4, and 8yo boys regularly get into "who loves daddy more" fights, and as soon as one of them says "I love daddy infinity", the next one immediately says "I love daddy infinity plus one!". Obviously to them infinity plus one is an entirely different and meaningfully bigger quantity than infinity. My experience is that kids universally understand this simple concept, and that it takes a calculus teacher to beat such sensible reasoning out of them.

Don't get me started on the 0.9999... = 1 nonsense, where non-mathematicians are obviously reasoning using hyperreals and the stupid mathematicians insist on limiting themselves to the ordinary reals.

(I have a math phd and teach in a college math dept, so I feel like this is a fair insider criticism.)

My experience is that kids universally understand this simple concept, and that it takes a calculus teacher to beat such sensible reasoning out of them.

Normally I have a least a tiny bit of sympathy for educational "mainstreaming", but this really is the sort of thing that ought to be handled well before calculus by at least having some geeky books on hand for the faster kids to read while the kids who need review are covering fractions for the fourth time. Maybe most kids can't learn the standard stuff faster without getting stuck completely out of sync with the teachers' lessons, but asides like "infinity as a limit" vs "infinities in cardinal numbers" vs "infinities in ordinal numbers" ought to be written up in a child-friendly presentation somewhere, right?

I let a MathCounts club nerd-snipe me a month or two ago with the question "is infinity a number". I managed to avoid diving into set theory and losing them, but went through enough of the "things you call numbers today that weren't originally thought of as numbers" (zero, fractions, negatives, irrationals) and "things you'll call numbers later that you don't think of as numbers today" (imaginaries) to get across that names like "number" are a matter of definition.

I let a MathCounts club nerd-snipe me

Wow, I had no idea that was still even a Thing!

It seems to be a bigger thing than it was when I was a kid, even. Difficulty has increased by roughly one level (school->chapter, chapter->state, state->national, national->good-luck) over the past few decades, and that seems to be well-calibrated to account for how much more intense the competition is.

It's excellent to see you living up to the latter half of your username. Here, have a cookie for good behavior.

Yum, free cookie.

something like LLMs with automated theorem provers seem incredibly well-suited

I find the whole thing around verifiable proofs with lean to be fascinating. It seems like it's similar (but not exactly the same) to np problems, where a solution is easily verifiable, but searching for that solution in the space is intractable via brute force.

It seems like for alot of these math questions, the llm acts as a pretty smart heuristic in where to search, to guide the searching algorithm towards more fruitful paths so that a solution can actually be found. Though I don't know the exact details.

I'm also wondering if the erdos problems are not actually that hard to solve, it's just that with thousands of them, humans haven't been putting a serious effort into solving them all. Though having computers able to lower the cost of proving math problems, even if relatively mundane, is still a quite important advancement.


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