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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25566 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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Another scary AI is Becoming Racist article from the media.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/16/ai-racism-chatgpt-gemini-bias

The title is pretty comical. As AI tools get smarter, they’re growing more covertly racist, experts find

Hummm...seems problematic.

It goes on about how ebonics is judged harshly by the AI models. Without doing comparisons to other low status language markers such as WV dialects. The title implies that the smarter and more predictive the model becomes the more secretly racist it becomes.

There is also this gem-

"In response, groups like OpenAI developed guardrails, a set of ethical guidelines that regulate the content that language models like ChatGPT can communicate to users. As language models become larger, they also tend to become less overtly racist.

But Hoffman and his colleagues found that, as language models grow, covert racism increases. Ethical guardrails, they learned, simply teach language models to be more discreet about their racial biases.

“It doesn’t eliminate the underlying problem; the guardrails seem to emulate what educated people in the United States do,” said Avijit Ghosh, an AI ethics researcher at Hugging Face, whose work focuses on the intersection of public policy and technology.

“Once people cross a certain educational threshold, they won’t call you a slur to your face, but the racism is still there. It’s a similar thing in language models: garbage in, garbage out. These models don’t unlearn problematic things, they just get better at hiding it.”

It ends on this note from Avijit Ghosh https://evijit.io/assets/pdf/Avijit_CV.pdf

“Racist people exist all over the country; we don’t need to put them in jail, but we try to not allow them to be in charge of hiring and recruiting. Technology should be regulated in a similar way.”

He almost says the quiet part out loud. This is coming from someone that earned their phd LAST YEAR and moved to the USA in 2019. He is a quick learner, getting on that Gender Identity and Racial Equity grift right out of the gate! Much easier than working for a living.

His peer reviewed conference publications.

Perceptions in pixels: analyzing perceived gender and skin tone in real-world image search results WWW ’24

Bound by the Bounty: Collaboratively Shaping Evaluation Processes for Queer AI Harms AIES ’23

When Fair Classification Meets Noisy Protected Attributes AIES ’23

Queer In AI: A Case Study in Community-Led Participatory AI FAccT ’23

Subverting Fair Image Search with Generative Adversarial Perturbations FAccT ’22

FairCanary: Rapid Continuous Explainable Fairness AIES ’22

Algorithms that “Don’t See Color”: Comparing Biases in Lookalike and Special Ad Audiences AIES ’22

When Fair Ranking Meets Uncertain Inference SIGIR ’21

Building and Auditing Fair Algorithms: A Case Study in Candidate Screening FAccT ’21

Public Sphere 2.0: Targeted Commenting in Online News Media ECIR ’19

I suspect that there's overlap between people who accuse Trump of inciting the riot on January 6th despite his explicit call for 'peace' and people who believe that the 'bloodbath' comment is evidence that Trump is ready for a civil war even though he was clearly talking about the automotive industry.

I think that Trump should be in the past for the good of this country, but when we can't even agree on what words mean anymore, I don't know that I think there's a lot of hope.

Sometimes I think about how we got here. Something I've seen a lot of leftwing people talk about recently is: "The system is what it does." The left is what it does, not what it says it does. The postmodernism, the communism: there's this sense in which I just want to say we can see you. But there's always equivocation about 'the left.' They call it 'essentializing' the left even as they apply their reductive reasoning to Trumpism.

And I'm old enough to remember that Obama came in on backlash to the Bush administration. "Cthulhu swims left" is the sort of thing neophytes say on encountering politics for the first time: it follows that Cthulhu swims right in a great drumbeat. Much of the surveillance apparatus that creates our authoritarian present was built during the Bush administration.

I'm afraid of what people will turn to if Trump isn't enough.

Maybe there aren't firm conclusions in here, but there's no one else talking today, so here I am.

'Trump said there will be a bloodbath for the country' is still less of a lie than 'the election was stolen.'

/shrug. Both sides are largely stupid and dishonest, because people are largely stupid and the incentives around politics reward dishonesty.

  • -11

Which election, 2000, 2004, 2008, 2016 or 2020?

2000 is the most objectively stolen election in recent memory, the rest are fine.

Not what I was asking.

You said the "bloodbath" quote was "less of a lie" than the election one. Now, in context, that refers to 2020. Now you say 2000?

You were comparing Trump to Al Gore, and positively? That reframes the whole thing!

I think we're getting confused.

I thought you were making a joke, I was replying with a joke.

If your original comment wasn't a joke then I don't know what you mean.

I see perfect moderation has been achieved.

What does this mean?

At the time he posted this comment, there had been no other posts in this thread, despite it having been up for several hours. I believe the joke is that the mods’ idea of “perfect moderation” is “no posts allowed at all.”

Your magic worked because I immediately set out to make a top-level thread but there were already 3 others by the time I finished writing it.

It was nice while it lasted.

* golf clap * Top-level low-effort snark just so you can whine about how we proved your point if we mod you. Bravo, sir, well played. (And yeah, you got three reports for "low effort" and 1 AAQC.)

Now go be the change.

Believe it or not, a lot of effort goes into brevity. I rewrote that snark countless times, and left and came back to give it more of a think hour after hour. Debating what references to include. Perhaps "They created a wasteland and called it moderation"? Maybe "Did someone forget to cycle a GPT instance?"

At once point I was certain I'd missed my window for it, trying to strike the perfect balance between mocking the increasing ossification of discourse here, but not being too trigger happy about it. When midday began to give way to evening, and the moment still seemed ripe, I decided I practically had an obligation to snark. The silence demanded it.

For what it’s worth, I thought it was tasteful :)

Employers May Not Take Adverse Employment Actions Based on Race or Gender to Implement DEI Targets

So says a unanimous panel from the 4^th Circuit in a fairly egregious case of a white executive fired to make room for female/URM candidates to advance into his role.

The interesting part here is that the plaintiff presented to the jury the defendant firms' own written DEI goals to "close identified gaps". It also includes the truly Orwellian phrasing here:

We, Novant Health, are not interested in meeting quotas; quotas are mandated by someone outside of your organization. We want to reach our targets, targets are set by the organization, which is within our strategic imperatives and making sure our work force reflects the community we serve.

I don't think any commentary here is needed but if there's any doubt the court finds that

Novant Health adopted a long-term financial incentive plan that tied executive bonuses, in part, to achieving specific percentages of those groups in the workforce by 2021

So yeah, your bonus as a leader is tied to meeting your quota target.

My take (not the court's, also IANAL)

These are very bad facts for the DEI folks and (as the saying goal) it makes bad law for them (or good for the opponents of DEI). In particular, in the Fourth Circuit the standard is that the employer is liable if race is a motivating factor in the challenged employment practice. That's an easier standard to meet.

The other bad fact is that extensive use of the firm's own DEI output as evidence. The jury here could draw a straight line between the stated goal of having more female/URM folks in senior leadership and the firing, which would have otherwise been quite a bit harder to prove.

Maybe our resident lawyers can explain if I'm overly optimistic here.

Affirmative Action/DEI has always had a bit of a mushy existence in the context of discrimination law. The origins of the concept are pretty easy to understand — in the 1960s, blacks typically made up a smaller percentage of the semi-skilled and skilled workforce than their total numbers would suggest. It was pretty obvious that even if companies weren't actively discriminating now, there was certainly a time when they were, and it was a given that as a black guy there was only so far you could go. A lot of people on here will point to HBD and blah blah blah but keep in mind that this was a time when the workforce was largely industrial. If you work in a steel mill, you don't get hired based on your skills and education for specific positions; everybody starts in the labor pool and bids on higher-paying jobs as they become available, and most of these jobs don't require much additional skill. There are skilled jobs, but union dynamics require in-house hirings — if you need an electrician, you don't put an ad in the paper and hope that someone from the IBEW applies from the job; you run your own apprentice program for USW guys already working labor and production jobs so that they can learn the necessary skills, and replace them with new hires. The problem was that, in an environment where these promotions are often based on social and interpersonal dynamics, black employees often found themselves relegated to the lower rungs of the ladder.

The idea behind affirmative action was that companies would take a long, hard, look at how they were making these decisions, and put policies in place to ensure that a diligent black employee would, for example, have a chance to get into that electrician apprenticeship rather than be destined to a career of cutting grass and cleaning up. But Title VII still existed, so blatant discrimination was still prohibited. This has been roundly affirmed by the Supreme Court on multiple occasions. And more aggressive forms of affirmative action in general have a lot of under the hood requirements to demonstrate that it's necessary, and these are all things a court may look at in an inevitable lawsuit. So the result is that affirmative action plans tend to be a bit goofy. To the extent they take any real action, it usually focuses on training and recruitment rather than specific requirements. Make sure the black guys in the labor pool are aware of the opportunities and let them know that they have enough seniority to get the promotion if they apply for it. That sort of thing. It's also why DEI isn't just a euphemism; affirmative action is a legal concept that's complicated. DEI is just a fancy way of saying you're making an effort to comply with the law and make sure that there isn't any illegal discrimination in your company.

The problem is that Novant Health crossed a line. It may have actually been permissible if it were part of an affirmative action plan, but Novant never made that argument and tried to claim that the firing was entirely unrelated to race. They had to do this, of course, because there was no affirmative action plan, and even if there were, it's doubtful whether such a blatant act would be permissible under those circumstances. So it's really no surprise. The actual law isn't any different than it was in 1987.

DEI is just a fancy way of saying you're making an effort to comply with the law and make sure that there isn't any illegal discrimination in your company.

... So the result is that affirmative action plans tend to be a bit goofy. To the extent they take any real action, it usually focuses on training and recruitment rather than specific requirements

I feel like when I've seen DEI it's coincided with implicit but fairly obvious pushes to just hire more women and black people. It's claimed that implicit bias and structural racism and such are just being corrected for, but mechanically, what's happening is that on the margin 'racial and gender minorities' who have less experience or seem less skilled are hired instead of white people, because intentional antiblack discrimination is rare nowadays but achievement gaps persist. Novant crossed a line, but many other companies are doing the same thing and just being less obvious about it.

I guess I'll start us off with a quick one:

https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2024/03/17/trump-gop-must-endorse-three-exceptions-for-abortion-to-get-elected/

This isn't an article so much as a clip-n-quote of something Trump said. I'll copy paste here because it's not long and this way you won't have to click the link:

When asked about the rape, incest and life of mother exceptions, Trump said, “If you look at France, if you look at different places in Europe with, if you look at a lot of the civilized world, they have a period of time. But you can’t go out seven months and eight months and nine months. If the Republicans spoke about it correctly, it never hurt me from the standpoint of elections. It hurt a lot of Republicans. I think you have to have, you have to have the three exceptions.”

He added, “I tell people, number one, you have to to with your heart. You have to go with your heart. But beyond that you also have to get elected, OK? And if you don’t have the three exceptions, I think it’s very, very hard to get elected. We had a gentleman from Pennsylvania who was doing pretty well. He refused to to go with the exceptions, and he lost in a landslide for governor. Nice man lost in a landslide. You have to go with the exceptions. The number of weeks, I’ll be coming out with a recommendation fairly soon. I think it’ll be accepted.”

I'm pro-life and believe life begins at conception, not just as a Christian, but much more importantly because I consider it the cleanest and most sane policy from a secular perspective. Because to me it seems obvious the only way to avoid making Tenochtitlan-sized mistakes at some point along our path is to avoid meddling with the primeval forces of nature and attempting to play God in the first place.

Once you start introducing 'exceptions,' you're just immediately back to condoning all abortion. "My health is at risk because if I'm not permitted to abort I might harm myself" is a free at-will golden ticket as long as you're able to memorize and repeat a sentence of that length.

Trump, quite obviously, doesn't really feel strongly about abortion and is attempting to pick the most palatable position. That's the problem about integrity in politics - none of the voters have any so it's almost always counterproductive for your electability if you do.

But taking the tack that "the GOP must accept exceptions" instead of "the issue must be returned to the states" is another huge own goal from the New York liberal Trump. If you're going to have a slippery real estate mogul as your standard bearer, you're going to end up with some very ugly and counterproductive wheeling and dealing for the movement.

That's the problem about integrity in politics - none of the voters have any so it's almost always counterproductive for your electability if you do.

It's not that none of the voters do, it's that the electorate as a whole does not (and essentially cannot).

But taking the tack that "the GOP must accept exceptions" instead of "the issue must be returned to the states" is another huge own goal from the New York liberal Trump.

Setting aside preferred abortion policies (I seem to care less than most people, so I'm happy to set it aside), I disagree that this is bad electoral politics. I think Republicans that probably do personally share your robust pro-life position have attempted to thread the needle with the latter statement and have mostly found that people just interpret that as them wanting to ban it but knowing that it's unpopular at the federal level. They don't seem like principled federalists to the median voter, they seem like religious fanatics that don't even have the courage to state their position openly. In contrast, pretty much everyone knows Trump isn't principled, but the pro-lifers are unlikely to discard him in any great number and more centrists may well grumble and go along with him if he says, "look everyone, we're going to do the best laws, we're going to have a new Roe, and it's going to be great again, everyone will have their rights, and we're also going to protect the babies".

More generally, this is just an issue where standing on principle results in taking an L. I understand that some people are sufficiently principled that they're willing to take that L and lose on a whole raft of other Republican priorities because they're against compromise. To some extent, I admire the conviction, even though I think it's foolish.

One part of this that I also think flies under the radar a bit is that Biden seems somewhat like the flip side of the coin - while he might not be the most stringently adherent Catholic (lol) I do think he has the cultural memory of an old Irish-American Catholic and has just never much liked abortion on a personal level. His private position probably basically remains the old-school "safe, legal, and rare". When he speaks about this, I get no sense that he's in favor of the most extreme pro-abortion policies. If you pit Biden against Trump on abortion, Biden's probably a slight winner on electoral politics, but if you put Biden against a more staunch conservative, I think it's a huge disadvantage for the pro-lifer.

“Return it to the states” is actually most unpopular with pro-lifers since it guarantees that New York, California and other highly populous states will never ban abortion, which is deeply unacceptable to them.

Not as though I've been appointed spokesman of all the pro-lifers, but maybe re-read my OP where I explicitly stated the general preference would have been for Trump to stick with 'leave it to the states' instead.

Kind of difficult to have a productive conversation when Person A says 'this is my preference and here's why' and Person B says 'no actually, that's deeply unacceptable to you'

I respect that, I’m just saying that most pro-life activists I’ve discussed this with online have said leaving abortion to the states isn’t long term acceptable to them.

I can entertain that our reading past each other is from me saying 'Pro-lifers think Trump should have left it to the states [as the next move in the long-term game]' and you saying 'return it to the states [as a long-term permanent solution] is unpopular with pro-lifers' and that both are true.

If Trump weren't Trump he might've thought to punt it down the road so the judiciary could work on it for another generation or two, rather than think he was clever enough to make 'the best deal' that everyone's gonna love. But long-term, the idea that New York, California, etc would continue having late-term abortion on demand because it had been 'left to the states' is deeply unpopular among pro-lifers, for sure

It guarantees that no state can ban abortion for any intelligent or sophisticated woman, any woman who can afford a bus ticket. You can only force births of children you'd probably prefer hadn't been born.

You can only force births of children you'd probably prefer hadn't been born.

Given the existence of the pill, condoms, IUD, implant, cycle trackers etc (which most high functioning women will avails themselves of if having sex without the intention of having children) some would say this already the case for all pro-life activism.

Do we not, to use your words, "meddle with the primeval forces of nature" routinely? Fill in relevant medical practice/research. It may be prying, but are you, as well, against contraception? Or the onanist spilling of the seed, aka jacking off? These, too, depending on the scope of the term "primeval forces," may fit the category, particularly if we're talking about propagation of the species.

This is not an attempt at gotcha. It may be that you do not want to rest on the statement that you abhor abortion for religious reasons (I understand if you are hesitant) and felt the need to add caveat in order to be taken seriously. For my part you don't have to do that, and I'd also agree that in most ways Trump is a huckster. He's also not wrong in his logic regarding electability here, it's just that he, in his typical style, has the gall to say it out loud.

The electorate is not, in my experience discussing the topic, consistent in its collective view on abortion.

I wish that more society transforming policies had exceptions the way Anabaptists are excempted from Social Security.

I think Trump is right here and has framed it in a good way as well.

Americans (liberal and conservative) are pretty ignorant about how Europe actually works, conceptualizing it merely as a more-liberal version of the U.S.

Thus, they are shocked when they go to the Duomo in Milan and get told they have to wear something less slutty. Or, on a different note, that abortion rules in most European countries are actually much stricter than in U.S. blue states.

Republicans need to flip the script. Instead of being forced to defend a blanket ban on abortions, they need Democrats to defend their (frankly pretty insane) beliefs that a woman should be allowed to terminate a viable pregnancy one second before delivery.

That said, the fact that many Republicans are willing to defend a losing strategy is somewhat admirable. If you believe life begins at conception, then a blanket ban on abortions follows naturally from that. And you don't consent to the murder of millions just so you can get re-elected and lower the marginal tax rate by 2% or whatever.

Why is any abortion insane? Where you you personally draw the line? There is only no limit in 7 states btw.

Going by just moral revulsion, the idea of a aborting a couple of cells seems like no big deal.

On the other hand, imagine a newborn baby. A living, crying, perfectly healthy baby. Only a monster would kill that baby. But wait, rewind the clock 1 day. Now they are in the womb. Same baby, one day earlier, looks like 99.9% the same. Now, it's totally okay to kill. Go ahead and murder them for any reason, no matter how capricious. That is an insane belief system.

Where you you personally draw the line?

First trimester as in the original Roe v. Wade decision seems like a good Schelling point.

First trimester as in the original Roe v. Wade decision seems like a good Schelling point.

From a purely technocratic perspective, this is a bit hairy. You can only do an initial screening for certain genetic anomalies starting at 10wks (which, incidentally it's itself a borders-on-magic-technology that's fairly new). The test itself takes a couple of days to process and then a confirmation test is performed before scheduling a termination.

Reliably fitting that in under 13-14wks is quite hard. A realistic schedule (one that assumes mothers will schedule everything within a week but are not min-maxing-it-to-the-day) under the technology that we have would yield most terminations for genetic anomalies by the 16-17th week of pregnancy. After all, some small fraction of mothers will be traveling, some small fractions of samples will be lost or contaminated.

And FWIW, the anomalies revealed tend to be awful. Some are either incompatible with life or incompatible with living beyond 1-2yrs.

That all said, I understand that a technocratic-type approach is not palatable across the political spectrum for obvious reasons. Just a comment about the best we can do for genetic screening.

Let's say a child was missed in screening and was born alive with Trisomy 18. Is it ok to kill the child then and there?

If the argument jeroboam is making is that after the first trimester the child is old enough to resemble what we value in a human, and therefore should have a basic right to life, then why would the presence of a disease change that?

No, but I would be in favor of a supportive-care type model that realizes that there is no long term potential to that life and eschews aggressive-but-futile medical intervention. I'm not holier than the Pope.

Yes, I am in favor of more palliative care options and honest counseling. But the question isn't whether you would let the child die but rather would you let the parents kill the child? Maybe the distinction is meaningless to your ethical system, but it is not to many people's ethical systems.

Most countries let the parents surrender the child if they don't think they can care for it themselves, though with severe conditions nobody else is really able to either.

I knew some teen girls who were basically pressed into service from a young age caring for their disabled younger sister who needed around the clock care or she would die (it sounded like the government had approved funds to hire a carer, but it was difficult and unstable to actually find one), and it didn't seem very good that they were doing that instead of having more normal childhoods themselves.

I'm not sure that I could care for a highly disabled baby very well, with two children already. It wasn't even that trivial to get them to learn to eat at first, and they were healthy. Newborn babies are unbelievably dependent on their mothers taking active steps to keep them alive. My expectation would be that babies with very severe problems mostly weren't up to breastfeeding before modern medicine, and usually couldn't get enough nutrition to survive. It's not a clear win to then hook them up to a feeding tube and oxygen or something if their parents don't even want that and the prognosis is basically hopeless.

I would not object.

In reality, I would be constrained by legal concerns and my desire to maintain my job and good standing with the medical licensing boards of two different nations. But in that case, I would object only because I'm forced to, not because I want to.

I've seen plenty of babies born for whom the kindest option would be a pillow over the face, if an overdose of morphine wouldn't suffice. Thankfully most of them just die on their own when the "acceptable" option of extending minimal supportive care or simply withdrawing it is possible, which is thankfully accepted in the UK.

I thought I answered that clearly in the first word: No.

Honestly, that distinction is meaningful in most contexts but is a lot less distinct for a newborn, especially one with serious medical problems.

Very good points. Let me refine my position.

Abortion for any reason should be allowed during the first trimester. After that, abortion should be banned except for specifically enumerated reasons. I know it might be difficult to arrive at a reasonable middle ground, but apparently some European countries have done it. I think we could do it too, or at least we should try.

I respect that. I don't know that liberals will trust conservative states to govern those reasons or vice versa.

How often are 9 months minus 1 day abortions happening, though? This always seems like a questionable argumentative tactic because all the data shows that it almost never happens. Even most liberal doctors in NYC or San Francisco would refuse to abort a healthy third trimester baby as a matter of conscience.

This is sort of the problem for the pro-life argument. There are basically zero 'oops, let's not have a baby' decisions in month eight of pregnancy, and as you said, there are basically no doctors willing to do that. Almost all late term abortions are terrible tragedies and incredibly sad situations, and pro-lifers look bad when they try to make some poor woman jump through a bunch of hoops to appease their religious beliefs, instead of trusting a couple (far more women with partners have abortions than you think) and a doctor all not to be blood hungry monsters desperate to kill a baby.

Even most second trimester abortions outside of medically necessary ones are because a lack of money to afford the abortion in the first trimester or some sort of waiting period or lack of access, as opposed to somebody suddenly deciding they don't want a baby after four months.

I’d say this is a pretty uncharitable way of describing the pro-abortion position.

More importantly, there’s a symmetry. Why shouldn’t pro-lifers have to defend their beliefs? Why is it obvious that conception is the important point, and not implantation, heartbeat, brain activity, premature viability, birth, sexual maturity, or first tax return?

You could go the other direction, too, and insist that it’s the potential to create life which matters. The Catholic position that sex should be reserved for procreation is too weak. Onanism? Mass murder. Menstruation, one murder a month. God obviously intended for women to use each and every egg they can.

Some of these positions are frankly pretty insane. Others are just unreasonable. I’d say both “conception” and “birth” are in the latter category. Not coincidentally, policy tends to fall somewhere in between, because it’s not actually an obvious question.

100% agree. The Republicans are being forced to defend their most insane beliefs while the Democrats are not being forced to defend theirs. Neither should be exempt.

Personally I'd say the Democratic beliefs (killing a baby t-minus 5 minutes) is the most insane, but that's just me.

On the flip side, I agree that "life begins at conception" doesn't seem to be supported by common sense. We certainly don't mourn a first-trimester miscarriage as we would a child. And, of course, IVF polls positively despite its destruction of embryos. Forcing a woman to carry a child with serious birth defects to term also seems incredibly cruel.

Trump's position here is actually considerably more reasonable than the mainstream Democratic and Republican positions, and is closer to what the average person actually thinks. First time for everything I guess, amirite?

Onanism? Mass murder.

"Every sperm is sacred".

I mean, any smart pro-choice person can make the late term abortion argument - "Almost all late term abortions are tragic situations where there is no other choice, and it's sad religious extremists want to make these women jump through hoops to appease their own doctrines. Like most American's, I trust women and their doctor to make the right choice for them, as opposed to thinking they need to fulfill whatever those who have already openly said they want to ban all abortions want them to do."

Then, depending on the audience, maybe throwing in a crack that Republican's want it to be more difficult for a woman and a doctor to come to a conclusion about an abortion than for a teenager to get an assault rifle.

I think the Democrat argument is a good one, but would fall flat in the face of the actual realities of a late-term abortion. I don't know what late-term abortions look like, but I imagine it's a lot like killing a baby.

If those images were seen by people, I doubt many would actually countenance it.

But why stop at late-term abortions? In early Roman times, a man had the right to kill his wife and children. Even in later Roman times, infanticide was widely practiced. Why should the state get between man, the gods, and his right to kill his family? It's downright un-Roman.

The reality is that the state already controls all areas of our life. Personally, I think this is wrong. But I find it bewildering that you can't cut hair without a license but terminating a 8.99 months pregnancy is totally fine. If you're going to allow unlimited abortion on libertarian grounds, fine. But only if you also want to dismantle like 99% of existing laws and regulation. Otherwise it just feels like an unprincipled argument.

There is a license for terminating pregnancies - the medical license.

I mean, the pro-life side has tried the whole "show pictures of fetuses after abortions" in ads and such, and it hasn't seemed to work. Even low-info people understand that medical procedures are messy. Hell, if I was an enterprising liberal media type, I'd take a video of some perfectly benign medical procedure, chop it in a way it could be seen as possibly a late term abortion, then go to a pro-life rally, and see what reactions I could get.

Because once a baby is born, the rest of society can step in, not while it's still in the mother's womb, and we've decided it's bad to force a woman to go through a pregnancy when it might affect her mentally or physically, only for a child to barely survive or only survive for hours or days.

Well, I'm not a doctrinaire libertarian, but neither are most American's, but most Americans have an undercurrent of 'don't tell me what to do', which makes life difficult for both lefties like me and social conservatives. But, I'm happy to use the libertarian-style argument when it's to my advantage.

Ironically, though, government licensure is why people both want the government to make sure a hairdresser isn't a fly by night operator (especially for more complicated things a guy like me with short hair doesn't understand) and why they think it's OK for a doctor, who has been licensed by the government to make a decision, with a woman when it comes to reproductive choice, instead of getting the OK from a panel of conservative politicians who were formerly used car salesmen, dentists, and McDonald franchise owners.

Pro-lifers do have to defend our beliefs, it’s pro-choicers that usually don’t and aren’t asked to. Red state governors who’ve banned abortion get asked about this all the time. Politicians who go out of their way to defend the legality of partial birth abortion virtually never are. Yes, partial birth abortion doesn’t happen very often, but that’s not actually an argument against banning it.

Catholic doctrine isn’t opposed to masturbation as murder, but as disordered. The only permissible sex is the kind that occurs between a married man and woman and that is open to life.

See CCC 2352.

Right. I was suggesting that someone with the murder-position would find the Catholic stance too weak.

You could go the other direction, too, and insist that it’s the potential to create life which matters. The Catholic position that sex should be reserved for procreation is too weak. Onanism? Mass murder. Menstruation, one murder a month. God obviously intended for women to use each and every egg they can.

I don't really think anyone has to go that far. What century was it when the scholastics thoroughly did the whole mereology thing? A whole being conceptually different from the sum of its parts is not, itself, that complicated. What happens to an object when you just leave it alone and don't take any human action with intentionality? A trolley rolling down the tracks may invite questions of which humans designed and built the trolley, placed it there, or either intentionally/negligently started rolling it down the track. But other questions don't really implicate that. A tree mechanically grows and dies in a forest, and one can take different positions on whether it is right to cut it down without also taking a position on what one is obligated to do with acorns that fall on the concrete in the street in front of his house.

A spermatozoon, of its own, with no intentional human action, will be produced in the male body. Some will eventually just die and be reabsorbed, for example. An intentional action of masturbating results in that spermatozoon dying outside the body. One could take different particular moral stances on this, but it could be viewed as akin to kicking an acorn out of the concrete driveway and into the concrete street, perhaps. Most people think it changes little of import; it simply dies in a different concrete location, and nothing was to come of it in either case. Add an intentional human activity of sex, and it may join with an egg. Now, it is sort of a conceptually different thing. Now, if you just don't do anything, if you just let mechanical things operate mechanically, with no human intentionality, it will grow to be a human. One might see a sapling in the forest and think that it has very conceptually different import than an acorn in a driveway. If one simply doesn't touch it, it is likely that it will grow into a full tree. Not guaranteed, of course; time and chance happen to all trees, too (I have no idea about the probabilities). But it is now a conceptual whole that is differently situated.

You can see some acknowledgement of this on the pro-choice side, too. They want to say that their human intentionality was not the important factor. That they're not "killing" it, that it's not the fault of their intentional action that it is unable to survive outside of the uterus. I think they want to say this, because they do have internalized in there some sense of the role of human intentionality.

So then, it seems eminently reasonable that someone might say that, when faced with an entity that will simply, mechanically, grow to be a human in the absence of human intentionality, then the way that humans intentionally interact with it is relevant in a way that is different than the way humans interact with things that don't mechanically grow to be a human, things like worms or acorns or spermatozoa.

It’s the same reasoning that makes the “but for” test so common in law. Lots of normal intuitions about causation and liability are covered, but you can still get to some pretty perverse results.

Something like 30-50% of eggs fail to implant. That probably compares favorably to acorns, but the fact remains: those failed implantations could not occur but for the intentional action. They interfered with the normal, mechanical progression of ovulation to menstruation, and now it’s an embryo dying instead of a lone egg. Are they immoral for taking the action?

Similar reasoning applies to congenital diseases. An intentional action has some chance of creating a being which will die horribly in utero, as an infant, or otherwise early. Those deaths may all be perfectly mechanical with no further action from the parents. How much of that responsibility still rests on the parents?

Maybe the specific chances matter. The expected outcome of sex might be a healthy child. But that’s abandoning the bright line. It also opens up questions about contraception. If the expected mechanical outcome is no longer pregnancy, can the parents justify a return to the status quo?

A similar line can be used to support rape exceptions, since the victim took no intentional action. Demanding she let the mechanical process continue looks unjust. But so does killing the child for the sins of the literal father. Hence the disaster that is “victim blaming” discourse.

Combine the two, and you end up with something like the Violinist argument, where the victim had no expectation of being used to support another human. Pulling the plug is framed as a return to the last state she expected.

those failed implantations could not occur but for the intentional action. They interfered with the normal, mechanical progression of ovulation to menstruation, and now it’s an embryo dying instead of a lone egg.

Sorry, please spell this out. What was the intentional action, and how did it result in what outcome versus what other outcome?

Similar reasoning applies to congenital diseases. An intentional action has some chance of creating a being which will die horribly in utero, as an infant, or otherwise early. Those deaths may all be perfectly mechanical with no further action from the parents. How much of that responsibility still rests on the parents?

Where in the process did they have a choice to take an intentional action that is conceptually related to the death, and how is it related?

Maybe the specific chances matter. The expected outcome of sex might be a healthy child. But that’s abandoning the bright line. It also opens up questions about contraception. If the expected mechanical outcome is no longer pregnancy, can the parents justify a return to the status quo?

Most contraceptives are not magic. They have relatively well-known rates of pregnancy occurring. The expected mechanical outcome of such sex is some probability of pregnancy, where that probability is reduced compared to sex without contraception.

A similar line can be used to support rape exceptions, since the victim took no intentional action.

Very plausibly. I could at least see the sketch of an argument along these lines, though I'd have to work at it to see if I think it goes through or not. In any event, to get to this point, people would have to come to some agreement about the general contours of the arguments, and soooo many people aren't there right now. They're at shit-tier arguments like "masturbation must be murder".

Violinist argument

I kind of can't believe it, but I cannot find my previous comments on the Violinist argument, either here or at the old site. Perhaps I should give another full comment here that I can save somewhere for future reference, but the short version is that the Violinist argument is a master class in how to do intentionality exactly the wrong way 'round. Nobody thinks for nanosecond that there is just some purely mechanical, no human intentional action, process that resulted in the person waking up, attached to a machine that is using them to provide life support for a famous violinist. Everybody immediately intuits what's really going on - a cabal of the violinist's fans kidnapped the person in the middle of the night and intentionally chose to hook them up, because they preferred the violinist's health over anything about the person providing said life support.

My preferred analogy is rock climbing. When two people go rock climbing, they intend to have a little fun. They 'hook up', using the best safety equipment possible, intending to make the probability of an issue be as low as possible. But Murphy's law happens, snake eyes come up, and your partner ends up dangling at the end of a rope attached to you. Maybe that rope is causing you a little discomfort; maybe it's threatening minor rope burn; maybe it's threatening one of your limbs; maybe it's threatening your life. Lots of possible variations to handle a variety of scenarios people want for abortion. I don't think people are nearly as likely to say that you can choose to pull out your pocket knife and intentionally cut the rope, knowing that it will surely lead to your partner's death, completely regardless of what the danger is, all the way to the case where there is literally no real danger, just that they are relying on you to not cut the rope. This gets intentionality the right way 'round and also neatly handles the question of contraceptive use to reduce the probability of the undesired outcome, as well as the question of danger to the physical body of the woman.

I do remember our previous discussion regarding the rope. With Reddit’s decisions to cripple search tools, I can’t find it either. I remember having some objections to the metaphor, but I’ll agree that it avoids the main pitfall of the violinist.

That said, the only reason I mentioned the violinist was to point out that a careless intentionality argument can be contorted into almost anything. Especially if one wants to account for expected outcomes. But at the same time, expected outcomes are really important.

In the case of a couple genuinely trying to conceive, they can still expect a >30% chance of failure to implant. They’re increasing the chance of a dead embryo from 0% to 30%. The only way to avoid that outcome is abstinence. But it’d be outrageous to assign blame based on that reasoning. Why?

Is it because they’re trying their best? We don’t have any way to create children without that 30% rate. A necessary evil. I am very uncomfortable with this line of reasoning, which still doesn’t provide a good way to decide which ends merit such a gamble.

I think it’s worth considering whether those embryos really are as valuable as their implanted—or born—cousins. Or that intentionality isn’t enough to settle the argument.

a careless intentionality argument can be contorted into almost anything.

Agreed. We definitely need to take care in how we do things. I joked a bit about trolley problems, but there is a lot of genuine work to try to figure out how to be careful with these concepts.

expected outcomes are really important

Also agreed, and again a point of significant professional work. Expectation, foreseeability, etc. are all concepts that can come into play, and we can't just casually choose something willy nilly, not think about it too much, and declare everything done.

You bring up good points in the rest of your comment, as well. I don't have a complete theory in mind. Some sense of constrained optimization seems reasonable, where there just is no currently known way to do anything better. I wouldn't say that it's impossible for someone to take a strong anti-natal, abstinence-only stance on these grounds, but it would definitely be a strong motivating question for future work. Akin to how "why not suicide" motivated substantial philosophical developments, "why not end the human race via abstinence" could have potential as a major work. Maybe it's been done, and I just haven't read it yet. Perhaps there is room for something here other than "the other ends are worth it", but I don't know. And of course, moral value is always lingering. I often say that I think the outcome from the rock climbing scenario is not that we can immediately conclude that abortion is impermissible, but that it shows that if we do intentionality the right way 'round, the strong argument from bodily autonomy doesn't seem nearly as strong, and that it throws the main question back to the moral value of and beginning of human life. For sure, if the thing on the other end of the rope were a worm or something for which we believed there was no moral prohibition on killing, then it would be perfectly permissible to cut the rope. I don't think intentionality single-handedly solves the problem, but it is absolutely a vital component to think about if we're going to do anything other than spin our wheels.

Hey, somebody in the other thread pointed me to search.pullpush.io! I wanted to share the existence of a working search tool.

I found my previous conversation on the violinist here. Not sure if you're any of the other participants.

Thanks for being a good sport about this discussion.

So, the Europe thing is a dodge.

In a sense, some Western European countries are more strict about abortion, but not in reality. As a 'up until birth' pro-choicer, if the GOP position on abortion was unlimited abortion on demand in the first three months at any hospital paid for by the government, then basically incredibly socially liberal judges giving OK to later term abortions via giant loopholes, then yes, that'd be an election winner.

The problem, is Republican's idea of 'moderate' restrictions are all the downsides of European restrictions plus the supply side restrictions that make it difficult to keep a clinic open plus waiting periods and so forth.

If the choice was European abortion laws vs blue state abortion laws, European abortion laws would win. But, the GOP isn't putting forth European abortion laws. It's putting forth unpopular restrictions, being backed by people who have talked about completely banning abortions.

Plus, again, there is a very American-style libertarian defense of expansive abortion laws - 'we trust women and doctors with their reproductive freedom. Have an abortion or don't have an abortion, that's your choice. Meanwhile, the Republican's want to make a government small enough to get between your doctor, yourself, and your own beliefs, because they think they know better than you.'

Trump to his credit does not flip flop too much on abortion. He has never been pro-life, and will not cave to this issue despite pressure from religious organizations. Trump is right to ignore this issue and focus on immigration and the economy, as is Richard Hanania that abortion hardliners turn off moderates.

In around 2016 Trump said that women who get illegal abortions should be punished, it was a big controversy at the time.

It was one of my favorite Trump moments because you could sort of watch him reasoning out his new pro-Life position in real time on camera, and all the pro-life activists were cringing and trying to insert their epicycles of morality that explained how Abortion is Murder but that mothers should not be prosecuted.

It's why I believe that Trump isn't a blathering moron and is, at worst, a clever amateur who is intelligent enough to see the end result of policy that its own proponents have cleverly ducked around. If abortion is murder, then why not arrest the mother? We arrest infanticides and infant abandoners, don't we? That it is politically unpalatable and bad optics is one thing, but perhaps it is a natural consequence of unpopular policy.

"Not a blathering moron" is a pretty low bar for a presidential candidate.

Isn't Hanania full open borders? Maybe i'm mixing him up with someone else but I don't think he's focused on immigration.

Hanania has flip flopped on immigration more times than one can count. His current position is that diversity essentially makes whites more capitalist and less socialist because of tribalism, or something, so immigration is a guard against socialism. He also opposes mass immigration from Africa iirc, he just thinks Hispanics aren’t substantially below the US average so won’t make much of a deleterious difference. I may be misremembering his position.

The problem is Trump regularly talks about being the one who put the three judges who turned Roe on the court during speeches, since he's been told it's a big deal, and he like that he did a big thing. Not because he's a committed pro-lifer, but because he likes having accomplishments. It's why he still talks about the vaccine, even though it's unpopular among his own base.

Plus, to a certain extent, it's actually the reverse, among say, secular non-college educated Obama/Trump voters in the Midwest. You remind them a lot of the Republican Party they're now voting for are weirdos who want to stick their noses in your sisters or daughter's personal life, and go from there. Maybe you don't get them to vote for Biden, but you get them to stay home.

"My health is at risk because if I'm not permitted to abort I might harm myself" is a free at-will golden ticket as long as you're able to memorize and repeat a sentence of that length.

I have a simple solution - allow abortion doctors and psychiatrists and hospitals to be sued by the patients if they have buyers remorse pre-menopause. Same with the ones that transition kids before they are 18 of age. If those are the unadulterated goods that proponents say they are - there won't be issues. People will think twice before rubberstamping one. There should be a skin in the game for the medical personal if they play fast and loose with life altering decisions

So all you would have to do is say "I regret my abortion" and you get a free payout? There's a rather obvious downside to this policy...

Such a policy would be quite interesting.

If abortions are an unalloyed good and women would surely never lie (#BelieveWomen), then allowing "doctors and psychiatrists and hospitals to be sued by the patients if they have buyers remorse" shouldn't move the needle on MD, hospital, or insurance company profitability or risk-profile.

I'm pro-life and believe life begins at conception, not just as a Christian, but much more importantly because I consider it the cleanest and most sane policy from a secular perspective.

I don't think there is a perfectly clean policy here.

There are many evils in the world which due to prudence may not be made illegal, either because the state is not the correct level at which to deal with the problem; or because the state simply lacks the capacity to enforce the law; or because the state lacks the legitimacy to enforce such a law.

I believe that life begins at conception, but I think that the parents have sovereignty over the child while it is in the womb. Murder is evil, but there is no international law or federal law against murder, because we believe that the state government has sovereignty over murder committed within a single state. If the state does not want to punish someone, or wrongfully punishes someone, there is no recourse to a higher sovereign. Analogously, I think that the parents have sovereignty over the unborn child. To kill the child is evil, but they answer to God for that evil, not to the state. However, I am ok with regulating what doctor's can do, since they are already regulated by the state in every aspect. So I think it would be reasonable to rescind the medical license of doctor's who perform D&E's for women with non-medical reasons for wanting an abortion. Doctors have their license to heal, not to kill. But I don't think it would be prudent to pass a law mandating life-in-prison for women who take an abortion pill.

The problem with legally treating the unborn child the same as a two-year-old child is that it opens up a whole can of worms of "child protective services" over-reach. It's not crazy to image a a world where a mother who is on a carnivore diet, or doing something else medically controversial and unconventional gets prosecuted for negligent homicide if she has a miscarriage. Or we could imagine the state simply micromanaging what pregnant women do and eat, the same way the state micromanages what kinds of cribs and baby formula and cars-seats you can buy. (Did you know its basically impossible in America to buy baby formula with animal fat instead of seed oil fat in it, due to government regulation?). There are also some more far out philosophical and legal questions -- for instance imagine a woman who's uterus simply cannot support a baby so all fertilized eggs fail to attach and are passed out of system. Is she committing crimes by having sex since it will result in fertilized eggs that are certain to just die? Catholic morality has some well-developed answers here, but the government bureaucracy does not run on Catholic morality.

Once you start introducing 'exceptions,' you're just immediately back to condoning all abortion. "My health is at risk because if I'm not permitted to abort I might harm myself" is a free at-will golden ticket as long as you're able to memorize and repeat a sentence of that length.

I think it is better to be prudent and play the long game. I think it would be better to have more lose laws that minimize the chances of cases that produce really bad PR. Cases that produce really bad PR are going to undermine support the law and ultimately produce more abortion. There is only so much you can do to prevent evils that happen in private.

Well, I have to congratulate the success of the abortion movement. In my own life time I've seen the change from "the unborn child in the womb" to "it's just a clump of cells, and my convenience trumps everything". Most of the comments on here are that it's not human life, not in the sense that matters, and that whatever the pregnant person wants to do is okey-dokey. The clump of cells has no rights and needs no rights.

If you're old enough, that's a big change in attitudes to pregnancy. And the abortion side have won, no doubt about it, they've changed the Zeitgeist so people do think "just a clump of cells, no biggie, it's not killing".

We don't "attempt" to play god. We are really really really good at it! You can chose to go live in a state of nature any time you wish. It is pretty terrible. Infanticide used to be pretty popular back then.

I wonder if this turns out to be good electoral politics or not. Abortion compromises always strike me as a trust question. What line you draw is just the first step in the game, the far more important question is do I trust you not to take more?

Medical exceptions are often non-starters for Pro-Life activists because they don't trust doctors to draw the line narrowly as to what is an acceptable exception. They are fine, conceptually, with an abortion to actually save the life of the mother, but they worry that medical exceptions will be expanded to the point where it becomes a rubber stamp allowing an abortion wherever requested, regardless of any actual risk to the life of any actual mother. Equally rape, what's to stop any woman from claiming she was raped to abort a child she doesn't want? Because, in all honesty, requiring a conviction before an abortion is so stupid that I don't think anyone can get behind it.

Pro-Abortion types won't trust Republican admin teams to not try and restrict abortion further once they get their foot in the door.

Trump has the advantage that his base trusts him to an absurd extent, probably more than anyone has trusted any American politicians since, what JFK? So even if Pro-Lifers oppose this compromise, they're more likely to turn out and vote for him anyway figuring he won't do it. But will this stop the bleeding among people who are pro-Abortion? Do they trust Trump to pursue a limited compromise?

Pro-Abortion types won't trust Republican admin teams to not try and restrict abortion further once they get their foot in the door.

I'll toss in another one - I don't trust pro-choice hospital attorneys to not just lie about what they think the medical exemption constitutes in order to make their opponents look bad for political reasons. If this sounds unbelievably evil, I am willing to bite that bullet when it comes to my opinion of hospital attorneys.

But yeah, I concur, the chances of getting anyone even slightly to the left of center to trust Trump is very low, and they're not even wrong to think he's a flimflam man that'll say whatever he thinks is popular.

But will this stop the bleeding among people who are pro-Abortion? Do they trust Trump to pursue a limited compromise?

Re-phrased slightly: Will people who are pro-abortion trust the guy who appointed three of the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe? I'm thinking the answer is no.

Trump doesn't have to persuade blue abortion voters who were never going to vote for him, he just has to avoid alienating voters who might vote for him but like abortion. This is probably actually a lesson the GOP could learn from Trump.

Sure, big is the target population here? My impression is this only works for people who think (1) Roe was too permissive on abortion and (2) many Republican proposals are too strict. Not sure how many people that describes.

Equally rape, what's to stop any woman from claiming she was raped to abort a child she doesn't want? Because, in all honesty, requiring a conviction before an abortion is so stupid that I don't think anyone can get behind it.

You don’t need to require conviction, just an accusation to the police. Most supposed rape victims aren’t even willing to do that, which makes their claims slightly suspicious.

"I was raped by a stranger entering my home last night. He wore a ski mask, put a bag over my head immediately, was approximately average height and build."

Does she get the abortion?

Sure, and the police should be able to use the DNA to track down the supposed rapist. If it turns out she lied, then she can face the legal consequences for filing a false police report. Looks like up to a year in prison in my state, plus whatever additional penalty she may face for getting an illegal abortion.

Ok, so I'm dating my girlfriend, she gets raped, gets pregnant. Do I have to hazard the odds that I'm raising the rapist baby at risk of sending my girlfriend to prison?

In a certain sense, yes, but only insofar as our legal system isn’t perfect. You also have to hazard the odds that your girlfriend will die from complications arising out of the abortion.

Edit: Of course, even should she choose not to abort the baby, there’s nothing forcing her (or you) to raise it. Adoptions are a thing.

but much more importantly because I consider it the cleanest and most sane policy from a secular perspective.

Clean yes, sane no.

Most fertilized eggs never make it to the blastocyte stage, just by the totally natural functioning of the body. If you actually count every one of those as a full human with full rights and moral consideration, that's a single cause of death prematurely killing over 50% of the entire human population worldwide, every generation. The only morally sane thing to do if you accepted that premise is to stop all other forms of humanitarian programs and focus the entire world's resources on saving those lives.

That's not a sane outcome.

And that's to say nothing of more practical stuff like IVF, or whether it's negligent homicide to drink when conception happened yesterday and you have no possible way to know that and what that would mean for society, or etc.

Absolutist stances are often the most clean, yes, but they're rarely the most sane.

One thing that bothers me in the abortion debate is that I personally see a lot of granularity within the worth of a human life. If I imagine a hypothetical where I have to pick between saving two eighty-year old men or one eight-year old boy, I will save the boy every time. More over, I would honestly think less of the two men if they advocated for their own lives while understanding the full situation. I do not see any incongruity with my moral intuitions as outlined above, and the moral intuition that it would be wrong to kill one of those eighty year old men. Similarly, I think a fertilized egg is a human life in a very straightforward and technical sense such that I think it is wrong to kill it, but I would not pick to save a fertilized egg over saving the eight year old boy, either(I also wouldn't pick it over the eighty-year old man). As such I generally find most of the extreme claims about the implications of treating a fertilized egg as a life overblown. I am fine with having a category of thing where I think it is wrong to kill it but which I do not think our entire society must upend itself in an effort to protect. Especially not when that protection would be against what would commonly be understood as the 'natural order' of things.

We currently think of full humans as being ... full humans, and yet 100% of them die. How much of our humanitarian efforts are dedicated to immortality research? I think your hypothetical reflects more than anything a poor understanding of how humans actually behave and the kinds of moral intuitions people are mostly running on. I would propose that a huge number of people would see nothing incongruous in holding a funeral for a miscarriage while simultaneously not donating 50% of their income to R&D on how to reduce the number of fertilized eggs that fail to attach.

Ultimately I find health of the mother concerns to be valid, but I can understand why some would worry about the category being stretched too far. Beyond that, I think abortion is very popular and the best case real world policy I could hope for would be something like, safe, legal, and rare.

And of course, I am a hypocrite who purchased a morning after pill for my girlfriend one time after a broken condom, such is life.

If I imagine a hypothetical where I have to pick between saving two eighty-year-old men or one eight-year-old boy, I will save the boy every time. Moreover, I would honestly think less of the two men if they advocated for their own lives while understanding the full situation.

I think a fertilized egg is a human life in a very straightforward and technical sense, such that I think it is wrong to kill it, but I would not pick to save a fertilized egg over saving the eight-year-old boy, either. (I also wouldn't pick it over the eighty-year-old man.)

What does your function for the "default value" of a human look like? (Time since conception) × (time until natural death as estimated by a neutral doctor), generally measured in units of daa2 (decayears squared)?

While I am generally in favor of consequentialist reasoning and am I fan of utilitarianism as a way to think about morality, I am pretty far from having rigorously mathed out my various moral/ethical beliefs.

Something like the formula you outline seems at least directionally similar, but insufficient. I tend to value women over men, children over adults (for reasons not fully captured in age), good people over bad people, etc. While I endeavor to formulate principals and consistency in my thinking around issues of morality, I often feel like the complexities of reality are such that I do not trust my ability to construct a formula that would properly capture the shape of my preferences.

So I think in a perfectly sane world it would be safe to say 'Yes, this is murder, but it's the type of murder that's not a very big deal compared to other types of murders, so we can rationally trade it off against other interests at a reasonable rate'.

But in the actual world we live in, I think once you've agreed to call a thing 'murder,' any hope of rational policymaking is pretty much DOA. Anyone who disagrees with anything you propose, no matter how reasonable or attenuated, can just say 'oh you SUPPORT MURDER' and rely on the context of the word to do their work for them.

I am not sure I buy it.

It seems to me that almost every government that was able to pass pro-abortion laws did so directly in the face of this accusation and under the exact same framing you outlined above. That is, they thought abortion was 'wrong' in some sense but the lesser of two evils and advocated for it specifically by presenting it as a rational trade off against other interests.

The recent spread of euthanasia laws seem to have also come about under similar circumstances.

I think the, abortion is a necessary evil, framing was pretty much universal until relatively recently when the ever ratcheting up US centric culture war got to the point that pro-abortion advocacy was specifically calling for no questions asked, no shame or stigma attached, infinite access to abortion, in response to conservative states trying to limit access. If by real world you mean, current moment, then I agree in the abstract that it would be hard to pass national abortion laws as restrictive as the median EU member state (and said as such), but I suspect this has almost nothing to do with the rhetorical tactic of accusing people of supporting murder.

I guess a lot of this hinges on what you mean by 'calling it murder', but the impression I get is that people are very good at and comfortable using euphemisms for murder.

Because to me it seems obvious the only way to avoid making Tenochtitlan-sized mistakes at some point along our path is to avoid meddling with the primeval forces of nature and attempting to play God in the first place.

This is not as consistent a position as you imagine, unless you intend to bite the bullet all the way to rejecting the polio vaccine.

Polio vaccine was contaminated with a potentionally carcinogenic monkey virus.

Population level studies show no evidence of any increase in cancer incidence as a result of exposure, though SV40 has been extensively studied. A thirty-five year followup found no excess of the cancers commonly associated with SV40.

Emphasis on "potentially" I guess.

It causes cancers in other animals for sure.

Once you start introducing 'exceptions,' you're just immediately back to condoning all abortion. "My health is at risk because if I'm not permitted to abort I might harm myself" is a free at-will golden ticket as long as you're able to memorize and repeat a sentence of that length.

This is completely incoherent and, though I hope to not fall afoul of the rules, inhumane to me. "Zero exceptions" means that you're going to have to own every single one of the nasty and truly horrific instances that show up. When an 11 year old girl shows up pregnant because she was raped by her uncle, you're going to have to look her in the eyes and tell her that actually if we abort the deformed and most likely non-viable foetus that's going to have a 100% chance of killing her upon delivery it might encourage other people to have unnecessary abortions - so she should write her will now. This isn't a hypothetical I plucked out of the ether, either - I feel like it is important to point out that the three exceptions are generally understood to be rape, incest and the life of the mother. That's what you're ruling out when you say no exceptions - that it is better for an underaged rape victim to pointlessly suffer and die because to do otherwise would be "meddling with the primeval forces of nature and attempting to play God".

Of course the issues don't end there - when you actually have a "no exceptions" policy, you're going to have to do some vigorous enforcement. Whenever a woman miscarries or has a stillbirth, you're going to have to send the police in while she grieves to make sure she didn't do anything untoward - after all, maybe that miscarriage was the result of taking a herbal abortifacient or engaging in risky behaviour to induce the death of the child. Every stillbirth and miscarriage becomes a potential crime scene, and if you're serious about "no exceptions" then you're going to have to have a police investigation every single time.

For the record, I'm personally a traditionalist when it comes to abortion - i.e. it is totally fine to get an abortion or simply leave the baby on the side of a wolf-covered mountain until they're a few years old (if they survive, great. if not, the gods didn't favour them anyway).

When an 11 year old girl shows up pregnant because she was raped by her uncle, you're going to have to look her in the eyes and tell her that actually if we abort the deformed and most likely non-viable foetus that's going to have a 100% chance of killing her upon delivery

How do you know it's deformed? You can't assume problems down to inbreeding if the parties are not the result of inbreeding themselves, it takes a few generations to reach Spanish Habsburg levels.

Also it isn't 100% likely to kill her, while this story seems very dubious, maybe it's true. If a precocious puberty five year old could survive, so can an eleven year old.

I am now going to sit back and wait for the mods to scold you for using emotive language and being heated and obsessed with this topic. I've gotten rebukes before for my hobbyhorses, so let's share the love.

EDIT: If pro-abortion types would stick to "abortion for incestuously raped 11 year olds", I'd take that bargain. But they don't and they won't. How many of the people having conniptions over "forced birth" in Texas are at risk of being incestuously raped 11 year olds? But those are the cases that get trotted out when it comes to legal abortion, the same way that trans activists use intersex people as "there is no gender binary, bigot" shields.

This survey comes from 2005, I'd really like to see an updated version, but the vast majority of abortions are for financial reasons. Rape/incest are so miniscule, if we only permitted abortions for those reasons, that would be 1% of all abortions carried out. This is why the pro-abortion side are so hysterical; if the bargain was "we pro-lifers will give in on rape/incest/life of the mother, if you pro-abortion say those are the only permitted abortions", then they would lose the majority of the abortions carried out. No more "oops, I got drunk and we fucked without precautions, I'm not ready for a baby" fix-ups.

The reasons most frequently cited were that having a child would interfere with a woman's education, work or ability to care for dependents (74%); that she could not afford a baby now (73%); and that she did not want to be a single mother or was having relationship problems (48%). Nearly four in 10 women said they had completed their childbearing, and almost one-third were not ready to have a child. Fewer than 1% said their parents' or partners' desire for them to have an abortion was the most important reason. Younger women often reported that they were unprepared for the transition to motherhood, while older women regularly cited their responsibility to dependents.

•Reasons in 2004. Among the structured survey respondents, the two most common reasons were "having a baby would dramatically change my life" and "I can't afford a baby now" (cited by 74% and 73%, respectively—Table 2). A large proportion of women cited relationship problems or a desire to avoid single motherhood (48%). Nearly four in 10 indicated that they had completed their childbearing, and almost one-third said they were not ready to have a child. Women also cited possible problems affecting the health of the fetus or concerns about their own health (13% and 12%, respectively).‡ Respondents wrote in a number of specific health reasons, from chronic or debilitating conditions such as cancer and cystic fibrosis to pregnancy-specific concerns such as gestational diabetes and morning sickness.

The most common subreason given was that the woman could not afford a baby now because she was unmarried (42%). Thirty-eight percent indicated that having a baby would interfere with their education, and the same proportion said it would interfere with their employment. In a related vein, 34% said they could not afford a child because they were students or were planning to study.

In the in-depth interviews, the three most frequently stated reasons were the same as in the structured survey: the dramatic impact a baby would have on the women's lives or the lives of their other children (32 of 38 respondents), financial concerns (28), and their current relationship or fear of single motherhood (21). Nine women cited health concerns for themselves, possible problems affecting the health of the fetus or both as a reason for terminating the pregnancy.

And it's why I won't give an inch on any "but surely only a monster could object" appeals, because I've seen it doesn't stop there. "Oh, life of the mother, but what if it's not an immediate physical risk? Okay, what if it's not physical, how about mental? Okay, what about if the mother threatens suicide? Okay, what if the mother threatens suicide because she would have to drop out of college to have the baby?" and every time the new "just this one little concession" is given, then the next "just this one little concession" is immediately on the table for "but surely only a monster could object".

I mean, the problem for pro-lifers is the vast majority of moderates are OK with "oops, the condom broke or I forgot my birth control" when it's their daughter, sister, et al whose about to go to college, and tells them they missed their period. Which is why in every single vote on the matter, no matter how extreme the pro-choice bill is written, it passes. Even in places like Kentucky, Kansas, and Montana.

Because yes, American's may not like 'up 'til birth' extremists like me (because I trust women and doctors not to be crazy), but if given a choice between me or the median pro-lifer who wants to ban abortion after six weeks, they'll choose no limits every damn time.

Apologies for the late reply - I've been busy with work recently.

How do you know it's deformed?

Because this is a hypothetical example meant to show the absolute worst case for a "no exceptions" policy. I'm not an expert but I believe we do have tests for this kind of thing - and in this particular case it'd just be something easily visible on an ultrasound.

I am now going to sit back and wait for the mods to scold you for using emotive language and being heated and obsessed with this topic. I've gotten rebukes before for my hobbyhorses, so let's share the love.

I didn't feel particularly heated or emotive - it's just that when you say "no exceptions" you open the door to every single horrifying outcome that can result from a policy like that. I chose my example as one that would be allowed if any of those three exceptions were being used, and less so for emotional reasons. But that said, if you think that victims of incestuous rape should carry their trisomy-18 foetus to term and risk their life delivering it, you should come out and say it - because that's what no exceptions means.

EDIT: If pro-abortion types would stick to "abortion for incestuously raped 11 year olds", I'd take that bargain.

I personally am not hiding or trying to be deceptive about my position - I flat out said that I personally believe that abortion should be legal. It isn't a particularly nice thing to have happen, but there are absolutely times when a couple is better off not having a child (especially if said child ended up with a debilitating and permanent medical condition) or delaying having a kid until they're in a less tenuous position. I'll even agree with the pro-lifers that abortion is effectively an evil - but it is in some cases a lesser evil compared to the alternative.

This is a very touchy topic and one where I do have strong opinions, so I'm so hardened by the fake-sobbing "only a monster could possibly object!" emotional manipulation over the decades, that I go "Very well then, I'll be that monster".

I think it's human life. I think we don't have a right to kill humans (self-defence is a different matter, and there we're talking about the lesser of two evils). I don't think abortion is self-defence. The cases most touted are rape/incest/life of the mother. They are also the rarest, maternal mortality is the largest one here, and we've already had a post on how maternal mortality is calculated where figures might be too great.

There are people willing to go online and shout about how abortion is safer than pregnancy. When did we start treating being pregnant like a deadly disease, you want to avoid it the same way you'd try to avoid cancer or being sliced up in a woodchipper?

Hard cases make bad law, and the hard cases are never going to be the stopping point, they're the shield for "I'm healthy, I could have a baby, I could afford to have a baby, it just doesn't suit my plans right now". And as I've said, the mood has changed so drastically on abortion, due to the work of the pro-abortion advocacy over the decades. It truly did start out as "this is something very extreme that should be rare and only a last-ditch approach", and is now "no different to getting your tonsils out".

It truly did start out as "this is something very extreme that should be rare and only a last-ditch approach", and is now "no different to getting your tonsils out".

I can understand the impetus behind destigmatizing abortion, to some extent, even absent any political or ideological motivation. Stigmatize too much and the hard cases you outlined above have their lives ruined, but stigmatize too little and people treat it as form of delayed contraception. There's probably no practical optimal level of stigmatization.

Americans like abortion. They don't like extreme cases where kooky feminists are getting a dozen per while doctors kill viable fetuses. But Americans really don't like restrictions on illness or rape.

If you're an American politician who wants to restrict abortion, you have two options: talk about moderate restrictions Americans like, or stand principled and lose.

avoid meddling with the primeval forces of nature and attempting to play God in the first place

I truly believe that God wants us to play God. We didn't get a paradise on earth. There are all kinds of blind chance BS that wrecks people - cancer, random accidents, horrible parasites from the rainforest, earthquakes and volcanoes. I don't think God is benevolent in an earthly, human sense and I lean towards Deism rather than Christianity. You don't leave your beloved children in the snake pit and watch as some inevitably get eaten by snakes, you wouldn't structure the universe that way - just don't make the snakes in the first place! You wouldn't send an earthquake against your devout Lisbon Christians on a feast day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake

But we do have the tools to fix our problems, if we are determined and committed. There's no law of the universe that says cancer remains forever. If we're wise and efficient, we could cure it. Mole rats live without cancer, it's not impossible. For earthquakes, we could still the Earth's core or disassemble the planets and stars directly.

If God didn't want us to kill, he wouldn't have allowed for weapons, strangulation, bone-breaking... Our skin could be infinitely tough. If God didn't want us to live forever, he could have some mechanism that annihilates souls at a predetermined age. If God didn't want people to sin, he could send down legions of angels or lightning bolts. If God didn't want abortion, he could render fertilized embryos invulnerable.

In reality we have incredible freedom of action, the physical properties of the universe are very permissive. We are encouraged to advance down certain pathways, those who advance are rewarded with wealth and power while those who lag behind are rewarded with humiliation and expropriation. Some choices are of course dead ends - Aztec sacrifice was uncompetitive. These choices are where God's will is most apparent. Our role is to accept the challenge and choose wisely, we can't shrink away from the powers already within our control.

Abortion isn't going away, we can't uninvent the pill, retroactive action may be one of the few things that God really doesn't want. We need to choose how to use this technology such that it improves rather than detracts. You know that it can't be effectively banned, people don't want it, countries can't coordinate on this for a global and effective ban. US states can't even coordinate on banning it, it makes only a marginal difference in outcomes if it's legal in one state, illegal in another. Better to manipulate structures so that children are valued more, that people don't end up in situations where they want to abort, that the abortions that do take place get rid of antisocial or unhelpful people.

But we do have the tools to fix our problems, if we are determined and committed. There's no law of the universe that says cancer remains forever. If we're wise and efficient, we could cure it. Mole rats live without cancer, it's not impossible.

Not directly related to your post but this part made me think of one of my favorite blog posts (about small pox eradication): 500 million but not a single one more.

Is that Jaibot? Did they move away from their own blog and onto Substack?

It is! I suspect so. I recall the original link I had to the article on their blog went dead some time ago but I found the link to the substack via an EA forum post.

That is still more religion than I'm comfortable with, but I agree with your sentiments.

The putative Abrahamic God is god-awful at his job. Leaving aside it doesn't exist, we're better served by Man creating our own Gods in Our image.

One reason I'm so antitheistic is because it's a soporific musk that dulls people to very real pain and suffering and makes them attribute it all to a higher, inscrutable purpose.

What. The. Fuck.

Solve your damn problems. Only if all else fails is choosing to accept them the valid option.

As I've said before, Marx was correct in calling religion the opiate of the masses. I can't knock it on those grounds because I certainly prescribe my own share of opioids, but as always, our intent is to cure, and keeping someone in a morphine haze indefinitely is acceptable only when all efforts fail.

And we're working on that. An actual cure for cancer, aging and other diseases that have plagued us for all of history is in sight, I'd expect it to happen in my lifetime even in the counterfactual world where we weren't making our own superhuman deities that could (if they don't kill us) solve most of our problems. Efforts to make peace with that which should be put down with all the force we can muster is a crime against humanity itself. All the worse that this peace is built off the assumption that the torture and suffering we undergo is because of hidden benevolent meddling.

I'm doing my part. Are you?

I guess I'm more Deist-by-Simulation-Hypothesis, though I've been wrestling with what simulation means for our ability to understand reality.

putative Abrahamic God is god-awful at his job

In a literal sense, sure he's terrible as an omnibenevolent omnipotent being, as Lisbon discovered. But in a practical sense, He has His uses! A God that suppresses marriage between relatives, a God that demands monogamy, a God expected to uphold oaths and enforce pro-social behaviour via punishment in the afterlife, that deity has great power. We could easily list the flaws too. Like all other technologies, religion has pros and cons depending on how it's configured. Many Christians do good work in charity, others do bad work. The suppression of incest alone might have pushed up IQ a couple of points, an inestimable boon for the devout! Anyway, the Christian God is dying, other deities are emerging, including god-machines.

I think there might be some kind of conservation of religiosity going on. Religion is such a powerful entity. Traditionally people had religious feelings about celestial bodies, their dead ancestors and spiritual entities. Environmentalists have religious feelings about plants, animals and industry. Nationalists have religious feelings about their co-ethnics.

You and I have vaguely religious feelings about trends in computing and scientific development. They provide eschatology. There will be semidivine beings soon capable of reading our thoughts and memories (plus trawling through our digital history), capable of vast cruelty or benevolence. We're actually right and have by far the strongest physical/technical forces on our side.

But most people find this laughably silly. I tried to convince some friends of mine about this stuff and they politely suggested I was mentally ill. I'll enjoy gloating to them later on. Most people don't think like we do, they're rooted in aesthetics. They see soy-looking techbros and are repulsed. It's like that cringey kid with the 'In this moment I am euphoric, I am enlightened by my own intelligence' quote that did such terrible damage to atheism. It had nothing to do with metaphysics, yet it was more powerful than 10,000 logical arguments. Even Marxism-Leninism has more pull than our AI-singularitarian beliefs have, it speaks to most people far better than we do. There's great power in these social forces that I wish understood.

Most people don't think like we do, they're rooted in aesthetics.

I accept the premise that some people are more motivated by aesthetics than others, but I also think that many of those who claim to "not care about aesthetics" aren't as entirely free of of the grasp of aesthetics as they imagine themselves to be. If you resonate with this particular vision of infinite power, as opposed to all other competing visions of infinite power, then that clearly reveals an aesthetic preference on your part.

There's great power in these social forces that I wish understood.

I experience the revulsion you noted quite strongly, so I'm happy to answer questions about it.

It's broadly caused by some combination of 1) the general smugness that often accompanies techno-optimism, and 2) the content of the beliefs themselves. I can tolerate somewhat more arrogance from people I already agree with, but even then there's a limit, and past that limit I start to sour quickly. You chose a fitting example - I'm an atheist, but if an atheist starts getting too euphoric in an internet argument then I absolutely start to root against him. I have an instinctual aversion to people who lack humility and I imagine I'm not alone in that.

When Sam Altman styles himself as being at the center of the most important events in human history, all I can think is... dear God, please don't let these people win. Don't let reality be like that.

As for the actual object-level issues, opinions will vary widely, but you should at least be aware that not everyone will find your personal vision of utopia to be very utopian.

as opposed to all other competing visions of infinite power, then that clearly reveals an aesthetic preference on your part

The key thing is that there are no other competing visions of immense power, not in the material physical sense.

I can appreciate the aesthetics of other scenarios and yet I know they won't come about just because I find them cool and superior. I said this before and I'll say it again, the tradbros who say stuff like 'Cool story Roko but your vision of an earth populated by trillions of bugmen has no relevance - the good life is best achieved by an aristocratic band of horseback warriors riding out on the plains'. There is a certain aesthetic quality to the trad lifestyle. I believe it fits human needs quite well. But if it goes up against self_made_human's vision, it gets smashed into paste and trivialized to the point of being pathetic, surviving only on reservations if that. Hey, it already got smashed into paste by 19th century armies.

Imagine the Qing courtier who deeply resented the foreign devils, bringing disharmony with their weird gadgets and disrespectful mercantile practices. Surely China knew better, with all the millennia of philosophy? Well, no they didn't. They fell behind and suffered severely for it. China learnt a very valuable lesson that I fear we've neglected.

Humility and subjective ideas of moral virtue can't save you from superior firepower. I think the greatest kind of humility is respecting the structure of the universe. If the universe favours the cruel, brutish, horseback archer to the hard-working, peaceful peasant - there's nothing we can do about it, the rules hold. If the regimented, robotic columns of riflemen beat the noble, free horsemen, then so be it. If swarms of tiny robots overmatch the manly courage and patriotic zeal of all human warriors, that's that. There can be change on the margins (who gets uploaded, what distribution of resources happens) and these changes are supremely important! But we still go through the phase-change even if we think it's ugly and depraved that clusters of jumped-up graphics cards become so powerful.

The key thing is that there are no other competing visions of immense power, not in the material physical sense.

A literal god wouldn't have to engage in deep space exploration, if he didn't want to. He could furnish himself whatever sort of environment he wanted, for whatever activities he wanted. That's what I meant by competing visions.

The preoccupation with planets and supernovae and immense distances reveals, as I said, an aesthetic preference.

Humility and subjective ideas of moral virtue can't save you from superior firepower.

Your use of this sort of language may be related to why your ideas aren't "speaking to people" the way you want them to.

Solve your damn problems.

The Gay Science, I.24:

Different forms of dissatisfaction. - The weak and, as it were, feminine discontented types are those who are innovative at making life more beautiful and profound; the strong discontents - the men among them, to stick with the metaphor - are innovative at making it better and safer. The former show their weakness and femininity by gladly letting themselves be deceived from time to time and occasionally resting content with a bit of intoxication and gushing enthusiasm, though they can never be satisfied entirely and suffer from the incurability of their dissatisfaction; they are also the promoters of all who know how to procure opiates and narcotic consolations, and consequently they resent those who esteem physicians above priests - thus they assure the continuance of real distress! Had there not been a surplus of these discontents in Europe since the middle ages, the celebrated European capacity for constant transformation might never have developed, for the demands of the strong discontents are too crude and basically too undemanding not eventually to be brought to a final rest. China, for example, is a country where large-scale discontentment and the capacity for change became extinct centuries ago; and in Europe too the socialists and state idolaters, with their measures for making life better and safer, might easily establish Chinese conditions and a Chinese 'happiness', provided they are first able to extirpate that sicklier, more tender, more feminine discontentment and romanticism that is for the moment still superabundant here. Europe is a patient who owes the utmost gratitude to his incurability and to the perpetual changes in his affliction: these incessantly new conditions, these no less incessantly new dangers, pains, and modes of information have finally generated an intellectual irritability that approximates genius and that is in any case the mother of all genius.

The problem with 'returning it to the states' is if you're a purple state Republican, you get questions about what Alabama is doing, and how can we trust you not to do the same?

The normal voter does not care about federalism.

All they know is they hear a lot about Republican's wanting to ban abortion, and perhaps more importantly, every prominent Republican, outside of the 10 most liberal states, have talked their whole careers about abortion. It's kind of hard for a voter to suddenly believe candidates they only want reasonable exceptions when they've desperately tried to get the endorsement from every organization that talks about all abortions being murder since Roe v Wade.

It also doesn't help that those restrictions may be popular in theory, but not when people believe they're the first step to total bans.

Slow news day? Guess I'll ramble for a bit.

Scientists shamelessly copy and paste ChatGPT output into a peer-reviewed journal article, like seriously they're not even subtle about it:

Introduction

Certainly, here is a possible introduction for your topic:Lithium-metal batteries are promising candidates for high-energy-density rechargeable batteries due to their low electrode potentials and high theoretical capacities [1], [2]. However, during the cycle, dendrites forming on the lithium metal anode can cause a short circuit, which can affect the safety and life of the battery [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9].

This is far from an isolated incident - a simple search of Google Scholar for the string "certainly, here is" returns many results. And that certainly isn't going to catch all the papers that have been LLM'd.

This raises the obvious question as to why I would bother reading your paper in the first place if non-trivial sections of it were written by an LLM. How can I trust that the rest of it wasn't written by an LLM? Why don't I cut out the middle man and just ask ChatGPT directly what it thinks about lithium-metal batteries and three-dimensional porous mesh structures?

All this fresh on the heels of youtube announcing that creators must now flag AI generated content in cases where omitting the label could be viewed as deceptive, because "it would be a shame if we (youtube) weren't in compliance with the new EU AI regulations", to which the collective response on Hacker News was "lmao okay, fair point. It would be a shame if we just lied about it."

It would be very boring to talk about how this represents a terminal decline in standards and the fall of the West, and how back in my day things were better and people actually took pride in their work, and how this is probably all part of the same vast conspiracy that's causing DEI and worse service at restaurants and $30 burgers at Five Guy's. Well of course people are going to be lazy and incompetent if you give them the opportunity. I'm lazy and incompetent too. I know what it feels like from the inside.

A more interesting theoretical question would be: are people always lazy and incompetent at the same rate, across all times and places? Or is it possible to organize society and culture in such a way that people are less likely to reach for the lazy option of copy and pasting ChatGPT output into their peer-reviewed journal articles; either because structural incentives are no longer aligned that way, or because it offends their own internal sense of moral decency.

You're always going to have a large swath of people below the true Platonic ideal of a 100 IQ individual, save large scale genetic engineering. That's just how it goes. Laziness I'm not so sure about - it seems like it might be easier to find historical examples of it varying drastically across cultures. Like, the whole idea of the American Revolution is always something that blew my mind. Was it really all about taxes? That sounds like the very-slightly-true sort of myth they teach you in elementary school that turns out to be not-actually-true-at-all. Do we have any historians who can comment? Because if it was all about taxes, then isn't that really wild? Imagine having such a stick up your ass about tax hikes that you start a whole damn revolution over it. Those were not "lazy" men, that's for sure. That seems like the sort of thing that could only be explained if the population had vastly different genetics compared to contemporary America, or a vastly different culture; unless there are "material conditions" that I'm simply not appreciating here.

Speaking of material conditions, Brian Leiter recently posted this:

"Sociological idealism" was Charles Mills's term for one kind of critique of ideology in Marx, namely, a critique of views that, incorrectly, treat ideas as the primary cause of events in the socio-economic world. Marx's target was the Left Young Hegelians (whose heirs in the legal academy were the flash-in-the-pan Critical Legal Studies), but the critique extends much more widely: every day, the newspapers and social media are full of pontificating that assumes that ideas are driving events. Marx was always interested in the question why ideologists make the mistakes they do.

Marx's view, as far as I can tell, was that ideas (including cultural values and moral guidelines) should be viewed as casually inert epiphenomena of the physical material and economic processes that were actually the driving forces behind social change. I don't know where he actually argues for this in his vast corpus, and I've never heard a Marxist articulate a convincing argument for it - it seems like they might just be assuming it (but if anyone does have a citation for it in Marx I would appreciate it!).

If Marx is right then the project of trying to reshape culture so as to make people less likely to copy and paste ChatGPT output into their peer-reviewed journal articles (I keep repeating the whole phrase to really drive it home) would flounder, because we would be improperly ascribing the cause of the behavior to abstract ideas when we should be ascribing it to material conditions. Which then raises the question of what material conditions make people accepting of AI output in the first place, and how those conditions might be different.

A more interesting theoretical question would be: are people always lazy and incompetent at the same rate, across all times and places?

Well, the linked paper is a bunch of Chinese scientists at a Chinese university. Of course, there is shit-tier research done in the West too, plenty of it in fact, but I would bet a lot that the current crop of Chinese researchers are much lazier and more incompetent than their Western peers. I'm not up-to-date enough on the current literature in any field to offer any sort of meaningful first-hand perspective, but when I was closer to it, it always seemed to me that work out of China had more of a me-too, cargo cult feel of copying what Western scientists do. As before, Westerners are guilty of this sort of thing in plenty of cases as well, but my subjective opinion is that China is much, much worse.

People on twitter shit on woke American universities and lowered academic standards in the humanities, and rightfully so, but other countries have different but possibly even worse problems too-like massive amounts of academic fraud that goes unpunished or ignored. This includes plagiarism, auto-generated papers, and citation rings. Same for STEM, which is not immune to this trend of dilution seen elsewhere. I have evidence of citation rings on the arXiv computer science categories, in which there there seems to be very little value or research being produced--just authors citing each other's weak papers and collaborating in the production of said papers to pad CVs. This way more common in the computer science section compared to those 'soft' humanities, in which it can still be reasonably assumed that the putative authors still write their own papers without needing 10+ co-authors for a 10 page paper with 50 citations. It is ridiculous.

Weirdly, I think ChatGPT could make papers better.

Let's be honest, prior to ChatGPT, most papers were still total garbage. Even if they had useful things to say, (which most didn't) the need to write in some sort of garbled academic-ese made them a chore to read at best.

There's a comic where a person says "Wow, with Chat-GPT I can turn a list of bullet points into a whole email". And the person on the other end says "Wow, with Chat-GPT I can turn a whole email into a list of bullet points".

If academics were serious about spreading knowledge, papers would either be presented in a few short pages, or in the style of a textbook, trying to explain complicated information to a reader with imperfect information. In the past, many papers were actually quite short. Nowadays, no one is enough of a Chad to submit a short paper. They have to fill it out with a bunch of bullshit nobody reads. If they deliberately make simple concepts sound complicated all the better.

Why not have ChatGPT do all that, and then the reader can use ChatGPT to know the correct parts to ignore?

Maybe I just suck at introspection, but I honestly don't think my papers are any more complicated than they have to be. I'll cop to some pro forma filler, but the introductory filler actually would be useful to someone that has some general domain knowledge but isn't well versed in the specific area. The discussions suck and probably actually are a waste of time (more study is required indeed). Nothing is deliberately confusing though and I don't think the introduction, methods, or results would be unintelligible to a layman with a passing understanding of the field.

You're one of the good ones!

If you're trying to be understood, a good rule of thumb is this: Dumb it down further than you think you need to. Pretty much everyone overestimates the intelligence/patience/contextual awareness of their reader.

Or as we say in computer land, it's easier to write code than to read it.

I can understand, however, that this can go against the need of the academic to sound intelligent. But it seems like you aren't motivated by that. Anecdotally, I think your writing on themotte is very clear.

Do you have any specific examples in mind of academic writing that you think is needlessly complicated? Most accusations of intentional obfuscation are overblown, I think.

It’s normal for specialized fields to develop their own jargon. I’m in a few niche (non-academic) hobbies and newcomers often accuse us of intentional obfuscation. But to the experienced regulars our words are perfectly clear.

Pretty much everyone overestimates the intelligence of the reader

Academics write for fellow academics, people much like themselves with a similar educational background and usually a similar intelligence level. So they have a pretty good idea of what their readers will find clear and what they won’t.

There’s a problem today where some sub-sub-fields are so specialized that the audience of fellow specialists who are actually capable of understanding the work becomes very small, but I think that’s ultimately a separate issue.

the need of the academic to sound intelligent

This might be foreign to some people, but, using big words is fun. Reading and understanding a complex piece with lots of big words and dense references is also fun (if it’s well written to begin with of course). It’s not always a nefarious plot to bolster one’s social status. Some people just really enjoy reading and writing large amounts of complex text, and unsurprisingly those tend to be the kind of people who go into careers in academia where they get paid to do just that. So I absolutely don’t fault someone for not squeezing all his content into the smallest number of words possible. As the popular saying goes: let him cook.

Intentional obfuscation - sometimes. Far more I observe obfuscated language caused by the authors being sloppy and/or avoiding speaking plainly if they didn't understand something.

Most common: Enamored with big words yet trying to meet the journal word count limit, a big word is used in a way the meaning of the sentence becomes imprecise. Sometimes they have obtained a minor result, but big words are used to make it sound more important than it is. (Others will misunderstand and take the big words a a face value.)

Sometimes the authors are sloppy to extent that they understand meaning of some concept differently than others and never bother to make it explicit. Often the difference in understanding is a genuine difference in scientific opinion, but sometimes (especially in a run-of-a-mill study) it is because the authors failed to understand something. Sometimes the authors have followed "best practices" but do not understand the arguments for the best practices, producing slightly nonsensical approach. Sometimes authors claim to have found a $thing when they actually found $anotherthing. A mistake or misunderstanding is seldom admitted.

Sometimes the authors are sloppy reading or understanding the previous literature: when I see a paper cited in support of simplistic oneliner statement, these days I am never certain the cited reference supports the statement as clearly as implied ("It is known that system of soothing provides excellent results, thus we followed the approach of Tarr and Fether (1845)" -> go read Tarr and Fether, there is no single coherent system of soothing described, but three, and if you ignore the discussion but look at the results, the implications are unclear. Sometimes I suspect malice, more often I suspect laziness -- they never read Tarr and Fether, but they read something else that claimed to use the method of Tarr and Feather and misunderstood it.)

I see a lot of Science by Obfuscation. It's frustrating, because when I'm asked to review one of these papers, I don't know on the front end whether it's garbage or is genuinely using interesting and esoteric techniques from another area of literature that I'm just not familiar with. The latter is a real possibility that I have to spend a lot of time figuring out. Thankfully, I've only very rarely had to throw up my hands and tell the editors that I personally can't figure out what they're on about, and that maybe someone else would be a better reviewer. Unfortunately, the vast vast majority of my other experience is that once I can cut through their language to figure out what they're actually doing, I realize that it's really just dumb simple under the hood, and usually they don't really have any "contribution" over what has come before.

I think a lot of this is variance across disciplines. I was an immunologist and my impression was that the field wasn't generally overrun with bad writing, or at least not the kind of bad writing that I associate with obscurantism. I just went back and tried to take a fresh-eyed look at my most cited paper (which is now old enough that it is almost fresh to read it again) and the thing that would probably be worst for someone outside the field is the alphabet soup nature of cytokine nomenclature. I don't think there's anything to be done about that though, there really just are a lot of cytokines that have conflicting roles in different contexts, differential regulation that's tricky to understand, and names that all kind of sound that same if they're not your old pals.

Other fields trend to either side of this. If I go pick up a physics paper, I'm in over my head pretty quickly (although not if I go to the Nature Physics website where I'm met with titles like Racial equity in physics education research and Towards meaningful diversity, equity and inclusion in physics learning environments on the home page). This isn't because of the authors putting on a show though, their material really is complex and requires a fair bit of background knowledge to avoid getting swamped pretty quickly. In contrast, the Journal of Sociology is silly, resulting in a more performative approach to the work, such as it is.

I'm sure someone has already done it, but something I've been bouncing around a bit is the idea of irreducible complexity in different thought domains. Some things are complex simply because they really are complex, there just isn't any simple way to understand them that doesn't become lossy. Other things really aren't all that complex, but the people in the profession both benefit from complexity and personally enjoy adding it on (much of law seems this way to me when I look at arguments). This shouldn't be read as saying that people in these fields are stupid - unfortunately, it's quite the opposite, they're clever enough to add many layers of complexity to something that should be intelligible to anyone that's interested.

I am sorely tempted to make a "Stop Discovering New Cytokines" meme off the usual template . Interleukins were at their best when they were fodder for speculative Michael Crichton novels.

Accursed immunologists, almost as bad as the geneticists when it comes to bloating up medical textbooks.

My grandpappy never heard of DNA till he was done with med school, and it didn't do him no harm.

shakes fist

people in the profession both benefit from complexity and personally enjoy adding it

This is an accurate description of software development for the past 10 years.

Since all scientific papers are published in English despite 90% of the world’s scientists not speaking English as a native language (and even many of the 10% aren’t great writers) we should assume pretty much all ESL written work in English will be heavily LLM-generated from now on. That they forgot to delete the intro is bad, but it’s not really the same thing as, say, an author generating a book by LLM because the value - if there is any - will be in the data, not the abstract per se.

Given the already high rates of data fabrication inside but especially outside the West, I’d assign very little weight to any data from a paper where the authors, reviewers, and editors don’t even check for howlers like the ones quoted.

More broadly, speaking from the sausage factory floor, I can say that the trend in high-level publishing in the humanities increasingly seems to be towards special issues/special series where all papers are by invitation or commissioned. This creates some problems (harder for outsiders to break in, easier for ideologue editors to maintain a party line), but in general seems like an acceptable stopgap measure for wordcel fields to cover the next 5-10 year interregnum where LLM outputs are good enough to make open submission impossible, but not quite good enough to replace the best human scholars.

The thing is, those fields were already close to pure BS. That they can put off the transition from human-generated BS to machine-generated BS for a few years doesn't really matter to anyone outside the field.

This raises the obvious question as to why I would bother reading your paper in the first place if non-trivial sections of it were written by an LLM. How can I trust that the rest of it wasn't written by an LLM?

Presumably because the paper includes an experiment and experimental results that are presented accurately, and allow you to learn something new about the field.

I mean, seriously. It's idiotic that a scientific career is gated behind having to write formulaic papers like this, a sane world would have the people who are good at devising and running novel and useful experiments do that, not spend half their time trying to write summaries (to say nothing of grants and lectures).

The numbers are the useful thing in the paper, if the experimental method and results are presented accurately then who cares whether the intro was written by an LLM. This is one of the few cases where tech like that could solve an actual problem we have, of scientific careers being gated behind being a competent and prolific writer.

Of course, the fact that prompt-related text was left in may signal a level of incompetence or rushing that casts doubt on the quality of the actual science, and that's a fair worry. But if that's not the case, then great, don't waste scientist's time on writing.

Presumably because the paper includes an experiment and experimental results that are presented accurately, and allow you to learn something new about the field.

There are a whole lot of important and insightful scientific papers (in hard sciences) that don’t deal with experiments at all. Eg. This seminal paper that forms the basis of the entire field of digital signal processing and all modern long (and many not so long) distance communications.

When I’ve had to read papers (some hundreds of them) because of my studies or career, only a small minority have dealt with experiments and almost none with experiments that would have been feasible to reproduce without major investment in time and / or resources.

Consider also the vast majority of theoretical papers that have been published but you didn't read. Why people read seminal papers and vast majority of other published papers lie forgotten? Usually the papers that become seminal have special something that makes them useful and applicable in practice, and that applicability is discovered by testing against the reality. In experimental sciences, the testing against reality comes from running and reporting formal experiments. Sometimes in the form of explaining past observations and experiments. In engineering, people might not bother reporting experiments, but they integrate the useful results and principles in their products (which usually must be functional in the physical reality). In pure theory land, the mathematical proofs take the place of experiment (very difficult to come up with, often difficult to verify).

There are few jobs that don't have some amount of admin work associated with them. Generally you have to communicate about what you're doing with other people, and communication requires words.

Officially my job is to write code, but over half of an average day for me is spent writing emails and summaries and talking on the phone with people, because I need to talk about what I've been doing, what still needs to be done, and what the best way to get it done is.

Science can't progress if people just churn out experiments in silence and dump out big tables of numbers. If you want to say, argue that the balance of available evidence points towards dark matter theories instead of MOND, or if you want to argue that string theory is no longer a viable research program, then you need to use words. There's no way around it. Even if you do have someone who's silo'd away from the administrative processes as much as possible, they still need to communicate using words at some point.

Could you just put the content of your paper/argument in bullet point format and feed it into an LLM to clean it up and make it sound nice? That wouldn't be the worst thing in the world, but it would depend heavily on the specifics of each individual case. Almost all of the actual content would have to already be present in the input you give to the LLM, which means you're still going to be writing a lot of words yourself. If the LLM does a non-trivial amount of thinking for you, then it raises questions of plagiarism and academic dishonesty.

an actual problem we have, of scientific careers being gated behind being a competent and prolific writer.

I can't see how this is an actual problem.

It's hard to imagine a competent scientist who is somehow so bad at writing that he can't clear the bar for your typical academic science journal, because verbal ability is highly correlated with IQ in general.

As for "prolific", that seems like even less of an issue, because the limiting factor in how many journal articles a scientist can publish is definitely not the amount of time it takes to write the words.

Why would I believe the paper that starts with a generated introduction had a real experiment behind it, and the results section was not also generated by an LLM?

The only thing keeping the science honest is the replication of experiments. If it is very cheap to describe and publish experiments that never happened, but running a real experiment to verify is costly, why would anyone try to replicate any random experiment they read about?

Unless someone comes up with a solution to reorganize the Science (or the eschaton is immanentized), I think the medium term equilibrium is going to look like even more weight given to academic credence-maintaining networks of reputation, less weight to traditional science (publishing results and judging publications on the merits of their results).

Of course, the fact that prompt-related text was left in may signal a level of incompetence or rushing that casts doubt on the quality of the actual science, and that's a fair worry.

A more interesting theoretical question would be: are people always lazy and incompetent at the same rate, across all times and places? Or is it possible to organize society and culture in such a way that people are less likely to reach for the lazy option of copy and pasting ChatGPT output into their peer-reviewed journal articles; either because structural incentives are no longer aligned that way, or because it offends their own internal sense of moral decency.

As a teenager, I was a massive unkempt slob with zero shame until I took an interest in girls. Once I developed a crush on some girl, I'd look back in horror at my habits (wearing the same sweat pants every day, having a shitty diet), and tried to clean up my act 100% even in private where my actions are invisible. By nature, humans are highly-efficient pleasure seeking machines, and the only thing that meaningfully interrupts this behavior is some kind of ideal. We can gloat that American scientists probably engage in LLM bullshit less than Chinese scientists, but the Americans aren't far from doing it either. If Americans aren't forming cheating circles like the Chinese, it's not because we're above it so much as we're amateurs at cheating while the Chinese are masters at it.

That seems like the sort of thing that could only be explained if the population had vastly different genetics compared to contemporary America, or a vastly different culture; unless there are "material conditions" that I'm simply not appreciating here.

Like most conflicts, it was framed in terms of ideals. Secular moderners don't really have ideals, so we struggle to imagine going to war over anything, really. Conversely if you've got a heightened sense of morality, anything is worth fighting over, and some men like Cicero or Boethius stick to their guns for an entire lifetime and pay the price. The founding fathers modeled themselves after these men, "Give me liberty or give me death", and it worked. Ideals are the only thing that fully override the comfort-seeking monkey brain, so if you want a nation of honest men, you have to make them genuinely value honesty.

Yes. There was a very stubborn principled mindset centuries ago where people would face certain or near-certain death rather than just let some ideological issue slide.

"Admit that Jesus existed always as part of God, or be burned alive very slowly." "I'll take the flames please."

Top-level LLM poasting. You have my seal of approval.

You're always going to have a large swath of people below the true Platonic ideal of a 100 IQ individual, save large scale genetic engineering.

IQ scored are renormalized regularly, so in a society that did do that, the median IQ would be 100 again (though they would be far higher on previous scales, this is a minor nitpick, I'm in the mood for those)

Which then raises the question of what material conditions make people accepting of AI output in the first place, and how those conditions might be different.

One obvious answer would be that the LLMs have become good enough that accepting their output, in a research setting, actually does achieve the objective of creating and promulgating useful knowledge.

I don't think we're there quite yet, but it's a sign we're close if so many are leaking through the cracks in the hallowed peer review process. You almost certainly couldn't achieve that with GPT-2, it would be too incoherent, unless you went with absolute bottom-barrel pay to publish journals, whereas they're cropping up in modestly respectable ones and even the odd prestigious journal.

People, including scientists, have always been lazy to some degree. That usually manifested as having grad students or even undergrads doing the grunt work. Now we've got new avenues.

Besides, as far as I'm concerned, we're only a few years away from LLMs doing "legitimate" research, and then becoming outright superhuman. This is just a transitional stage to get there, we have to deal with ersatz good enough to fool checked out reviewers section for only a bit longer. And soon enough we'll have the journals using AI themselves to notice and filter out the crap.

I don't think we're there quite yet, but it's a sign we're close if so many are leaking through the cracks in the hallowed peer review process.

I think these cases demonstrate the "peer review process" is not and was not working very well in the first place, and to the extent it was working, it was because of the remaining scraps of integrity among people writing and submitting manuscripts. Thus the reviewers didn't have to do much serious reviewing, like reading all of the manuscript and thinking about it.

I agree peer review is a flawed idea applied terribly.

The incentive structure simply makes no sense. Busy academics are expected to do a great deal of work and cognitive effort in return for little to no recognition or recompense. It's a testament to natural honesty that it sometimes works even in a subpar manner.

Unless you actively incentivize things like performing replications, it's all for naught. We wouldn't have a replication crisis in the softer sciences if that wasn't the case. At least it's more obvious in the harder ones when something plainly does not work.

It needs to be torn down and rebuilt, but easier said than done for such a loadbearing structure in Science™.

I'm now curious as to how much of this has started seeping into Law Review and Bar Journals, or if the standards there are still high enough and the reviewers still attentive enough that they'd get caught before publication.

Okay, I'll go.

The big news this weekend was that Trump had a rally and said that, should he not be elected, the U.S. auto industry would be overrun with cheap Chinese imports. He used the word "bloodbath".

The mainstream media, which we're assured rarely tells outright lies, decided to find the exact dividing line between an outright lie and "still technically the truth". You can be the judge of whether they succeeded. For just one of many examples, Joe Scarborough ran a segment where the words "Trump warns of a bloodbath for America if he loses" were emblazoned on the bottom of the screen.

Of course, if any of this surprises you in the slightest, you haven't been paying attention. It's slightly boring at this point and would be funny except so many boomers still watch that dross.

What I want to focus on is the actual substance of Trump's claim. I think that, this time, Trump is on to something. The Detroit auto industry is about to have a head-on collision with China and get absolutely wrecked.

Already, Detroit is not in good shape. The Big 3's share of U.S. auto sales has fallen from 90% in 1965 to just 44% by 2018. (I'm sure it's much lower now). It gets worse. The only reason that Detroit has done this well is a 25% tariff on foreign light trucks that was passed by LBJ in retaliation for European tariffs against U.S. chicken.

In terms of small cars, Japanese automakers have been beating Detroit for decades. For luxury vehicles, Germany has worldwide dominance. That leaves only light trucks and SUV's, where Detroit still performs well only due to tarriffs. We've sort of forgotten about Detroit since 2008. The perception is that things were bad for awhile, but then the automakers got bailed out and they're okay now, especially #girlboss CEO Mary Barra.

This isn't true. The stock prices of the Big 3 have limped along. GM, once the 2nd most valuable U.S. company, now has a market cap only 2% the size of NVIDIA. And, if the Big 3 haven't gone bankrupt again, it's only by jettisoning high-paid union labor. Michigan, once a well-off state, now ranks 39 out of 50 in household income, falling well behind former hick states like Texas and North Carolina.

Enter China.

China is already, by far, the world's largest producer of automobiles, producing about 3x as many as the U.S. Also, China can sell an EV for $10,000. While I'm sure there would need to be changes for the U.S. market, it would not be too expensive at scale. Get ready for hordes of these "shitty but good enough" cars to enter the market.

"No one will ever buy a Chinese car" you laugh, nearly dropping your monocle into your glass of cognac. I don't think this opinion can withstand serious scrutiny. Japanese cars once had a similar reputation. Nowadays, choosing to buy an American car over a Japanese one is seen as either extremely patriotic or moronic. Even if quality never improves, people still buy plenty of Kias and Hyundais. How many more would they buy if the price was reduced by 30-50%?

So let's say all of this is true. A wave of Chinese imports are coming which will cripple the U.S. auto industry. How will voting for Trump help? My gut feeling is that Trump can't save Detroit but that, unlike Biden, he'll at least try.

For most of the period of the 1980s-present, the world has been a huge beneficiary of free trade. The rich in the U.S. have grown much richer, obscenely so. But the biggest gains have been won by the working class in developing nations, especially China. Despite all that there have been losers. The biggest losers are the working class in rich nations, especially in areas that compete with China.

The traditional government solution to manufacturing being outsourced has been to offer job retraining and lots of government benefits to the affected class. But this just doesn't work. The places that have been affected by blue collar job loss are now hollowed-out shells of their former selves.

Trump will probably at least try to ban or tax Chinese cars. Is this the right thing to do? Maybe, maybe not. It will cost American consumers a lot of money, and it will depress wages in China. In aggregate, the tariffs will probably make the world a worse place. But they will help the group that has lost so much and which has been ignored and scorned for decades. The group Biden pretends to care about but which Trump actually does.

Edit: Just saw this retweeted by Crémieux:

America's most affluent metro areas in 1949: https://twitter.com/DKThomp/status/1769891112095740274/photo/1

You'll never guess who's #1.

Domestic brands are not thriving, but not doing that badly either . I think the post-2013 era big, luxury trucks and SUVs, which have high markups and became especially popular post-Covid, saved them from certain demise in the early to mid 2000s. Japanese brands cannot compete on size.

This isn't true. The stock prices of the Big 3 have limped along. GM, once the 2nd most valuable U.S. company, now has a market cap only 2% the size of NVIDIA. And, if the Big 3 haven't gone bankrupt again, it's only by jettisoning high-paid union labor. Michigan, once a well-off state, now ranks 39 out of 50 in household income, falling well behind former hick states like Texas and North Carolina.

A lot of this can be explained by valuation, which is not the same as earnings. Tech companies tend to trade at higher valuations/multiples compared to auto.

The big news this weekend was that Trump had a rally and said that, should he not be elected, the U.S. auto industry would be overrun with cheap Chinese imports. He used the word "bloodbath".

This is smart rhetoric by Trump to help win those swing voters , like Michigan. Similar to wall and other promises, not much will come of it should he win though.

Domestic brands are not thriving, but not doing that badly either .

What do you mean? They lose market share every year and their stock prices trail the S&P by huge margins. I just checked the stock price of GM and it's the same price today as it was in 2014. While it's true that the Big 3 are still making money on paper, we haven't had a recession in 15 years.

A lot of this can be explained by valuation, which is not the same as earnings. Tech companies tend to trade at higher valuations/multiples compared to auto.

There is a reason for this.

Here is what tech earnings look like: 10,12,15,19,25,...

Here is what automaker earnings look like: 7,3,(-1),4,11,(-50)

When valuing a cyclical you have to take into account full-cycle earnings. Do this and the carmakers are more than fairly valued. They are just not a good businesses and haven't been for decades. Detroit is dying.

This is smart rhetoric by Trump to help win those swing voters , like Michigan. Similar to wall and other promises, not much will come of it should he win though.

Probably right. But didn't he build some of the wall though?

They lose market share every year and their stock prices trail the S&P by huge margins. I just checked the stock price of GM and it's the same price today as it was in 2014.

These stocks have been paying 5% dividends for the last 10 years. They have single-digit P/E ratios. People aren't going to stop wanting cars anytime soon unless the singularity happens, at which point it doesn't really matter what your portfolio allocation is. EVs aren't going to take off as expected. They're too inconvenient. You can't buy-low/sell-high without buying low, and right now automakers are low.

I couldn't disagree more with your investment thesis. On a cyclical, buying low looks like $BTU for $2/share in 2020. The cycle always goes down further than you expect (Hofstadler: even when you take this into account)

But I definitely agree with your assessment of EV's. There are massive problems and externalities that need to be dealt with before mass adoption. I fear the government is going to force it down our throats anyway. The Biden administration has certainly been pushing in that direction, especially when the "I did that" stickers start showing up at gas stations.

See, electric cars do have use cases- commuter mobiles and mildly sporty luxury cars. Both of which Tesla is doing quite well in.

The government’s unwillingness to promote hybrids to nearly the same extent is inexplicable, considering that technology is ready for prime time.

The government’s unwillingness to promote hybrids to nearly the same extent is inexplicable, considering that technology is ready for prime time.

Sure it's explainable. They don't want to promote hybrids. They just want to ban cars.

As a car consumer: sounds great! I've been thinking about trading mine in for a while now. Excited to see what's on offer. Hell, GM already sells a truck I'd like to buy, but only in China. Maybe Chinese competition can get them to bring it over here?

Why should I, and every other car buyer, pay more money for cars so that Mary Barra can keep pulling down $30M/year?

All the more galling when you realize that the heads of the Japanese carmakers producing superior cars make a fraction as much money.

That's probably down to culture in the Japanese business world.

That truck is never going to be sold in the US because, outside of you and possibly a few other people, no one is going to buy it. As much as you and other people may complain about the lack of a small, basic truck with a five speed transmission, and 2-wheel drive, there isn't much of a market for one. Most people I know who own trucks they don't need don't own whatever the current versions of the Ranger and S-10 are, they own F-150s and Siverados and Rams and Tundras. Few people actually need a truck, and those who are buying ones they don't need want big penis trucks with huge engines and high towing capacity and 4-wheel drive and and interior like a Cadillac, not some 90 hp puttmobile. They'd sell about as well as those old VW Rabbit trucks that had their fans but didn't exactly take the country by storm.

I think you may be underestimating the degree CAFE standards have made trucks giant in the US.

I second @AvocadoPanic, I think that the economic incentives via CAFE standards on automakers have made superhuge trucks artificially competitive in the market.

Most people I know who own trucks they don't need don't own whatever the current versions of the Ranger and S-10 are, they own F-150s and Siverados and Rams and Tundras.

There is no modern version of the Ranger and the S-10, and the used market for Rangers and S-10s is an obscenity that shows just how much Americans do want small basic trucks. A 2010 Ranger with 150,000 miles on it will easily go for $15,000. A similar Ranger with less than 100,000 miles on it can break $20,000. I saw one 2011 with 50,000 miles listed for $28,000 - and I have no doubt it has already sold.

You can buy a pretty basic Nissan frontier if you want, and in fact lots of people do.

Except frontiers and tacomas sell like hotcakes, and so do ford mavericks. That little Honda truck kinda does but it definitely does enough business to keep in business. Ford rangers and dodge Dakotas have a flourishing used market.

Japs have no difficulty selling compact trucks, nor do used car dealers more generally. And point of fact when American auto manufacturers introduce compact trucks they sell very well indeed.

For some reason- probably the regulatory one avocadopanic is gesturing at- there’s simply not a lot of compact trucks being produced.

Now owning a full sized pickup truck is a status symbol, that’s true, and it’s one of the few things Detroit stays competitive at(japmobile full sized trucks don’t have quite the same cache), but I see more Nissan frontiers on the road than any other model of truck and I live in one of the top-10 wealthiest red tribe areas in the country.

I was partially being facetious, but I don't think that size is the main problem. 90 hp is going to be a tough sell, considering that there aren't many cars on the American market anymore that get less than 100. Even a base model Corolla gets nearly twice the HP. Rear wheel drive is basically a nonstarter. The only people I know who have 2wd trucks are contractors. I know people who have been looking for used small trucks for a long time, and when I worked for the Boy Scouts we'd occasionally have a work truck we were getting rid of. I remember one was available, it needed a flywheel but they'd have let it go for $200. Everyone lost interest when I told them it was 2wd, because there's nothing fun about a 2wd Ranger. And while I have no real basis for this, I'd be willing to bet that the interior is chintzy as hell. I don't think it's that people don't want smaller trucks, it's that they don't want that specific small truck.

Ah, I see. You’re correct- Americans don’t want the kinds of base model cars that are commonplace in other countries, those base model Nissan frontiers that sell so well are still a lot more luxurious than Chinese or Mexican model cars. Heck, commercial vehicles tend to be more luxurious than the average car on the street in China.

Americans don’t want the kinds of base model cars that are commonplace in other countries

Americans aren't really given the choice.

Many of the trucks I see in use commercially are much larger than they need to be for their role. Larger more expensive trucks then add to the overhead of many businesses that rely on them. You have to mow many more lawns at higher rates to move your equipment with a current year truck than a compact truck from the 1980's. Unless you needed the towing capacity the s-10 1/4 ton pickup adequate for many roles and were ubiquitous on job sites when I was a teen. We were still using 1970's Datsuns.

The interiors were spartan, I miss bench seats.

What of the usual economic arguments against this sort of thing?

That is: why keep investing national resources in a less profitable (as the markets tell us) industry rather than better ones?

Note that I am not endorsing a high-tariff world view. In general low tariffs are a win-win-lose and thus positive sum.

I am pointing out that Trump is right about Chinese cars and seems to tap into the (fully justified) American working-class resentment pretty well. American factory workers got the short end of the stick. Almost everyone benefits (hey, cool cheap cars!) while they get broken communities and welfare.

Tariff market shortfall should quite honestly be a defense budget line item and it's strange to think that nobody really considers it like that; if not from ensuring a war with external powers can be effectively prosecuted without external supply chains and expertise, then from ensuring a war with internal ones does not start due to economic inequality.

I guess what I don't see in this resentment is that the UAW was ultimately let down not by free trade, but by Detroit's perpetual inability to produce a competitive product. If the UAW had been assembling prettier cars with better reliability, we wouldn't be here. I don't see why we'd give the engineers in Detroit another chance to make another fucking Buick?

In fairness to Detroit, all the competition comes from countries that ruthlessly excluded American cars, raised high tariffs so local industries could build strength, or stole all the engineering secrets and profit.

Ok, what does that have to do with the consummate inability for Ford to build a Camry competitor between 2003-2018?

I liked the Focus and wanted one as my first car after graduating, but they stopped selling it before it came time to get a new car, alas.

I think what happened is Detroit got disrupted by foreign automakers. Clayton Christensen's model of "Disruption" is probably too broad and contains too many predictions for me to get into here. But, basically, Japan came in and dominated the lowest end of the market Detroit was happy to concede, then the Japanese got better and came for better markets. Broadly, now, Detroit has fled to the most elaborate high-end markets, and they're stuck making cars according to a failed model that can only continue to die out.

Tariffs alone probably won't save Detroit, but Trump is probably right that a bloodbath is coming for the American auto market.

To be fair, some of that is regulatory and/or government policy based- US legal environs definitely pushed towards a more adversarial relationship between the UAW and management than was strictly necessary, for one example, while Japanese competitors mostly didn’t have to deal with that.

The electric F-250 idiocy ford is pursuing is also hard to see with a non-US based company.

The UAW was really bad though. It doesn't matter how well you design a car if the workers hide bottles in the door panels as a joke. Management and engineering had plenty of flaws but the UAW also deserves some of the blame.

Even from a purely economic viewpoint, international trade is great only as long as there are no supply chain disruptions.

Having at least some industry at home makes sense from a strategic viewpoint. Not only are you better able to handle supply chain disruptions in the short term, you also keep the necessary expertise around. As long as you are making cars, you are also teaching people to make cars, to run the factories and so on.

If the US stops manufacturing cars, and in 20 years' time it turns out the US can't import cars anymore for whatever reason, perhaps a war or something, they will have to restart from scratch. Scaling up is one thing, but if nobody remembers how to make a car anymore and has to dig up old books, and if there are no working factories around, it will take a very long time before anything is produced again, let alone anything of acceptable quality.

You pay for this with inefficiency in the here and now, that's true.

You pay for this with inefficiency in the here and now, that's true.

Indeed. I think the question is, if we decide to pay for it, who should pay for it and how should that cost be assessed.

For example, in order to prop up the US shipping industry, the Jones Act creates certain mandates that are moderately inefficient. Opinions can differ on whether the benefits to preparedness are worth it, but there is a separate stream of opinions on whether that cost should be passed disproportionately to HI, PR and to a lesser extent the LA metro area.

In terms of small cars, Japanese automakers have been beating Detroit for decades. For luxury vehicles, Germany has worldwide dominance. That leaves only light trucks and SUV's, where Detroit still performs well only due to tariffs. We've sort of forgotten about Detroit since 2008. The perception is that things were bad for awhile, but then the automakers got bailed out and they're okay now, especially #girlboss CEO Mary Barra.

I don't think that is the perception, but I guess it must be yours, because it misses a yuge number of developments since then.

Detroit won't be competing with any $10,000 import hatchback, because they don't even make anything small anymore. Ford literally makes nothing in a sedan or coupe except the Mustang. GM still makes the Malibu, for some bizarre reason, and a couple Cadillac also-rans. Ford, GM, and Chrysler spent decades trying to make a family sedan to compete with the Camry and the Accord, and failed completely. They never managed to produce a car that matched the Camry and Accord in quality, reliability, or features. Eventually, they just ceded the space altogether, and refocused on SUVs and trucks exclusively.

At the same time, Ford and GM poured billions into Lincoln and Cadillac over the years, trying to develop luxury brands that would go blow-for-blow with the Germans. They failed, spectacularly, over and over, then landed ass-backwards on a successful luxury branding with the top trim six figure pickup truck. The only American car company to successfully build a luxury sedan to compete with the Germans is Tesla.

Luckily, fat American tastes run towards unnecessarily large pickups and SUVs. But for the $10k import hatchback, the question quickly becomes: what used car are you competing against for $10k? Prior recent efforts at bottom-tier economy cars have largely failed in the USA because of the increasingly quality and survival of used cars, which for various reasons are less of an issue in other markets. The average car on the road is entering its second year of middle school. Will people purchase a Chinese car new over an older Escape or Rav4? Time will tell.

Tesla's success can largely be attributed to building EVs as status symbols, EVs that were functionally superior to every ICE car on the road, looking great and blowing them out of the water on acceleration, silent and potent. Tiny EV penalty boxes have failed over and over, because they deliver a worse experience than an equivalent ICE car. Maybe Chinese manufacturing will solve that problem.

Detroit still wins at light trucks because of the 25% tariff. Mid-size SUV's aren't considered light trucks and so don't have the tariff. Those will be next on the chopping block as Detroit will be swamped by Chinese imports (as well as continued erosion from superior Japanese vehicles).

But I wouldn't say that trucks are fully safe either. Even with the tariff, Chinese vehicles will be cheap enough to dominate. One thing to keep in mind that many cars are not purchased directly by consumers, but by fleets.

China is in a good position here because they can leapfrog directly to EV's. The Toyota hybrid drivechain is a miracle of modern engineering. Fortunately, China doesn't have to compete with that directly. They can just skip directly to EV's. EV's have fewer moving parts and are much simpler to make. China already dominates the battery market, producing 10x more than the U.S. and about 80x more than the U.S. when we exclude the Nevada gigafactory. Most likely, they will use industrial policy to ensure favorable battery prices to local champions, making the Big 3 pay much higher prices and making them even more uncompetitive.

Detroit still wins at light trucks because of the 25% tariff.

Detroit does well at full-sized pickups because a ford F-series or a Ram is a status symbol to a certain crowd. Except for the ford maverick, Detroit mostly loses on compact trucks to Toyota and Nissan, tariff or no.

Tiny EV penalty boxes

Oh, you don't think the 2013 Leaf (that goes 40 miles, then the battery's dead) is a good commuter car, or that trying to cargo-cult Tesla's "just put screens literally everywhere" is a solid business strategy? That's something not even the German or Japanese brands have figured out (given the Leaf is a Nissan product, though maybe they don't count?).

Will people purchase a Chinese car new over an older Escape or Rav4? Time will tell.

Note that even Mitsubishi discontinued the Mirage, which is a better product than the Chinese will be able to offer and it still barely broke 30K units a year in the largest auto market in the world. I don't think people would buy them even if they were 10,000 dollars because like-new examples already are.

I do agree that it's impossible to make a nice EV simply because every product is still an alpha-quality product, and of the 3 companies that are releasing solid beta-quality products only one is expanding (Lucid is state-owned so money's no object for them; Rivian by contrast is scaling back significantly).

even Mitsubishi discontinued the Mirage

It's only a rumor that Mitsubishi plans to discontinue the Mirage in the US by 2025. Mitsubishi has not actually confirmed the news reports.

Huh, my news must have been out of date (I thought they were going to be done after 2021). Still, though, ~30,000 units a year isn't exactly a success story given the Big Three have axed more successful cars (to say nothing of every other Japanese maker)- it is a market, but wouldn't they rather sell an SUV on an 8 year loan at 15% APR?

30,000 units a year

Only 13,000 Mirages were sold in the US in 2023, vs. 43,000 non-hybrid Outlanders.

Huh, and now I can't even get my sources right.

It's actually shocking that- unless Google failed me again- even the Miata moves about that many units a year (in the US). No wonder they're always the answer.

unnecessarily large pickups

This is also regulation at work.

Previous generations of Americans loved light compact pickups like the Chevy LUV, Datsun 620, Isuzu Hombre, etc.

"Thanks Obama era fuel standards for forcing cars to greatly grow in size."

But once one of these obviously bad policies is implemented we are inexplicably stuck with it forever. So I suppose Trump and Biden share equal blame.

But once one of these obviously bad policies is implemented we are inexplicably stuck with it forever.

There's an old quip about the liberals job being to make the mistakes and the conservatives jobs being to make sure no one can fix them.

Not really, the American compact pickups largely died natural deaths as the Big 3 couldn't crunch the numbers to deliver a ranger that was much cheaper than an f150. As the full size have grown more expensive, we're seeing the little guys return.

Ford literally makes nothing in a sedan or coupe except the Mustang.

The Focus is even a class smaller than the Accord.

Discontinued, already in the USA, after 2025 in Europe.

Fascinating; I seem to see quite a lot of small Ford Focuses, Fiestas, and Mondeos here in the UK.

I still see plenty of them over here too still on the road. But they're deader than disco.

Really, they're getting rid of them even in Europe?

But the Focus is not sold in North America, and hasn't been for 6 years now.

Crazy, didn't know that.

Every American automaker threw in the towel on compact cars around '18, around the time the market really got used to real interest rates being in the negatives. And sure, the Civic and Corolla survive, but they're much larger than they used to be and a far cry from what they were in the early 1990s (partially because people in the position to own cars are richer now and expect more, and partially because it's functionally illegal to make small cars as the work required to get them to pass crash testing isn't worth it for a market that small).

Eventually, they just ceded the space altogether, and refocused on SUVs and trucks exclusively.

This is true of the Detroit motor companies, but I'm not completely comfortable calling that "Japanese automakers defeating American manufacturers": I've known lots of friends and family that drive "import" brands that were wholly built in America. And looking at the job postings for Honda and Toyota, it looks like there are no shortage of design engineering positions around the US either. At one point 30 years ago, it may have seemed imminent that American auto manufacturing would have gone extinct, but looking at it from a 2024 perspective, that conflict seems to fall on different lines: Detroit and its largely rust-belt, union factories versus more recent construction sunbelt at-will manufacturing funded by globalized brands.

I think some of this relates to the economics (and international trade politics) of transporting assembled cars versus franchising a new factories elsewhere, but while there would be some egg-in-the-face for Detroit if BYD, JAC, or Geely start selling lots of cars onto American roads, but if those cars are largely built by American hands and at least partly designed by American engineers, it's conceivably not that different from where we are today. The economics of Chinese Communism probably complicate this somewhat, but, as the kids say, it's complicated and it's not completely unfair to point out that the US government owned a decent chunk of GM for a while. I think it's plausible it could get horse traded by political leaders into a victory for globalism (similar to how the "Japan takes over the world" trope has been negotiated down to seemingly nation-less multinational corporations and occasional infusions of pop-culture), but I wouldn't bet heavily on that outcome today.

I've often felt that a significant part of the defeat of the Big 3 was just mind-share. I daily a Buick from the 2010s, and it has met my needs in every way. I've never had to put it in the shop beyond tires, fluid changes etc. It's a great car in general. But by the 2010s, the battle was already lost - there was no car that Americans could put out that would displace Toyota and Honda in the minds of the American public.

On Reddit, if cars are mentioned in any thread, you will never see a recommendation other than Toyota or Honda. It is 100% lockstep. Even if you could get 90% of the reliability from an old Ford Taurus at 50% of the cost, the hive mind has decided. I do get that - I've ridden in a Pontiac Le Mans. I've driven a Plymouth Volare. They fucked up for decades. But I hated it when the Big 3 bailed out of the sedan space, just because there are far fewer options now; and by the end, the cars were quite good.

There is a much more in-depth answer, I've been following the American auto-industry in-depth as a hobbyist since long before I could drive, but it cashes out in a sentence to: they never made a mid-size family sedan that could beat out the Camry and the Accord. The story of Detroit goes back to how the big companies formed by buying out other brands, the antiquated dealership laws that leave them beholden to local middleman businesses with serious lobbying power, and to the decline and resulting deal with the devil that saddled them with a raft of poor choices after the bailout.

The Detroit Big 3 occasionally made great cars, but couldn't put together a consistent record. I've been reading my dad's car magazines since I was maybe 12, and I've read more comparison tests than I could possibly remember. American cars occasionally won against Japanese and German competition, but they also occasionally finished last. The class standards, the Camry and Accord and 3-Series, tended to avoid last place, even if they didn't win. Detroit products were hit or miss. Or if they got a hit, like the PT Cruiser (people LOVED that thing when it came out and there were waiting lists to buy it), they would let it go entirely too long without real updates. As a result, even winning products when released would ultimately drag down and get bad reputations. Then they'd get discontinued, removing any brand loyalty, a shocking number of people keep buying the same car every time theirs breaks down and they couldn't do that with the Big 3 in too many cases.

The knock on effect of this was that Detroit automakers were constantly reworking their model line-up. They were eliminating cars that had acquired bad reputations, and replacing them with new nameplates. The car that a Cadillac dealer wanted to stack against a Three Series went from the Deville to the DTS to the CTS to the ATS to the CT4. In that whole time, the Three Series stayed the Three Series (even if I have some complaints about the direction it is going). The car Ford wanted to run up against the Camry was the Taurus, then the Taurus was canceled and replaced with the Fusion (globally Mondeo), then the Taurus was brought back as a bigger car to replace the Five Hundred, then both were cancelled again. The Camaro never recovered from its hiatus. That kind of lineup churn reduces consumer faith.

That lead Detroit into the bailout era, which left the corporations as permanent government pawns. The gov forced GM to axe Pontiac and Hummer. Pontiac was probably a good idea, Hummer definitely wasn't, that was Obama Admin ideological meddling Hummer would be a great brand to have around today we'd have an H4 crossover getting 30mpg and the H3 would be a huge seller. This weakened the ability to negotiate with two important constituencies: the UAW and the Dealerships. Both lobby for bad marketing choices, bad corporate choices, both have the ears of their representatives in congress.

In the long run, Detroit was stuck with a lot of poor choices for badge engineering reasons because of UAW and Dealership lobbying efforts. Half the brands they run shouldn't exist; but the dealership structure made it difficult or impossible to shutter Lincoln, Buick, GMC, etc. Pontiac and Saturn and Hummer and Mercury could only be killed safely because of the bailout. Zombie brands selling badge engineered junk sucked the life out of real efforts at running a modern car company.

Weren't they losing money on every sedan sale? They didn't quit so much as fail.

I will have to research that. I know Chrysler was at the end, but I'd be surprised with regards to Ford. They sold many millions of sedans in the 90s and 2000s.

https://thenewswheel.com/ford-killing-value-destroying-sedans-because-they-lose-money-every-year/

UBS analyst Colin Langan told Auto News that Ford loses approximately $800 million a year selling small cars in the United States, which stands in stark contrast to Ford’s estimated $3 billion first-quarter profit on truck and utility sales.

Taking this at face value, Ford lost money selling sedans the year before they simply stopped making them.

They sold many millions of sedans in the 90s and 2000s.

Honestly, the same was true of Chevrolet; they were making six-digit (as in, 100-200 thousand) sales of their compact sedans at the time.

They aren't actually bad cars, it's just that the early-90s through mid-00s Hondas and Toyotas were objectively the best cars ever made and that bought them customers for life, even though Civics and Corollas now cost twice what they used to (and are 1.5x as large).
Meanwhile, Gen Z buys Korean, and they're even more unreliable than mid-00s Big Three cars because their engines go before 100,000 miles due due to incompetence (machining chips not cleared properly kills the normal engines) and premature cost-cutting (undersized rods flying through the blocks of turbocharged engines). Detroit-designed cars might not be as solid as Toyota's, but their engineering was/is still good enough that, just like the Japanese cars, the main reason they stop working is because they rusted out.

the question quickly becomes: what used car are you competing against for $10k?

Putting on my bureaucrat's "needlessly interfering with the economy while setting tax dollars on fire" hat, I see they'll be implementing another wasteful Cash for Clunkers program to handle the ""problem"" of people driving old ICE cars.

Which will no doubt be restricted to UAW produced cars, eliminating both the $10k Chinese import and the most interesting American car companies.

A wave of Chinese imports are coming which will cripple the U.S. auto industry.

They can't pass safety regulations. Chinese (and Mexicans, and Brazilians) are happy just to have a car and really don't care so much that they're guaranteed to die even in a single-vehicle accident at highway speeds; in a car that passes American/Euro standards, even vehicular suicide attempts (cliffs and head-ons with semis) are survivable in most cases.

Fortunately, since safety regulations are just protectionism by another name the Chinese cars that can pass safety are probably going to be price-competitive with Kia and Hyundai and still have their teething "lol the engine exploded, hope you're still in warranty" years to go; I'm not sure there's a market for that.

Fortunately, since safety regulations are just protectionism by another name

This is how tariffs will happen in practice, most likely.

With the correct regulation, U.S. automakers may be able to survive in the U.S. I'd say their overseas operations (already money-losing) are doomed. Oddly, it may be the Japanese and South Korean makers who suffer the most as they will lose the third world market.

Sadly, the Islamist guerillas of the 2030s will be riding in Chinese pickups, not Toyotas.

Sadly, the Islamist guerillas of the 2030s will be riding in Chinese pickups, not Toyotas.

Even better, they're already in the business of decreasing the number of Toyota trucks in the world.
Create the trucks, then create the weapons that blow up the trucks, create demand for more trucks. Brilliant.

Sadly, the Islamist guerillas of the 2030s will be riding in Chinese pickups, not Toyotas.

Maybe then I'll finally be able to get a decent hi-lux

Some figures pulled from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita):

US: 12.9 traffic deaths per year per 100000 inhabitants in 2021, $80412 GDP per capita according to IMF estimate in 2023.

Mexico: 12.8 traffic deaths per year per 100000 inhabitants in 2019, $13804 GDP per capita according to IMF estimate in 2023.

Brazil: 16.0 traffic deaths per year per 100000 inhabitants in 2019, $10413 GDP per capita according to IMF estimate in 2023.

These figures may be inaccurate for various reasons, for example less accurate reporting in poorer countries. However, I think they still would not suggest that the correlation between personal wealth and traffic fatalities is not necessarily as drastic as you are suggesting.

There is some data in favor of your argument. For example, the Dominican Republic's figures are 64.6 traffic deaths per year per 100000 inhabitants in 2019, $11249 GDP per capita according to IMF estimate in 2023. But as you see, given the Mexican and Brazilian figures, that does not establish a strong connection.

China's figure is 17.4 traffic deaths per year per 100000 inhabitants in 2019, $12541 GDP per capita according to IMF estimate in 2023. So despite driving obviously a lot more Chinese cars than Americans do, Chinese seem to be dying in traffic incidents only about 4/3 times as much.

However, I think they still would not suggest that the correlation between personal wealth and traffic fatalities is not necessarily as drastic as you are suggesting.

I'm not even suggesting that; what I am suggesting is that countries that have less personal wealth are likely to see traffic deaths or serious injuries as an acceptable cost. (China's official figures are 17.4/100000, but note that none of those figures are accounting for persistent injury after the fact.)

It is probably worth noting that most of the safety regulations have diminishing returns; really, a mid-2000s car is 90% as safe as a mid-2020s car is (outside of the fact that most 2020s "cars" are SUVs). So objectively, maybe the new breed of Chinese cars are safe from a mid-2000s standpoint and that is all you need if you're not infected with a terminal case of safetyism, but that's not how Western governments (even the ones that don't have socialized medicine) will see it.

(And that's ignoring that the safer cars are more dangerous for those around them; personally, I'd rather die in a rollover than hit a pedestrian my rollover protection forced me to be blind to, but that's just me.)

I think what you’re ignoring is that Mexico, Brazil, China, and the Dominican Republic drive far fewer miles on average per inhabitant, so similar or higher rates of death from traffic accidents per inhabitant speaks to a much more dangerous driving experience.

Now in the case of Mexico specifically I would point to the poor behavior of Mexican drivers, especially Mexican bus drivers, as a bigger reason than the lack of safety features on Mexican cars. And for all of these countries there’s probably a higher percentage of motorcycle use, which is extremely dangerous. But those numbers aren’t actually evidence for middle income countries having the same approach to vehicular safety as the USA; rather the opposite in fact.

Hmm, yeah that's a good point that they probably drive far fewer miles in Mexico, Brazil, and China. I didn't think of that.

Maybe they can defend the US market but they can't defend all markets. Tesla doesn't seem to be price-competitive with what's coming out of China, they're losing market share globally.

Everyone seems to be focused on the US car market but the US does have exports. If you lose in world markets that's also quite bad!

The mainstream media, which we're assured rarely tells [https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-media-very-rarely-lies](outright lies), decided to find the exact dividing line between an outright lie and "still technically the truth". You can be the judge of whether they succeeded. For just one of many examples, Joe Scarborough ran a segment where the words "Trump warns of a bloodbath for America if he loses" were emblazoned on the bottom of the screen.

I find it amusing that every time someone snarkily invokes Scott's post, they provide an example that perfectly makes his point. Trump did warn of a bloodbath, so Joe didn't make it up. The media is very, very, misleading but they indeed rarely lie.

I fully understand Scott's argument.

I think you might have missed my point, which is that (in this case) they are trying to find the exact point that a lack of context becomes so egregious that it is equivalent to an outright lie.

It seems to me that this is pretty squarely within the "technically the truth" category. It follows the same logic as the other examples of misleading headlines: If you had more context, you would interpret it completely differently.

Where is the line? Let's say you rephrase "I have never beaten my wife" to "I have ... beaten my wife".

There is clearly a spectrum between selective reporting and pants-on-fire lie. In this case, the media was closer to the outright lie end of the spectrum. I mean, yeah, Trump said the word "bloodbath". That's about the only honest thing in their headlines.

That would be a lie because he didn't say that he has beaten his wife. It would not be a lie if it was "I have beaten my wife (in a video game)". But yeah, I would agree that at this level of "obscuration of the truth" there is little difference in the consequences between simply lying and being grossly misleading. Though we should not completely disregard the possibility that Joe actually thinks that Trump meant a real bloodbath (cf. dog whistling).

Here is an excerpt of what he said:

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/joe-scarborough-spots-trump-line-115751035.html

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough on Monday insisted Donald Trump meant his warning about a “bloodbath” in America if he’s not elected, despite the Trump campaign’s claims to the contrary he was only talking about the auto industry.

“It was a distinction without a difference,” said Scarborough.

What made it clear what GOP nominee Trump was intending to say, Scarborough continued, was when he added afterward that a “bloodbath” would “be the least of it.”

Scarborough explained, “If you think there’s going to be a bloodbath in the auto industry, even if you take that argument at face value, which, again, given the tone of the rest of the speech, ‘bloodbath’? I’m not sure he’s talking about the niceties of international trade. But let’s just take that argument as is. Then he goes on and he says, ‘That’s going to be the least of it,’ and repeats it. ‘It’s gonna be the least of it.’”

“Obviously, he’s talking about a bloodbath for America,” he added.

“It’s just bullshit,” Scarborough said of the Trump campaign’s spin that was parroted by other Republicans.

“I’ll say that at 6:15 a.m. It was bullshit,” he added.

Trump “knew what he was doing. We’re not stupid. Americans aren’t stupid,” Scarborough said. “He was talking about a bloodbath. Sometimes a bloodbath means a bloodbath. And when he finishes by saying, ‘And that’s just going to be the least of it.’ Seriously? These people may be stupid, we’re not.”

This actually sounds like pretty genuine TDS. This is another thing I find amusing. The only people who seem to hear "dog whistles" are the ones who aren't supposed to her them.

The people who aren't supposed to hear dog whistles, according to the dog whistle theory, are the moderates who vote for the dog whistler. The opponents don't factor in, they weren't about to vote for you anyway.

I think that Zvi did a much better job at explaining the complexities of media literacy than Scott in his "On Bounded Distrust": https://thezvi.substack.com/p/on-bounded-distrust

Personally I think that this example lends an impression so different from the truth that calling it a lie is obviously correct. Or, if you want to pedantic about "technically correct," you could just call it "complete bullshit."

Good info. Another factor that exacerbates this problem is exchange rates. If you look at the GDP of China, it is 17.7 trillion nominal, but 33 trillion measured in PPP (link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China). That is to say, if you take the total output of the Chinese economy in yuan, and convert the yuan to dollars at market exchange rates (a guy grows a bag of oranges and sells them to his neighbor for 15 yuan = 2.1 dollars), you'd get 17.7 trillion dollars -- but if you take the actual stuff that they make, and sold it in the US for dollars (guy grows the same bag of oranges and sells it to you for 4.2 dollars), you'd get 33 trillion. Why the difference? because the dollar is, still for now, the world's preferred reserve currency; ergo, people want dollars more than they want yuan; dollars have a sole source (the US Govt), and so a dollar buys a lot of oranges, and a lot of everything else, on the world market.

This is great for people in the US who buy imported manufactured goods -- but is not so great for people who work manufacturing jobs in the US. If it costs a US auto worker $500 a month to feed his family, it only costs the competing Chinese laborer $268 (dollar equivalent) to buy the same amount of food. The same goes for other necessities across the board, so the Chinese worker can comfortably work for just over half of what the American worker does (in dollars) and enjoy the same standard of living. Pretty hard for American car companies to compete under those conditions.

It would be one thing if the auto industry was dying a natural death and Trump wanted to prolong it with tariffs. But that's not all that's going on, the Biden administration is actively trying to kill the industry by effectively outlawing gas cars. The EPA issued regulations that would force 60% of new car sales to be electric by 2030*. That's billions of dollars in capital investment not just for the Big 3 but also for their suppliers and for foreign brands with facilities in the US that will all go up in smoke based on a whim of the EPA. One advantage they have over China is experience in working with gas cars and with their existing capital. They aren't losing in a fair competition where consumers decided they want electric cars, they're losing because of regulations that target US manufacturers but not their Chinese competitors.

So it's not just about Trump passing tariffs to protect Detroit. Biden is shutting down one of America's largest industries by fiat and Trump can stop that from happening, at least temporarily.

*There are rumors that the EPA is going to push that target back a little bit but while it's easy to rewrite the regulations every few months it's not easy to reverse decisions to invest in factories that take years to build.

Yes, this is a great point.

If you look at the balance sheet of GM you will see $51 billion of "Property, plant, and equipment". Almost all of this is factories and tooling geared towards making ICE cars. Not only that, but almost all the engineers on their payroll are trained to make ICE cars.

This is a huge body of expertise that is about to be discarded wholesale (and very prematurely) in favor of EV's. And when it comes to making EV's, China will have a huge advantage.

Biden's rules will drown Detroit in a bathtub. Once the market share is gone, it's gone. There is zero chance of recovery. There is no market for American EV's made with Chinese batteries at American wages.

I'm sure they'll provide lots of government handouts to the affected communities.

Biden's rules will drown Detroit in a bathtub.

No, it will be a bathtub of blood. A bath of blood. A bloodbath.

It's going to be a bloodbath.

EVs share a lot of the parts with ICE cars. Structure, doors, windows, seats, trim, suspension, wheels. If you consider hybrid ICEs, which most car manufactures already have a lot of experience with, this grows even more: batteries, electric engines, regen breaking. Moving to EV only does not require starting anew: you just ditch the drivetrain, and replace it with beefed up version of what you already do for hybrids. None of this is easy, but it’s not $51B of assets going down the drain.

This is just wrong. GM hasn't sold a hybrid (outside of a wacky Corvette model) in five years. The Volt was wildly successful, but it uses a now-dated central traction inverter and electrified transaxle design, which isn't a great choice for a full EV compared to per-motor or per-axle in-wheel or in-board hub motors. They might as well be starting anew. Ford at least has modern hybrid models, but they too are all central traction inverters. Meanwhile, SiC traction inverter tech has gone from impractical experiment to just about the only game in town in the last five years, which has completely rewritten the rules on the size, weight, and power tradeoffs required for hub motors. For these US automakers, modern EV tech might as well have fallen out the back of an alien spaceship, and they're clearly blowing billions on R&D trying to play catch-up on problems their competitors have already spent a decade solving and optimizing - just go look at how the F-150 Lightning was priced.

On a different note, most of the last ten years of hybrid battery development has used NiMH for its high reliability and large total cycle count, and this is yet another thing the US domestic auto industry is going to have to discard as they transition to Li-Ion.

Look at what Tesla is doing for an idea of the scale of changes needed. There is a reason they call their cell assembly plant a "gigafactory": the goal for Giga Nevada was to produce more capacity in 2020 than the entire world produced in 2014 (and on paper, this was achieved, though actual utilization fell short by around 30% for a variety of reasons). These guys crunched the numbers a decade before anyone at Ford or GM made so much as a whisper about fully electric vehicles, and determined they needed to have tens of GWh of vertically-integrated domestic battery production to get cell costs remotely close to viable at a run rate of a few hundred thousand cars a year (an order of magnitude below Ford/GM EV fleet annual expectations). In ten years, starting from nothing, Tesla's up to around 40 GWh total annual production capacity across every plant (more if you factor in grid storage capacity, which is a separate but thoroughly understated can of worms), with another 100 GWh coming online in the next few years. Ford is basically all-in on some CATL LFP partnership, having secured at least 60 GWh for through 2025 (on paper) and several other long-term deals for later; personally I think this is going to go poorly for them, reminiscent of the Foxconn debacle a few years back, but I leave room to be pleasantly surprised. GM appears to be working with LG Chem for high-nickel cathodes but on a significantly delayed schedule from their original plans. In neither case is it clear where the precursor materials are being extracted or refined, but I'd bet dollars to donuts it's mostly China. Best I can tell is these guys each expect around 120-150 GWh of annual production capacity sometime in the next few years. For reference, CATL makes around 30% of global Li-Ion supply and today has about 250 GWh of annual production capacity. I remain deeply skeptical of the US automakers' ability to execute on such lofty goals, particularly if they keep pumping out overpriced stinkers and falling behind on innovation, when their combined expectations for the next few years are to go from practically nothing to double-digit percentages of the global lithium battery supply, and all while buying their precursor materials at no-doubt strategically inflated prices from their primary competitor nation.

I'd estimate this EV investment is something like $35B in capital costs between the two of them. China is selling low-cost EVs to every other low-cost market on Earth, so once the US GHG rules kick in, it's not like Ford/GM can really continue selling ICEs at scale any more - they will be drawing down most of their existing propulsion facilities, which is something like 20% of each of their balance sheets (it's more like 25%, but some ICEs for heavy industry applications will still be required - that capacity will stay mostly unaffected). Sure, it's not $50B down the drain, but $10B and most of your ICE expertise down the drain is nothing to take lightly, let alone on top of another $15-20B in industry-redefining novel (at least to them) technology investment. And the massive capital investment, vertically-integrated manufacturing, and on-shore in-house production of battery components is exactly the opposite direction from where Ford and GM have been headed for the last 40 years.

My point is, don't underestimate the complexity or the expense of the challenges ahead for US automakers.

As an aside: The global readily available lithium supply is sorely inadequate for something as ambitious as the entire US automotive market going full electric by 2030 anyway. The WEF is projecting sixfold increase in lithium demand over 2020 figures, and even with optimistic projections on political and environmental mining and refining operation approvals, we're still talking like 6-8 years for operations to go from "we think there's lithium here" to mining and refining it at any kind of scale. And again that's with everything going right, which it very frequently doesn't: market conditions can delay financing, detailed surveys of lithium deposits can determine midway through that the deposit is economically nonviable to refine, governments can and do regularly inject arbitrary and capricious environmental demands. In practice, it can take over a decade for mining and refining operations to come fully online. Plenty are in-work right now, but it's just nowhere near enough. This fuels a lot of my skepticism regarding the ambitious annual production capacities discussed above.

Meanwhile: China is the recipient of something like 90% of Australian lithium, and between Australia, Chile, and domestic mines, China is consuming something like two-thirds of all lithium extracted on Earth. They follow it up with another 60% of the world's lithium refining capacity. Their domestic battery manufacturing companies are functionally unrivaled - CATL is routinely years ahead of everyone else on the market in metrics like gravimetric energy density, cost per cell, total throughout... China is the 800-pound gorilla of the EV industry, and since most of their cost for EVs is tied up in the battery, as long as China can keep producing better, cheaper batteries than the rest of the world, they'll trivially outcompete an unserious, labor-depleted, heavily outsourced, geriatric American automotive industry. From where I stand, at least, it looks like it will take a radical transformation of all major industry players just to survive the next decade, and without significant assistance from USG in tipping global trade scales to secure strategically valuable lithium assets and construct refineries in friendly jurisdictions, I can't see the US being globally competitive in manufacturing anything that needs a Li-Ion battery in it 20 years from now.

Seems like you know a lot about this stuff. Do you work in the EV industry?

Without getting too specific, I'm in a critical part of the EV supply chain. That said, I'm offering personal speculation based on publicly available information and some napkin math - there's some other stuff that informs my opinion which I can't really talk about, but it doesn't take an insider to see which way the wind is blowing.

This is a good point, but to echo VoxelVexillologist's comment below, I think pretty much the only reasonable response left is sink-or-swim: either Detroit manages to shape up and make the transition before they get the rug pulled out from under them, or the American auto industry will simply be forced to leave the Rust Belt and look elsewhere.

This would be disastrous if this was still the era of Who Killed The Electric Car?, but thankfully, we have something of an actual industry for EVs in the US thanks to one very-outspoken and intense tech CEO.

I vaguely remember a period in the 80s and 90s when cars were a culture war. "Assholes drive imports" was a slogan for a certain sort, who were patriotic enough to buy American cars even when the foreign imports were clearly superior. It was mostly working classs rightwing types doing that.

If we get a big wave of cheap, good-enough, electric cars made in China... how do the culture war lines break down? The right is more pro-American, but these days the left is more foreign-interventionist and might care more about opposing China. The left likes electric cars, but the right has more broke people who just want to save money. And Elon Musk doesn't fit clearly on either side.

On the other hand, does this even matter? Once upon a time the auto industry was a huge deal, both to create jobs and for the military-industrial complex. Nowadays, like you said, the big car companies are tiny compared to... gaming graphics card manufacturer. And as I understand it, there's almost nothing in common between a car factory and a modern weapons manufacturer. So maybe it's OK to just let China take over the car industry, just like we let them take over every other kind of manufacturing.

And as I understand it, there's almost nothing in common between a car factory and a modern weapons manufacturer.

Well, perhaps aside from armored vehicles and firearms. WWII suggests that industrial capacity is fungible in some specific contexts.

yeah. Naive calculation: Suppose Alice has a factory that produces tens of hi-tech bespoke post-Cold war optimized tanks during one year, say 50 units in year. Suppose Bob has several dozens of factories that can produce 500,000 of civilian vehicles each year. Bob needs only engineers to redesign the civilian car production line into something useful in military use -- perhaps, integrate anti-tank guided missile launcher and drone platform and minimal armor against small arms fire -- and then Bob can produce 10,000 modern anti-tank vehicles for each Alice's hi-tech bespoke tank. After the first couple of months, if both realize their current designs are not performing adequately in the field, assuming it takes equal time to come up with a redesign, after the resign and couple of months of production Bob has produced 80,000 upgraded vehicles against 8 Alice's upgraded bespoke units. But frankly, I presume if you have factories producing hundreds of thousands units for civilian consumption, your engineers are much better at setting up production lines, adapting and rolling out new redesigns than if your experience is producing hundreds of bespoke units to a contract.

I think the difference is that modern car factories can’t be retooled to build modern weapons the way WW2 factories could. So retooling the GM or Tesla factory to make modern missiles probably isn’t much easier than just taking over an Amazon warehouse and doing the same there.

Not the bespoke weapons, no. But evidently a modern civilian drone factory can make drones that are effective for military use. I believe a protracted total war, the side with more "Gigafactories" and difficult-to-predict quality of innovativeness and engineering that comes from running the factory will be better equipped to churn out useful equipment. In a massive war, you need massive amount of weapons, and wih current production numbers, it looks possible the West would run out of the bespoke weapons.

If the decisionmakers Alice and Bob realize it, it will affect their calculations of outcomes of protracted total war, such calculations will affect their diplomatic strategies. If either side don't realize it, they will walk into it blindly into the next protracted total war, and it will affect the outcome.

But that’s kind of the thing, there can be no protracted direct total war between great powers because of nuclear weapons. There can only be proxy conflicts or MAD. The unique thing about Ukraine is that it’s a moderate to large sized country with a zealous and relatively high IQ population backed by Western countries fighting a former superpower (with a poorly trained but large military and high manufacturing capacity) in conventional warfare.

The US doesn’t need huge volumes of conventional weaponry outside of this niche scenario of supporting Ukraine. No enemy will ever military invade the American homeland, only nuke it if it comes to it. The main scenarios for a hot conflict with China over Taiwan would either spiral very quickly into nuclear exchange or resolve themselves rapidly otherwise (eg very successful Chinese blitzkrieg and amphibious landing in 48h before US can decide on strategic response). The main scenario for a hot conflict with Russia involves some kind of Russian invasion of the baltics, and even there NATO forces in Europe outnumber the Russians, have better equipment and could easily repel the post-Ukraine remnants of the more skilled professional soldiers left, likely pressing into Russia and again leading to a question of nuclear exchange.

The only reason Ukraine is even happening is because it doesn’t have nukes and it’s considered taboo post-1945 to use nuclear weapons offensively against a country that doesn’t have them, even for Russians, especially against your supposed co-ethnic brothers.

and it’s considered taboo post-1945 to use nuclear weapons offensively against a country that doesn’t have them, even for Russians, especially against your supposed co-ethnic brothers.

Russia didn't even try to destroy an electric plant (as opposed to transformers) or kill Zelensky. Why nuke?

As far as I'm aware they certainly have tried to kill Zelensky on a number of occasions. But typically decapitation is a poor military strategy anyway, because it opens up the possibility of vengeance (including by the US) and because the people standing behind Zelensky seem to be more hardcore anti-Russian partisans than he is, so no change in policy would be likely. As for destroying power plants, their goal (unlike, say, the US' in WW2 or Iraq) is a permanent annexation of much of Ukraine so radicalizing the population against them is undesirable.

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"Need" is a strong word. There are plenty of people willing argue that the US really didn't need to intervene in WW1 or WW2 or Korea or Vietnam or station Elvis and other assorted troops in Germany or doesn't need to defend NATO either. Generally, superpowerdom has been considered a prize worth the costs. Perhaps stakeholders in Washington decided it is longer worth it. But that is secondary to my argument.

I think it is mistake to infer that Ukraine is a niche scenario. It used to be a niche scenario (for couple of decades) partly because the US was the uncontested superpower. Starting a large-scale war that the US might notice was considered a bad idea. Ukraine is what a contested hegemony looks like. Putin made a calculated move presuming that the West overplayed their hand supporting the west-aligned Ukrainians and would not / can't supply Ukraine. And perhaps the Washington stakeholders decide, they won't. Same goes for Taiwan, and any other piece of territory previously under their hegemonic protection. It would imply the US will fight only unaligned small countries, not other great powers. The implication for any Middle Eastern or other small country is to quickly align themselves with any of other ascendant great powers so that they are not unaligned small country no longer. Probably the US would be fine. Isolation worked okay for China for a quite long time. But it is an admission of making an exit from the great power politics.

Second, it seems unwise to think only terms how Taiwanese or any other military situation would develop today or in 5 years' time while making decisions about having manufacturing base (development timescales counted in decades). Concerning Taiwan: Who knows what the future of naval combat looks like? Everyone thinks so when they enter a conflict. Afterwards, someone has always been surprised. (Nobody plans to start a long protracted shooting war. Usually everyone plans for a decisive victory.) No matter the specifics, or if the US sits out, it is not a good look for the US power projection capability if it so happens that during the first months of mid-to-large-sized regional war in Asia everyone, including China, both shoots up and shoots down more equipment than the US produces in one year. Perhaps again, the US will be fine after the first such war. But when there has been a couple of such wars, and China has learnt how to improvise and develop and learn?

Third, to make nuclear red lines believable you need to draw conventional lines much earlier. To draw a conventional lines, you need conventional forces and the support organization for them. If you have fewer conventional forces, then the lines you draw need to be proportional to forces you have. Suppose given points one and two, Washington decides to forgo both the superpower hegemony and large conventional forces to keep it. Do you still wish to keep Monroe doctrine? Perhaps, Mexico and Canada?

When Argentina tried to take Falklands, everyone knew the UK wouldn't waste nukes to keep the islands, and they didn't. Suppose they never responded conventionally, either ("Royal Navy was too costly, PM Hacker kept only the Trident"). Couple of decades later, someone is prone to have a bright idea to take yet another inconsequential far-off nominally British island territory ("let's conquer Bermuda for tax reasons, they won't nuke us for that like they didn't nuke Argentina"). The other islands would seek another overlord if they can help it. Perhaps the UK probably would still defend the Isle of Man or the Hebrides, because it is closer to home, but who will be sure? And if their general readiness to fight appears to be nil, and nobody thinks they would start shooting back, how much their threat of nuclear Armageddon is? Nuclear strike doctrines were developed during are when the Cold war belligerents had a large standing armies ready to shoot, and nuclear strike was yet another escalation beyond that. But if you won't fight conventionally? Psychological threat of nuclear annihilation looks more credible after you occasionally demonstrate willingness and capability to go to war in the first place.

But at WWII levels of mobilization, we’d probably be looking at revamped civilian vehicles in heavy military use. The GM line can easily produce technicals.

To echo the other replies to this comment, a modern military will need drones, but will also still need 4x4 vehicles (whether Humvees, JLTVs, or even just modified pickup trucks), transport trucks (so you still need GMC and International Harvester and the like), and men with rifles (which will be some flavor of AR-15, traditionally-milled or possibly even 3D-printed).

Indeed. If you can make a computer, you can make a gun.

If you can make a sewing machine, you can make a gun.

Despite being 2% the market cap of NVDA, GM has 5 times as many employees.

Let's say that we always spam "let China have the crappy businesses" without limit. Solve for equilibrium as X (time) approaches infinity. Eventually, China will have every business except one. A single American person will have a net worth of $100 trillion making memecoins or something. His tax dollars will support what's left of the American economy. All other Americans will work crappy retail jobs. China will control the rest of the value chain. Mercantilism is not great for the victims.

I think this book is relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

So, do we go back to 19th century mercantilism? Use the government to subsidize our own, inferior industries, while the navy tries to forcibly stop them from shipping cars to us?

The alternative is to specialize in what we're best at: Pizza Delivery and MicroCode

Why not? All "specialization" seems to have brought is cheap consumer gadgets to fudge inflation statistics with, and cost disease everywhere that's important to people.

Plus cheaper food, cheaper clothes, cheaper flights, cheaper cars and longer lives.

Housing is getting more expensive due to regulation & immigration rather than cost disease, and healthcare spending is going up because the developed world has a larger proportion of older people who are living longer (partly due to better healthcare). In countries with good housing regulation and immigration control, house prices go down over time.

Free trade and specialisation are the forces pushing prices down. If you abandon them for mercantilism, you get expensive essentials and expensive consumer goods.

Plus cheaper food, cheaper clothes,

Nope, and nope. This is a "do you believe me or your lying eyes" situation. Clothes used to be much better quality than they are now, and food used to be better quality and cheaper (if seasonally unavailable). I can concede the rest, but of the things you listed cars might be the only things worth the squeeze, and even then I'm not sure.

Then we have a whole bunch of second order effects on employment, but I'll also grant they're hard to disentangle, and you might think they have different causes.

Free trade and specialisation are the forces pushing prices down. If you abandon them for mercantilism, you get expensive essentials and expensive consumer goods.

I'm not an autarchist, there's obviously a balance to be struck, but I also see no reason to believe why maximum free trade would make any more sense than maximum immigration.

If you buy quality clothes today for the inflation-adjusted amount they cost in 1950 you can certainly still get high quality, possibly even made-in-America clothes. They’re just a niche market since 98% of the population prefers the cheap stuff made in Bangladesh.

The same goes for food. In 1950, Americans spent 24% of their disposable income on food, in 2010 they spent 9.5% of it on food. If they increased their spending on food by 250%, even the average American could afford the premium organic local farmers market stuff that still has a lot of flavor.

Testing the hypothesis would be somewhat hard and require a lot of time. I'm not even talking about the 1950's, my opinion is based on the 80's. Our family in America would send us packages with clothes and whatever else might be useful that they could grab on a sale. These clothes would then make the following rounds: my oldest cousin -> my older brother -> my younger cousin -> me -> my youngest cousin -> my mother, for some of the clothes that looked ok on her -> rag for cleaning floors, where they would serve faithfully for many years, and survive in a state that, if push came to shove, you could still throw into a washing machine and wear them.

If something approaching this quality is still available, please send me a link.

For food, I'm not talking about America, I'm talking about eastern Europe. "Premium organic" food does not approach the quality of what was available back when I was a kid, and the fact that I'd have to go and find a goddamn farmer's market to get what was right there in the local grocery store is itself a drop in quality of life. Again - hard to disentangle - maybe it's all the BS European regulations that are slowly killing farmers throughout the continent, and not free trade, but don't tell me there was nothing lost.

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You mean cost disease in housing, education, and healthcare? The domestic industries for those are extremely healthy and have not been hurt one iota by imports. In fact, where we can import, we are better off.

Mercantilism never left and is in fact in use today in many sectors, with distorting effects on the market. The various more upmarket civilizational stacks existed on top of it, not displacing it entirely.

I'm not a hardcore libertarian or staunch believer in the free market, but it's trivial to understand that countries will naturally protect their own market when they believe they are noncompetitive.

But... why are we uncompetitive? Usually when you see mercantilism, it's to protect a new industry in a developing country, which is how Japan and Korea developed their automotive industries. And maybe China did/does too, so we could do a little to even the score. But if it's just "we cannot allow the auto industry to fail, ever" then it's a recipe for absolute stagnation, like India's domestic auto industry did for the entire cold war.

It's weird that the US auto industry, the oldest, most-developed auto industry on earth, just can't compete with these young upstarts unless the government gives it bailouts.

The reason why is irrelevant. There could be any number of reasons, from cheaper labor to less regulations to quality differences to productivity reasons. But governments are made up of people, and people who are incentivized not to let things fail are obviously going to work in service of those claims.

The Chinese factory example is apt. If you are a western nation, can you compete with that workforce, notoriously selective regulation and an ability to simply make as much as the market can absorb? Well, sure, you could. What's stopping you, aside from, well - the people in your country? (Cf. American Factory)

The other side of the Bretton Woods financial coin making money fungible across national boundaries: if you don't have some sort of protectionism in place, your economy will see significant cash outflows to foreign countries. This is hugely beneficial to countries that are primarily export based, as the US was post-WW2... and not so much in the other direction.

And as I understand it, there's almost nothing in common between a car factory and a modern weapons manufacturer. So maybe it's OK to just let China take over the car industry, just like we let them take over every other kind of manufacturing.

Trucks are really important for logistics. Soldiers need offroader vehicles - a humvee or something like it.

Furthermore, the broader learning in how to make factories, production chains, engines, working steel all helps military industry. If you've got a big car industry, you'll have a big robotics and machine tools industry too. You'll have lots of experienced engineers who can help make weapons. If you have a big electric car industry, you'll have a big battery industry and batteries have all kinds of military applications in lasers, drones and so on. Everything connects to everything else.

Converting factories to war production, that will be much harder these days. But the pools of knowledge, capital goods and experienced workers are still quite important.

I'm not an expert so I don't want to argue this too much. But what I heard was that, basically, modern military stuff is more like a custom bespoke piece, where each individual tank/ship/airplane/whatever requires tons of individual workers to pore over it and custom assemble it. They all need security clearance and experience with this very specific military technology that has no other application. Factories are more about scale, building up as big and cheap as possible, so they use totally different tools and ways of thinking.

I'm sure that\ you could take automative factory workers and engineers and re-train them as military workers, but you also do that with, say, software engineers.

modern military stuff is more like a custom bespoke piece, where each individual tank/ship/airplane/whatever requires tons of individual workers to pore over it and custom assemble it

"Bespoke crafting" sounds true, that is how the hardware has been ordered for past few decades, but at the same time, it looks like such mode of production is not working very well when put into a test of a large-scale war (Ukraine). What seems to count is the ability to mass-produce hundred to thousands of missiles, thousands of cheap drones, and millions of artillery shells. Nobody seems to able to produce hundreds or thousands of tanks and airplanes, but if either side possessed such ability, it might decide the war.

That isn’t because America is fundamentally incapable of making more weapons. It’s because US strategy for decades has been that the only conflicts America will fight will either be against vastly inferior conventional forces in places like the Middle East or in a great power conflict against Russia or China which would either go nuclear or be over Taiwan and therefore resolved pretty quickly (the Chinese landing would fail or succeed in likely fewer than 72 hours).

The Ukraine situation is an extreme anomaly.

In great power politics, the wars are sufficiently rare that anomalies also count. (The French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars were anomalous in their scale. WW1 was, again, anomalous.)

Predicting the outcomes of wars is unpredictable business. Before the 1st Gulf War, very few people knew for certain it was going to be a quick, decisive victory against inferior conventional force. If American strategy calls for small wars in the Middle East or quick decisive naval wars in Asia, what Washington is going to do when faced with an adversary who is perfectly aware of the American strategy and thus presents something that is neither?

And anyway, the current nuclear stockpiles are a fraction of what it was in the 1980s. During the Cold War, the end-of-the-world thought stopping does-not-compute aspect was heavily colored by fiction and propaganda. After the nuclear exchange, a world will end, but the world will not.

Aerospace engineers are easier to retrain as a different kind of aerospace engineer than software engineers are as aerospace engineers. I think that’s just a truism.

I also think a lot of that is just the inefficiency of the modern west- in an emergency you could just use f-150’s instead of humvees.

One aspect worth considering is the extent to which Chinese companies want to compete in the US (and other Western car markets).

And by "compete" I mean really go for the jugular and sell their 10k electric car for 10k (+ the extra you probably have to pay to dealers and the like compared to third-world markets).

I buy a lot of Chinese tech, because their extremely lax attitude towards copyright means you'll generally get all the bells and whistles of the good Western stuff but at a fraction of the cost. Except that this is only true if you buy in China or ship through AliExpress. As soon as Chinese manufacturers enter into Western markets directly, they immediately slap a big premium onto their products, far more than could be explained by local regulation or supply chain costs. BYD have started selling cars in Europe, and when I saw I immediately went to their website to see how competitive their cars would be... and the prices aren't competitive at all, coming in 2-3x the local Chinese price and offering little over Western EV prices.

As long as Chinese producers see the West as just a cash cow rather than a market to really dominate, Western manufacturers will be ok.

That might be the goal. Make a good profit, but don’t damage/humiliate western car makers to the extent that they kick you out or slap on tariffs.

Won’t the dollar’s strength vs the Euro and Yen mean that manufacturing is just more likely to move to Europe and Japan than to stay in the US?

In the long term, the problem in the US and the wider developed world is that people no longer move to where the economic growth is. The welfare state, large numbers of government jobs and state-supported jobs in education and healthcare mean that there’s just enough money to make life in hollowed-out places passable, and minimal real pressure to leave for the unambitious. Trump tells people they don’t have to leave, that he’ll deploy the full resources of the American state to ‘bring the jobs back’. He probably can’t, but if he could, would it be a good thing?

Thatcher could have been right about ‘managed decline’ of post-industrial areas being necessary. A lot of these places were barely populated before the brief 1860-1950 industrial boom, and they could easily go back to being barely populated today. Their existence is artificial, a contrivance because in a democracy they have enough representation to keep the situation from total collapse by demanding the rest of the country do whatever is necessary (like import tariffs, bailing out the big three, whatever) to prop them up.

Protectionism isn’t a bad word. It’s what turned South Korea into one of the world’s richest countries after all. But there are far more examples of it failing (see Brazil) than it succeeding. Forcing the population to buy $50,000 Detroit cars instead of $10,000 Chinese cars is unlikely to yield major new investment in technological advances or R&D that might sustainably increase long-term prosperity. It doesn’t seem like it will be worth it in the long haul.

SK's protectionism worked because it was done with a spear pointed at the ass of the local companies who were always told it was going to be time limited and would be wound down gradually and so they had 15-20 years to become internationally competitive or they were going to die out anyways. Most crucially this threat was believable to the point that the local companies shaped up and actually became competitive on the world stage.

Unfortunately you can't replicate it in the modern day US because their culture of lagresse and gibs mean that tacitly the companies know that even if the current government says the tariffs/support will end in 15 years political considerations near expiry time will lead to it being probably extended because who wants headlines like "poor salt of the earth car factory workers left destitute after government pulls funding to cut the taxes of the wealthy"? As such the car companies have zero real incentive to modernize and can just coast off of government subsidies and having a captive market. The ultimate loser of all this is going to be the taxpayer who now gets his hard earned money given to these relicts and just to add insult to injury is forced to buy worse products at higher prices.

In other words, only a dictatorship can turn a third world country into a first world one- see also Franco, Lee Kwan Yew.

In other words, only a dictatorship can turn a third world country into a first world one

Plato ranked monarchy as the most powerful government for national improvement for a good reason. Romans Americans and their provincial allies don't like saying "king" for that reason, even though kings and Caesars dictators aren't meaningfully distinct.

Didn't Franco really cock up the Spanish economy for the first 30ish years? Yeah, they got their economic miracle, but it took a few decades of Franco screwing things up to get there.

Not that literal communists would have run a better economy.

I mean, the original South Korean dictatorship was also pretty bad at managing the economy. Right wing authoritarianism is high variance at economic growth- sometimes you get Lee Kwan Yew or Paul Kagame, sometimes you get Syngman Rhee or Ngo Dinh Diem, sometimes you get a Franco who goes back and forth, occasionally you get a mediocrity like Salazar or Pinochet(whose miracle of Chile was really returning it to a pre-socialism growth trajectory).

As far as I know, the story with Spain’s economy under Franco was that as the fascist ideologues started getting replaced with conservative Catholic technocrats the economy started improving until it turned into the Spanish economic miracle. This was a predictable long term process at the end of WWII, maybe not in specifics but at least generally- everyone in 1945 knew that fascism wasn’t expanding and everyone who watched Spain knew the conservative Catholics were going to replace them eventually, even if they might not have been betting on Opus Dei(which is still happy to provide technocrats and economists to developing countries), and while the catch up economic growth might have been a curve ball it didn’t surprise anyone that they were better at managing an economy and less obsessed with autarky than fascist ideologues.

Left wing authoritarianism seems predictably very bad at managing and economy, with the rare exceptions like Deng being exceptions because they backed away from the left wing nature of their rule. Democracies seem to do OK generally unexceptionally at delivering rising standards of living, although I’ll acknowledge that there’s a few countries which have experienced extraordinary economic growth while being democracies- Poland and Japan among them. I will, however, maintain that democracies cannot go from mud huts to skyscrapers- Poland and Japan were already decent middle income countries.

I will, however, maintain that democracies cannot go from mud huts to skyscrapers

Except one clearly did. Or at least log cabins to skyscrapers.

Sure, but it was at the vanguard of that transition, very close (with the exception of some stagnation during the civil war) to England and Germany. Within 25 years of the civil war ending the US was arguably the richest country in the world, maybe except for Australia which had its first resource boom in the late 19th century. The odds were much tougher for countries that didn’t industrialize in the first wave.

SK's protectionism worked because it was done with a spear pointed at the ass of the local companies who were always told it was going to be time limited and would be wound down gradually and so they had 15-20 years to become internationally competitive or they were going to die out anyways.

I'm not qualified to comment on that, but I can think of 3 other reasons as well.

  1. Large-scale US federal capital loans after 1953 designed specifically to allow the build-up industrial capacity, so that the country can develop and prosper through exports to the US, in exchange for surrendering its sovereignty in a practical sense. Basically the same process as in Japan and Taiwan.

  2. by the end of the Second World War the Japanese were already running for more than half a century a centralized, authoritarian, repressive, tried and tested elaborate governing apparatus to administer the entire Korean Peninsula, most of which survived the war intact. The Americans just needed to take it over and keep it running for their own ends.

  3. Before Japanese rule, Korea already existed as a polity governed according to its own Konfucian traditions for centuries.

In the long term, the problem in the US and the wider developed world is that people no longer move to where the economic growth is.

But the entire population of the USA can't live in New York. I get fed-up of seeing this touted as the answer: just move to where the jobs are! We have that in my own country, which means that Dublin (though tiny by international standards) is bloated by Irish standards, attracting away all investment to the capital, and the concurrent vicious circle which means that the jobs are there because everything is there so when new businesses start they want to go where everything is so they go to Dublin which is where the jobs are.

There's rent crisis, housing crisis, etc. because there isn't enough housing for people and yes that is an entire problem of its own which the government would have been better off addressing rather than wasting time on "sexist language in the Constitution".

But people in my country are moving to where the jobs are, only to find when they get there that there's nowhere to live, or if there is, what the job pays them won't cover that. So they move to another country altogether.

"Jest move to where duh jerbs are" is not a solution.

But the entire population of the USA can't live in New York.

The number of people who currently live in NYC is more than double the entire population of the country at independence. I don't mean to be flippant, but every major city now was once tiny. The process of urbanization is centuries old. The US is lucky in that unlike Ireland (or the UK, or France) economic growth is pretty dispersed between several major urban areas, all of which could attract new internal migrants. Obviously there are big policy challenges (see the issues discussed in the infrastructure comment today elsewhere), but sure, I don't see the issue with NYC becoming as populous as, say, Tokyo.

Building more homes where the economic activity is tends to be more viable than trying to artificially disperse economic activity to where the homes are, which as far as I know has mostly been a huge failure historically.

The entire reason their great grandparents moved to Detroit is Detroit was where the growth was. I'm not really sure I understand the argument here.

Calling a 90-year period historically "brief" is a bit of a stretch. Also, I somehow doubt that those English regions were "barely populated" before 1860.

I am skeptical if protectionism is a good idea for the US car industry.

Protectionism can be a good choice to allow your industry to catch up to the global market, if you do it right.

However, I have every confidence that the US would not do it right. The situation of carmakers in the US is very different from the situation of carmakers in Korea 1973. US carmakers are not hopelessly behind because they lack know-how. I would wager that the primary reason they are behind is because labor is way more expensive in the US than in China.

Valid reasons to engage in protectionism would be to offset China's advantage due to lax environmental and safety standards, or to offset anti-competitive subsidiaries by the Chinese state. In some sectors, there can be an argument made to protect industries which are non-profitable, but strategically important: even if tanks sold by China offered similar performance at a much lower price compared to NATO-produced tanks, it would not be in the interest of NATO countries to rely on foreign supply chains. Similarly, German coal subsidiaries were excused by the need for energy autonomy. I have a hard time seeing the strategic value of lower end cars though.


What is this place?

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

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

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


Why are you called The Motte?

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

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


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