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PaperclipPerfector  14d ago (text post)   26445 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024

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I read the Origins of Woke by Richard Hanania a couple weeks ago. I was going to write a more in depth review covering more sections, but got bored after writing my thought process about how employers aren't allowed to use discriminatory tests and never got around to writing more, so I'll post what I did write.

Let’s all people have a factor that you can represent numerically how good they will be at a job. Let’s call it the m, for mystery, because exactly what will make someone good at a job- e.g knowledge, skill, conscientiousness, etc. can be very difficult to measure, and knowing how important proportionally each sub-factor is to the final m factor or even what every sub-factor maybe is also very difficult. But, we can still try to estimate someone’s m. If you have a job that largely involves lifting heavy boxes and moving them around, you can get a decent estimate by having a candidate try to lift a heavy box- if they fall, they almost certainly have low m for that job, and if they succeed with ease, they’ll likely have a high m for that job. If you have a CEO position for a large multinational corporation, you can like at a candidate’s previous job experience- if they’ve previously been in charge of a corporation that hit records profits during their tenure, they’ll likely have high m. If while previously in charge of a corporation, it went from high profits to bankruptcy, or they’ve only ever held a job as a janitor, you can guess that they’d have low m for the position.

We can say with confidence that on average, black people have lower m than white people for most jobs. Whether this is because of genetics, culture, discrimination, or something else isn’t relevant to this discussion, because this discussion isn’t about increasing their m, just about what are fair hiring practices. In 1964, when the Civil Rights Act passed, both Congress and the general population of America overwhelmingly wanted two things: For black people to not be actively discriminated against, but also for people to be able to still select the best employees for a job, even if all the best employees were white. But what is “discrimination”? That’s a surprisingly hard question to answer.

Let’s say an employer has 1000 job candidates, and needs to select 100 to fill a newly created job. The employer wants to get the 100 employees with the highest m- he is unlikely to succeed perfectly, but he still wants to get as close as he can. If the employer asked all potential job candidates to fill out a brief questionnaire as the first stage of the application process, and one of the questions was “Are you black?”, and then the employer threw out every single application where someone answered “Yes”, the average m in the remaining pool would likely be higher, although he also would’ve likely tossed some candidates who did belong in the final pool. Whether it’s a good idea from the employer’s perspective may vary- maybe the employer really has no good ideas on how to figure out which candidates have higher m, and his next step will just be to randomly select 100 candidates from the remaining pool, in which case he’ll have done better in terms of average m score than if he didn’t purge black candidates.

But, I think almost everyone would agree that purging black applications like that is discrimination, in the letter of the ACR, in the spirit of what Congress intended it, and that the majority of Americans don’t want to see that sort of candidate selection happen, not from government employers and not from private employers either. The government would tell any employer that tried to do that something like, “Stop that, rework your hiring practices so that you’re actually more directly testing for m, and not just discriminating against blacks”.

So the employer goes back to the drawing board, and comes up with another test. He will take a pencil, and slide it into the hair of a candidate. After releasing, if the pencil falls out of the hair, the candidate proceeds to the next stage, if it stays in, the candidate is removed from selection. That’s the Apartheid South African Pencil test, and in practice that’d basically be the same as the previous test, although it’s hypothetically possible some black people would pass and some white people would fail. Or maybe the employer tries to be slightly less blatant, and instead does a swimming test(black have worse buoyancy than white people). Unless the job actually involves swimming in some way, I think most people would still agree that such a test is discriminatory, not actually measuring m in any way, at least not more than a generic fitness test does, and would only have predictive power in job performance because it’s managing to exclude blacks.

The employer now comes up with a fourth test. It will be a straightforward algebra exam, the sort you’d see in a 10th grade math course. If the job does not involve algebra in any way, like it’s a job moving boxes around, or maybe it’s a cashier job at a retailer, or even a more high class job like a lawyer that doesn’t really involve math, then this test will also disproportionately fail black candidates, who tend to be worse at algebra. But, is it actually discriminatory? Where the previous tests only would have any predictive power for job performance in so far as they measured whether or not someone’s black, and black people on average did worse at the job, the algebra test might have real predictive power, because it’s not just measuring algebra skill, it’s also measuring general intelligence, and general intelligence would be a major component of m for almost any job.

Whether the test is actually discriminatory now comes down to whether “general intelligence” is real, and also that if it is real, can it be measured by an algebra test? I don’t think that question, in the absence of formal studies, has an obvious answer. I think reasonable people could very easily come to believe that algebra skill is divorced from other intellectual tasks like public speaking, literacy, chess skill, etc. My understanding of the literature is that that is not true- that there is a general intelligence, and skill at all intellectual tasks are relatively closely correlated. And that that general intelligence is also closely correlated with job performance in pretty much every job. But, reasonable judges who aren’t good at parsing scientific studies themselves can be convinced that general intelligence does not work like that.

Richard Hanania, in The Origin’s of Woke, writes that judges and bureaucrats expanding the definition of discrimination to also include tests that really measure future job performance is one of the key origins of wokeness. I wouldn’t disagree. Where I do disagree with him is that I don’t think it’s easily possible to permit real skill tests but ban actually discriminatory test, because they can look very similar. Ultimately I don’t disagree with his conclusion that the laws should be altered to allow for discrimination though, because I think where in the 60’s the Civil Rights Act may have been needed to prevent employers doing discrimination along the lines of a Pencil Test for employees like how the American people wanted, today the vast majority of Americans are no longer anti-black racist, despite what many on the left think. I think you could remove a lot of anti-discrimination protections, and unlike in the 60’s, a combination of few people today being actually racist and non-governmental social pressure to keep the real racists in line will prevent the sort of racism Americans hate.

According to the internet the Wonderlic test, which is an IQ test, is used by a large number of major American corporations, from Bank of America to American Airlines to Abbott medical. Dozens of other major corporations have their own in-house cognitive assessments. The infamous ‘Google interview question’ is an IQ test. The US military and many parts of federal and state civil services use IQ tests. Somehow these places did not stop using them under legal pressure despite the disparate outcome standard being in place for fifty years or more.

The sole requirement for employers is that they must be able to prove that test performance equals job performance. This is absurdly simple to do in any profession in which performance can be objectively measured (which is most of them).

The major lost cases (iirc a big one semi-recently was some firefighter or cop promotions in New England) are where this standard couldn’t be shown to investigators. If you can prove it the justice department will typically just move on and not even look further into a case.

The infamous ‘Google interview question’ is an IQ test

Obviously it correlates with IQ and G, but it’s not an IQ test.

The point of an IQ test is to measure something “intrinsic”, and so they try not to rely more than necessary on education (e.g. they tend not to include calculus questions), as this confounds your attempt to measure something intrinsic.

In contrast, a genius who has never programmed a computer or taken a CS class is going to fail a technical interview, which is literally by design.

This doesn't seem like a nit when the debate is around what tests are legal, illegal, or legally grey.

By ‘Google interview question’ I mean the historic kind that made Google a famous interviewer in the early 2000s where they’d ask how many pizza boxes could fit under the Golden Gate Bridge or whatever and see how you reasoned your way through the question.

But they and all the big tech companies have stamped out this sort of question precisely because of the chilling effect of the law. You can obviously make a case that it's related to job performance, but their legal departments prefer to stick to coding and behavioral questions where the case is self-explanatory.

Do we know this is the case? Up until now I had assumed these tests got abandoned because much of the predictive power of the test was based on people not knowing how to approach this novel situation and having to figure it out on the fly. Once the secret got out and people learned a script for this type of question, answering got easier and more routine and the tests ceased to be such a good indicator.

I recall the timeline of the tests going away being shortly after everyone on the internet started talking about Google interview questions and specifically questions of this type, and I don't think that was a coincidence.

But you don't know whether you can prove it or not until you end up in front of a judge. That's got to have some sort of chilling effect.

The other famous case recently was teachers in NYC schools. They proved that the test was fine to one judge and then lost on appeal and had to shell out $2 billion. So it's a pretty arbitrary standard that can go either way depending on the judge.

But you don't know whether you can prove it or not until you end up in front of a judge. That's got to have some sort of chilling effect.

It seems to me there are two axes here: vague versus concrete legislation, and restrictive versus unrestrictive. Complaining that the current system is too restrictive (or not restrictive enough) for private companies (or public organizations) seems like a fairly interesting debate. But I really really don't think you want to be asking for concrete legislation that irons out all the ambiguity, like "only these 5 industries can ask math questions during interviews", "you can only require applicants to write essays if their job involves writing more than 4 essays a year", etc.

Passing the buck on to judges is how systems try to avoid insanely idiotic edge cases that inevitably comes from extremely concrete legislation -- judges are the political organ trusted with discretion and judgement.

Yes, that makes the legal system less predictable (which is bad), but the alternative is not "incredibly concrete legislation that doesn't have any terrible edge cases". The alternative is "iron-rules bureaucracy that follows a brain-dead flow chart" -- i.e. precisely the system that people on here like to complain about.

Granted, "prove x is true" can be incredibly sane or downright impossible, depending on how sensible your judge is. I just don't think there is really an alternative here that isn't worse. Similarly, note that the rules on this website are also pretty open to interpretation, and you may get different rulings from different mods. Nonetheless, trying to simply write more concrete rules could never actually work.

The counterfactual isn’t dumb regulations about tests, it’s racial quotas or laissez faire freedom of association. The politics of quotas have been unpalatable to voters forever so instead we get opaque jurisprudence trying to square the circle of stopping racism without noticing minority underperformance. There’s a ton of path dependence that got us here, and while the bureaucracy might be metastatic at this point good concrete legislation in the 1960s might have built a different, more functional world.

Are you arguing you'd prefer the New York school system to use racial quotas? Or that you'd prefer if principals could exclusively hire $race $gender teachers and be protected by freedom of association?

The current system of "hey, try to let the requirements of the job drive the hiring process. Sorry that we can't give you a perfect checklist that guarantees you won't be sued" seems far superior to either of those.

I’d prefer if good workers were hired over bad workers, and failing that quotas could grant the system of racial spoils some transparency. The status quo of neither drives inflationary compliance costs where every company has to shell out for the next hot seminar about racial equity or run the risk of deviating from standard practice and thus become liable for a lawsuit.

But that wasn’t my point. What we get is overdetermined; underperforming minorities are going to underperform, and it’s mean to be mean about that, but they on average are worse than the average worker, so we get a stupid compromise that solves nothing with immense costs but sounds nice and fair so we’re going to be stuck with it forever.

The other famous case recently was teachers in NYC schools. They proved that the test was fine to one judge and then lost on appeal and had to shell out $2 billion.

What was their test like?

It seems trivially obvious that a high school math teacher should have to pass a math test slightly higher than whatever they'll be teaching. Or that a bank employee should be able to do whatever kind of math they might use for their job.

It seems unlikely that the extra friction and expense of requiring kindergarten teachers who can pass even Algebra II is worth it, as long as they're literate, patient, enforce social norms, and willing to stick with the phonics and counting curriculum. I vaguely remember having to pass an algebra test as an adult, some years after taking the course, in order to continue teaching a subject that involved no algebra at all, but a lot of enforcement of social norms and some design stuff. It seemed a little silly, and I do think I would have been pretty pissed if I had failed and needed to both re-learn algebra and pay a fee to re-take the test.

Seems sort of similar to the kinds of friction you get in big companies. Google has teams that require very in-demand skills and teams that require very out-of-demand skills, but front or back, iOS or Android, C++ or JavaScript, everyone gets paid on the same ladder and has to pass the same interview.

Google actually has a separate SWE-Front End position with different interviews. This is not because Google's interview process is good (it's not), but because the market puts some limits on corporate idiocy.

IIRC, most of the interviews were the same for front end SWEs, but they swapped out the system design interview for a frontend interview.

Yeah that's fair. IME out-of-college interviews tend to be very general, algorithms/data structures stuff (e.g. I did a general interview, and was offered a spot on a computer vision team and on a software engineering team). But if you're hiring somebody with industry experience, especially at a senior level (L5), questions will be geared more to their specialty. The pay scale is still the same though, afaik.

It seems unlikely that the extra friction and expense of requiring kindergarten teachers who can pass even Algebra II is worth it, as long as they're literate, patient, enforce social norms, and willing to stick with the phonics and counting curriculum.

The current system of requiring a college degree with an education specialization is also extra friction and expense compared to the previous system of letting school officials hire 16 year old girls and use their judgement to pick which ones would be any good at it.

It seems trivially obvious that a high school math teacher should have to pass a math test slightly higher than whatever they'll be teaching.

Yes, but then they didn't have anywhere near enough black or hispanic teachers, which was not an acceptable outcome in that culture.

The tests weren't made public to protect trade secrets of the testing company unfortunately so I'm not sure.

I agree it might seem silly but I don't think that it would be racist or that you should get a $2 million pay out like in this case.

There may be something to the accusation that some jobs have been set up in a way to favor people who are very good at showing up with to the minute timing, writing emails and reports, and other things that are convenient for managers but not exactly about the work being done, such that it's more convenient to manage a small white woman moving a few boxes than a strong black man moving many larger, heavier boxes, because her m in general office skills and agreeableness are higher. This seems to happen a fair bit in government positions, where there might be several support white women writing grants for some minority local agricultural program or something. I've seen it in politics, with full time non-minority positions devoted to "centering minority voices" in marketing materials.

I'm most familiar with education, and do sometimes see this happen. People often talk about the degree barrier, and schools being organized like mid-century factories. Recently, I saw a situation where a minority community is required to hire an art teacher. The specific community is rich in professional artisans, that and views of nature is all they're known for. But they have to hire someone with a college degree, additional education classes for certification, who can run classes that are cleaned up and ready to leave exactly when the bell rings, do a moderate amount of accurate paperwork, and write some reports. So they get an outsider. They are not allowed to exchange this position for a business or finance teacher, which they might be more in need of. This is a bit silly and wasteful. The skills for m, training the next generation of artisans is not the same as m fitting into a tightly scheduled, interlocking education system that's stressed about specials teachers providing "preps" for the homeroom teachers, and the bureaucratic money goes towards the latter.

That isn't to say that I generally agree with the woke take that surely if you removed barriers we could achieve "equity," especially in high education and prestige positions. But the structure of at least some jobs (probably the kinds of jobs the average woke activist is most familiar with) are not very tightly linked to their ostensible goal.

But, is it actually discriminatory?

What would you say to someone who answered “yes” to this question? Because it comes down to how you define “racial discrimination.” To discriminate is to make distinctions, to distinguish, “to separate from another by discerning differences.” The examples you give all discriminate by race at the individual level; they treat individuals differently according to their race. But what about discrimination at the group level? If a system produces statistically distinct outcomes between two racial groups, even if no individual is treated different on account of their race, does it not still distinguish, separate, and discern differences between the two groups as groups? Does it not then discriminate between the racial groups?

If you read academic race theory works, you end up finding working definitions, usually implicit, in line with exactly this — “racial discrimination” being defined as the presence of “disparate impact” — regardless of whatever causes it. If blacks do have lower average m scores, then anything that sorts on m will discern that difference between the racial groups (unless you deliberately compensate for that racial difference), and thus discriminate between the racial groups. Thus, lower m scores are not an excuse for hiring fewer blacks, they’re the reason using m scores at all is racist.

the algebra test might have real predictive power

Are “having predictive power” and “racially discriminatory” mutually exclusive? They certainly aren’t so if you use the above definition. In fact, given your example, the more predictive power your test has with respect to m, the more racist it is.

Whether the test is actually discriminatory now comes down to whether “general intelligence” is real, and also that if it is real, can it be measured by an algebra test?

Again, no. Even if “general intelligence” is real, if it statistically differs between races as groups, then an algebra test that measures it — or any other test that does so — will be racist for exactly that reason.

will prevent the sort of racism Americans hate.

It doesn’t matter what sort of racism ordinary Americans hate, it only matters what sort of racism American elites hate. And looking at the people who are the credentialed “experts” in these matters, and how the people who interpret and enforce the relevant laws have been drawing upon their views for decades, they’re very much in line with the “disparate impact = racism” view, in which any system that produces statistical differences in outcomes is definitionally racist regardless of the reason why, no matter what real statistical differences it may be detecting. It doesn’t matter if “general intelligence is also closely correlated with job performance in pretty much every job”; that just means that a “colorblind* selection for job performance is racist.

I think you meant to respond to @non_radical_centrist directly

Yeah, sorry about that.

Yes. If (1) races are different, (2) that difference results in one race performing better compared to another race on outcome X, and (3) outcome X is relevant to a company, then (4) you’ll see a different racial mix compared to overall population stats.

The race theorists call this racism and assume it is a bad thing. I don’t think it is is a bad thing and don’t really care whether we call it racism or not.

I don’t think it is is a bad thing and don’t really care whether we call it racism or not.

Except you're not in charge, the "race theorists" are, so what you think or care about doesn't matter, only what they think and care about.

People often talk about the degree barrier

Fun, counterintuitive fact: Degree requirements actually favor black applicants, because in the US, black people are educational overachievers.

That is, for any given test score level, black Americans have, on average, higher educational attainment than non-Hispanic white Americans. If you look here, in 2021, 26% of black and 45% of NHW Americans age 25-29 had at least a bachelor's degree.

If we look here, we see that the 74th percentile for black SAT takers is between 1000 and 1100, let's say 1050. This is an upper bound for the average SAT score of black four-year graduates; it's likely a bit lower due to the imperfect correlation between test scores and educational attainment. The 55th percentile for whites is around 1150, half a standard deviation higher. If we do a similar exercise for masters or higher, again we find roughly a half-sigma difference.

I don't think this is primarily attributable to affirmative action, since most four-year universities do not have competitive admissions. Probably the fact that black students tend to have wealthier and more educated parents than white students with the same test scores plays a role. Athletics may be a factor as well.

Anyway, since black people tend to be more credentialed than white people (and Hispanics) with the same cognitive and academic skills, degree requirements actually give them an edge. I expect that the DEI industry will quickly lose interest in skills-first hiring when they realize that the main beneficiaries are white and Hispanic men.

That's interesting, though not directly related to the community I was thinking of.

One of the things I like least about the current BLM iteration of ethnic strife is the way it read ADOS Black/white dynamics into completely different ethnic histories and interactions in regions very far from the areas affected by slavery. Even entirely different countries are adopting it! European countries, with utterly different ethnic histories! But the American West Coast wasn't centrally racist against blacks more than, say, Chinese for much of its history.

Anyway, I guess I was thinking of crafts and community gardening as a stand in for the kind of traditionally human things that most people who are average for their own group really can do, the community is happy to have, and the government likes to encourage, but for Seeing like a State reasons once they are Jobs, or even just Volunteer Positions, they become administratively complex, such that the people who are perfectly able to do the thing itself cannot administer the permits and grants, where most of the money ends up going.

As Sailer and others have said, you can’t perfectly compare different groups at the same nominal IQ level because actual social dysfunction, being disruptive and other deleterious things are often tied more to how many standard deviations you are below your population average than they are to the overall population. For example the observation that a white kid of 80 IQ is often a lot more dysfunctional and socially incapable than a black kid of 80 IQ. There are entire populations that are capable of functioning at levels that would render an ashkenazi person fit only for a lifetime of psychiatric care.

I wonder if that correlation isn’t only downward. IQ is correlated with conscientiousness, planning ability, time preference and so on. Is it possible that a black person of 130 is likely higher functioning than a Jewish person of 130? Could be an interesting thing to look at.

Is Ben Carson higher functioning than the average rabbi? Seems entirely plausible.

At neurosurgery? Absolutely. At chinuch? Almost certainly not.

What are we talking about, again?

I think the reason for higher rates of comorbidities among low-IQ individuals from higher-IQ populations is that you're very unlikely to get an IQ two standard deviations below the mean purely because of additive genetic effects, so a large proportion of people with IQs this low are going to have some major developmental disorder causing the cognitive deficit. On the other hand, if an IQ of 70 is only one standard deviation below the population mean, then a sixth of the population is going to get there with additive genetic effects and a relatively small proportion will get there through some major developmental disorder.

I don't think it works the other way. The only way you get an IQ two standard deviations above the mean is with additive genetic effects. There's no anti-Down syndrome, where you can get an extra chromosome that gives you 30 extra IQ points.

However, it's worth noting that black students don't actually perform better in college than white students with the same test scores. They're just more likely to enroll and stick it out to the end. This is why I suspect that non-academic factors like higher family SES and athletics play a role. Unlike raw IQ, educational attainment has a substantial shared environment component in twin studies, probably due to a combination of cultural attitudes toward education and parents' ability to help pay for college.

Or it could be the same reason women are more likely to stick college out all the way through, whatever that is- probably a willingness to switch their engineering major for psychology where white men would leave and go to welding school.

But, reasonable judges who aren’t good at parsing scientific studies themselves can be convinced that general intelligence does not work like that.

Many brain cells are expensed trying to justify WHY some groups must ve 'actively discriminated' against when the intuitive value of the above statement is obvious to anyone who has interacted with other people. If everyone was equal in ability and some groups were being discriminated against for no reason, I would hire them since they cost less money/are more desperate and I would crush the competition with my superior offerings. Korean bulge bracket banks are filled with Korean girls because they work hard and don't cause trouble all while being cheaper. Silicon Valley is filled with the obvious Asian (East and South) surplus because of their acretive value. Neither circumstance emerged because of a concerted antidiscriminatory lobby, but because market forces brought them to the fore. Capability tests are discriminatory solely because they are barriers to the value capture efforts of activists. Goldman Korea hires girls because these girls generate more value than their cost, but activists hire minorities because their tribe can parasite the value off the host.

If everyone was equal in ability and some groups were being discriminated against for no reason, I would hire them since they cost less money/are more desperate and I would crush the competition with my superior offerings.

There was a problem with racism in the Jim Crow era where, if you were to be colour blind with your hiring practices and what customers you let in in the South, you could get racists making a lot of trouble for you. I think we're well past that era, but that there was a time when things really were nastily racist needs to be kept in mind.

oh certainly, in those situations then real racism comes to the fore and thats undeniable. It still means there is a resource worth tapping in that case. Why don't agriculture firms get unemployed hicks or 'youth' to go pick their damn strawberries instead of mexicans? Something is at play other than a single line that says 'warm body' and that is what screening exercises are for.

Given the results of integration I have a hard time calling it (the racism) 'nasty' rather than 'warranted' or even 'prescient'. So many downtown areas, neighborhoods, schools, and communities destroyed. So many lives and livelihoods lost. But at least we're not as mean now, I guess.

Another day, another man engaging in auto-auto-da-fe. While the stellar minds of the frontpage Reddit debate if it is QAnon or TDS that make a person set himself on fire, less stellar ones dug up his manifesto, where he places Trump and Hillary on the same side, and Thiel and cryptocurrency at the heart of it all. Points for originality. Not many points, but some points. But this is only the background for a comment which I read in the thread, one of a thousand semantically identical ones over the years.

It sounds incredibly plausible that the term "conspiracy theory" and flooding the field with flat-earthers, bigfoot hunters, extraterrestial anal examination enjoyers, and the rest, is itself a conspiracy designed to discredit people who ask questions about Kennedy assassination and Mkultra by conflating them with kooks and schizos. But going further, there is a meme, that comment which I have read a thousand times, which says it's a fear of nobody in control, of a random universe and of Hanlon's razor that makes people invent conspiracy theories. Is this meme a psy-op itself? Its aim to bring down status of those who ask questions about possible conspiracies even lower, paint them as cowards running from the reality? Given how reliably it appears as a call-response pair with somebody mentioning a conspiracy theory in a discussion, I'm inclined to answer positively.

And maybe it's a typical mind fallacy, but another piece of evidence of the artificiality of this meme is that it reverses the scariness of those two possibilities. To me, a world where people come to harm because of impersonal arbitrary forces, of an inherent chaos which can be mitigated or ignored according to your risk tolerance, is a comforting world. It is not the world I believe in. I believe there are malicious, intelligent, competent agents which plan for humiliation and elimination of large masses of populations, because, respectively, social status is zero-sum and material resources are finite. I know that I'm not as intelligent, as connected, as fortunate in the circumstances of my birth as them, so there is literally nothing I can to in mitigation, not to mention that malice aggravates the feeling of injustice so much more than bad luck, when something horrible happens. This world I believe we live in, the world of conspiracy theories that are true, is without a doubt not the more comforting one of the two.

I believe there are malicious, intelligent, competent agents which plan for humiliation and elimination of large masses of populations, because, respectively, social status is zero-sum and material resources are finite.

This is a silly position to hold. The world is positive-sum given that scientific advances in productivity combined with returns-to-scale have allowed us to make humanity richer than ever before. I presume you are right-wing but this horseshoes pretty well with the leftist idea that European civilizations only got rich by plundering brown countries, and that whites will forever be tainted by this until reparations enforces equity upon all nations (and perhaps not even then). It's utter tripe.

positive-sum

Positive sum in terms of who's system of values? You may have a system that you think everyone should share, but not everyone shares it.

In some other value system, your most positive contribution to the world might involve immediate ritual suicide, to spare the rest of us the effort.

For a less extreme version, someone else's value system might have an axis that does not exist in your system, maybe including such things as "souls" and "afterlives" and suchlike. They might make decisions to de-prioritize improvement in your shared dimensions, in favor of improvements in a dimension that you think is imaginary. (Ritual purity laws might be a good example here.)

It's positive-sum in terms of material resources, which is what I was responding to given the OP's message.

I agree that not everyone shares the same system of values, with some diverging or even outright conflicting. For some, like Nazism, military conflict is required, but that does not necessitate "elimination of large masses of populations". Just some humiliation for the Holocaust and other crimes. For most others, persuasion will suffice. Communism was defeated simply by capitalism existing as a viable and better-seeming alternative. The great thing about democracy and the modern world order is that it heavily emphasizes persuasion as opposed to force of arms to solve ideological disputes. I'd prefer to keep it that way.

Material wealth can be positive sum because we can add to it in discrete components.

Social status is innately relative, and as a function of that is innately zero sum. The lower classes have more absolute wealth than they did in 1800, but they don't have more status.

That just begs the question what social status is. I think ranking is too poor of a definition and instead esteem should be considered at least as an important part of ones social status. Then social status trivially isn't a zero sum game, as we for example could increase the total trust in a system, taking for granted that 'trust afforded' is a component of ones esteem. For example imagine a group consisting of a 1:1 split of gentlemen and Criminal Scum (tm) compared to one that's purely gentlemen. Hopefully I don't have to belabour the point of how the amount of trust and pleasant behavior are different for each group, and how the amount can be increased by decreasing the ratio of Criminal Scum (tm).

I think the closest to zero sum is attention, but even believing that to be zero sum can be likened to believing that material wealth is. Of course there is some maximal bound on both of them, but I don't believe we are anywhere close to saturating the amount of attention that can be given and not either it's quality.

But given that you believe that social status is innately zero sum, how do you think adding people to a system interacts with status? Is the amount diluted or is average kept (per person)?

"Scarcity doesn't exist" is certainly a position, but I usually see it from the people far to the left of the leftmost motte poster. Because you sound like a techno-optimist, let's assume there's a Dyson sphere around the sun. Where to from there? That's it, that the ceiling. Would you rather share the energy with a hundred billion others, or a hundred thousand?

let's assume there's a Dyson sphere around the sun. Where to from there? That's it, that the ceiling. Would you rather share the energy with a hundred billion others, or a hundred thousand?

Humanity is thousands if not millions of years away from achieving Dyson Sphere tier technology. Your argument here is the equivalent of saying we should ignore life-extending medicine due to the eventual heat death of the universe. Maybe at some point in the distant future that will become relevant, but for now it's unabashedly a good thing, just as it has been for the entirety of human history. And who knows, maybe at that point in the distant future we'll be able to pull energy and matter from nothing.

But going further, there is a meme, that comment which I have read a thousand times, which says it's a fear of nobody in control, of a random universe and of Hanlon's razor that makes people invent conspiracy theories. Is this meme a psy-op itself? Its aim to bring down status of those who ask questions about possible conspiracies even lower, paint them as cowards running from the reality? Given how reliably it appears as a call-response pair with somebody mentioning a conspiracy theory in a discussion, I'm inclined to answer positively.

I have seen it in action with family members, mostly harmlessly, and seems best explanation of what is going on (in general reasonable aunt complaining about masons controlling substantial part of catholic church - while being controlled by Soros who also runs entire EU).

I think your aunt is picking up on the quite reasonable to point out fact that a CPA(or anyone else who uses a spreadsheet to make decisions) with dictatorial powers would make better object-level decisions for the organization than the current pope and most of his appointees. And what that's missing is, of course, the enormous amount of internal politicking going on where individual and group actors within the Catholic Church might have conditions which benefit themselves which are drastically different from benefit to the Church(the organization) as a whole, along with lots of true believers in the spiritual side of things making decisions off of what amounts to pure ideology, plus bog standard corruption.

I suspect that this is a very generally applicable and that it explains lots of jewlumminati-type conspiracy theories; organizations can easily become irrational actors.

I tend to agree with the idea that the meme itself is artificial, and I think the aim is to give the public a meme that simply dismisses the idea of conspiracy out of hand. I don’t believe in any particular conspiracy personally, but I find the meme obnoxious simply because dismissing a claim out of hand is a dangerous thing simply because it means not even bothering with the evidence. I think the proper and critical thinking response to a conspiracy claim isn’t dismissing it out of hand, but demanding proof. If the earth is actually round, it will still be round even if I question it. And provided that the evidence is available, truth will eventually win.

I think the proper and critical thinking response to a conspiracy claim isn’t dismissing it out of hand, but demanding proof.

Well, you often get "it is OBVIOUS", "lack of proof is proving strength of conspiracy" or "please view this 2h long youtube video".

What now?

First of all, the person who makes a positive claim is the one obliged to provide evidence. This is simply elementary logic. Negatives cannot be proven, so it’s not on me to prove that no conspiracy happened, it’s on you to provide some evidence that there is a conspiracy.

Second “it’s obvious” isn’t evidence. If it’s obvious, proving it should be easy.

Third, I don’t accept YouTube as a source. Find me a newspaper or other print source so I can check on the facts presented.

And doing this in family setting typically irritates another person much more than ignoring their comment about shadowy conspiracy.

Often dismissing it out of hand rather than demanding proof is much better strategy.

Jack Chick theory of politics.

another piece of evidence of the artificiality of this meme is that it reverses the scariness of those two possibilities. To me, a world where people come to harm because of impersonal arbitrary forces, of an inherent chaos which can be mitigated or ignored according to your risk tolerance, is a comforting world.

Fully agreed regarding relative sentiment. I never quite understood why this default hypothesis is presented as something scary – but for the purpose of stating a paradox, to signal cleverness, and also support for the status quo and high-status groups.

Malice is inherently and obviously threatening. Perhaps "the scary thing is nobody's in charge" folks see it as witty because they're not accustomed to fearing malice of others. Or they have a strong intuition that an orderly technocratic world is preferable, no matter its ultimate morality? In any case, quite alien logic.

I think it meshes nicely with a understanding (that I might have tried posting about in some more detail before, or else at least planned to) that ideologies like grey-tribery are for those who on the margin prefer to extract additional resources from nature, while ones like SJ is for those who extract resources from other people.

If your skill points are in wrangling people, then the "utils are withheld by scheming political coalitions" world is the comfy familiar scenario where you figure things will work out for you somehow, and the "utils are withheld by cold unfeeling nature" world is the maths class where no amount of conformism got you partial credit for the calculation you couldn't do, except now your life is on the line. On the other hand, if your skill points are in wrangling nature, as is probably the case for most people here, the dangers and missing utils of nature are another engineering challenge to overcome with Yankee ingenuity, Bayes and game theory, while the schemers world is like that time in high school you tried to join the cool kids table with Bayes and game theory and got shoved in a locker, except now your life is on the line. Perhaps relate to sentiments on Factorio vs. Diplomacy.

On the other hand, if your skill points are in wrangling nature, as is probably the case for most people here, the dangers and missing utils of nature are another engineering challenge to overcome with Yankee ingenuity, Bayes and game theory, while the schemers world is like that time in high school you tried to join the cool kids table with Bayes and game theory and got shoved in a locker, except now your life is on the line.

I remain unconvinced that there's much overlap between smart, competent people and the social outcasts that got shoved in lockers. I think the outcasts cling to this narrative as a coping mechanism rather than genuinely being all that competent. In my experience, the smart kids also tended towards being popular and good at sports. If your proverbial skill points were more intellect than charisma, you might get shit from your buddies about it, but I really doubt the framing of the highly competent being routinely bullied.

Eh, the locker-shoving thing was (intended as) hyperbole, but as a working academic (CS) my impression has always been that the majority of high-achieving people in the field are hopelessly substandard in matters of politics and coalition-building, easily walked over by those who are not, and often somewhat terrified of them for that. If you're not willing to take it from me, take it from the Y Combinator guy. Note that this does not imply, in either my case or Graham's, that one becomes an actual social outcast; most socialising is not adversarial.

I was never physically bullied in school, but I was an outcast. This was in the 2000s.

I'm not going to share my IQ or anything like that, so I guess you'll have to take it on my word that I'm pretty smart, in college I was an outstanding student. And maybe it's questionable that I'm "competent," though that depends on what skills exactly you're measuring. But the point of the meme is not that future Presidents of the United States with outstanding charisma are being shoved into lockers, it's that geeky kids who would make good researchers, programmers, or professors are. Those are people who do, indeed, have deficits in some areas, though they are capable of being highly successful in certain socially desirable niches. My teachers throughout my schooling told my parents I was capable of great things; my peers did not think so.

The issue was that it was difficult for me to relate to other kids, and for them to relate to me: I'd make jokes, and they wouldn't get them (my teachers sometimes did, though), I'd make references, and they'd go over their head; I also kind of had a Hermione thing going on, and I assure you that the feeling where students don't like the teacher's pet is still alive and well. The first day I went to the local gifted education program -- and then a selective high school program filled with smart people -- were the very first times in my entire life I felt like I belonged, people laughed at my jokes, people were interested in what I had to say.

The issue with public school is it mixes everybody together. The sorts of assortative social connections that allow people to find others they get along with and relate to are often not present; insofar as they are, it's exactly the sort of cool kids table vs geeky kids table vs goth kids table vs drama kids table stuff the comment you've replied to is talking about. If you go to a school which is a greater reflection of broader society -- so, like, a 100 IQ mean -- it is statistically incredibly likely you'll relate intellectually to very few members of the student body. Perhaps you went to a school located in an unusally well-off section of your community?

I would actually say you have a point in such a situation -- in the selective high school program I attended, I do think there was an observable correlation between a person's intelligence, popularity, and charisma, though there were also many niches where people of various interests could be successful. I recall having several friends who were, to put it bluntly, mathematical geniuses with little charisma.

I'm not sure either side of the story, like @Primaprimaprima indicates (dude, why are we so similar?), tells the whole story of what's going on. I think it's also notable that everything, including IQ, is correlative, and sometimes these correlations break down -- sometimes there are people with high verbal intelligence who suck at fractions (raises hand), or people with incredible endurance who can't bang rocks together, or people who understand computers from the boot ROM to the hyperscaler who can't remember to do their taxes, or people who are incredibly charismatic but lacking in prudence. Everyone, reading that sentence, had at least one real person pop into their head. Maybe someone they know, or at least someone they've heard about. We can talk a lot about correlations, especially when discussing broad social trends, but the core argument for liberalism has always been that correlations break down when talking about the individual. I think school experiences might be one of those situations.

The issue was that it was difficult for me to relate to other kids, and for them to relate to me:

Makes sense. That was my experience as well. I think that social skills are like athletic skills or martial arts- no matter how smart you are, you need other people to practice with. And it helps a lot to have partners who are roughly around your own level. That's why so many smart kids turn out a bit socially stunted and awkward- they can't "think themselves" into having genuine peer social connections.

See for example: https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/a-tale-of-two-teenagers

The social isolation and lack of friendships experienced in gifted children produced by the discrimination and isolation to which brilliant minds are subjected is generally confused as a disorder of lack of sociability. Gifted children no longer experience this situation of isolation by being relocated to specialised centres where they live with their peers (other gifted children).

...

The issue with public school is it mixes everybody together.

On the other hand that does at least give people a measure of humility. I'm worried about the real upper crust of people who are born into wealthy, talented families, got the genes for high intelligence, and then sent to selective schools where they only ever met other high-iq privileged kids. It seems like a sort of breeding ground for entitled assholes- the "Davos Man" who has absolutely no idea what an average Joe is like. For example Bill Gates was sent to a wealthy prep school for middle school, wealthy and ratified enough to have a programmers club in the 60s when that sort of thing was very rate. And obviously that's a huge competitive advantage for someone like Bill Gates, but... he did turn into a bit of an asshole, taking over software monopolies with manic win-at-all-costs, crush-my-enemies energy and only much later in life did it seem like he finally had a change of heart and started to reflect on his actions a bit.

I actually found my experience at the selective high school to be more humbling than the alternative -- while I was rarely intentionally elitist towards other students in the younger grades (typically I felt inferior to them), there were definitely a few times where I was like that. Going to the selective school put me in places where I wasn't the smartest guy around. I even met some people who were more intensely elitist than I had ever dreamed of being, who looked down on anybody who struggled with things they found easy, who couldn't even get along with the very smart student body because they thought themselves better even than them. I went from the top 1% of students to the top 20%. Being not the smartest guy in a room helped me understand my limits and be more empathetic toward people not as smart as me. If I hadn't had that experience, I do wonder if I would have turned out like the "I am enlightened by my intelligence" guy.

I remain unconvinced that there's much overlap between smart, competent people and the social outcasts that got shoved in lockers. I think the outcasts cling to this narrative as a coping mechanism rather than genuinely being all that competent.

Sure, partially. But it's not entirely wrong. The idea didn't just come from nowhere.

I feel like I've seen an overcorrection in recent years away from the smart = socially awkward myth and towards a new myth of a pure linear spectrum between blonde-haired-seven-foot ubermensch math PhD star athletes on the one hand and sickly frail developmentally deficient chronic failures on the other, which is also not an accurate model of reality.

I'm intelligent and I was bullied pretty severely in middle school, up to and including physical assault. Things got better by high school and I had multiple friends and a decently normal social life, but I was never fantastically popular.

the smart kids also tended towards being popular and good at sports

Not sure how we're defining "good at sports" but this point in particular doesn't match my experience at all. The stars on the high school football and basketball teams tended to be C students. Professional athletes in most major sports don't strike me as particularly more intelligent than average, at least compared to people who directly make a living off of cognitive skills.

In general the biographies of great thinkers show enough of what today we might label "sperg" behavior to make me think there's a legitimate pattern here - Newton, Kant, Wittgenstein...

The past truly was a different country. The Marty McFly archetype didn't come into being for no reason.

There’s a soft and hard version of this thesis though. It’s like Cummings writing about how he was surprised, upon becoming the PM’s chief adviser, that there was no secret management room where the competent people were actually running things, even if he disagreed with their ideology. There was nobody in charge. Now, you can say that he merely wasn’t privy to the actual deep state or whatever, and that’s a legitimate theory, but I’ve heard similar sentiments from other powerful people and I don’t believe they’re all lying.

Some people, often those one wouldn’t necessarily expect, and sometimes those one would (‘retired’ Obama is one) truly do wield large amounts of power, but even they’re not really in charge.

I actually consider the viewpoint of:

another piece of evidence of the artificiality of this meme is that it reverses the scariness of those two possibilities. To me, a world where people come to harm because of impersonal arbitrary forces, of an inherent chaos which can be mitigated or ignored according to your risk tolerance, is a comforting world.

inherently scary and threatening. There is plenty of doublethink and celebration paralax going on.

It is a very implausible claim on the face of it.

Things happen for a reason, and in the world there are various groups with different agendas that they coordinate for their goals at expense of others, is simply an unshakeable fact.

J. Edgar Hoover saying the mafia doesn't exist is scary, because the mafia obviously exists and he is covering up for it. There isn't a reading where it is productive to focus upon the comfort of the mafia not existing, just cause Hoover says it doesn't exist. It isn't a realistic scenario. Nor of course can you blame everything that happens on you, on the mafia being behind it, but it is nonsense to come with an understanding of reality that disminishes the mafia.

When people claimed that there was no communist conspiracy, and like people here who do it with the contemporary version of this, promoted weakmen kooky scenarios of communists putting fluoride in water supply, and comedies pushed the meme "Communists are out to get our bodily fluids", and were hating on those who opposed it as right wing extremist lunatics, that was scary. We had communist sympathizers who opposed valid opposition to communists, and painted reasonable vigilance as inherently ridiculous. That is dangerous and a society with no defenses should be afraid of how things are going to degenerate towards.

A reasonable precautionary attitude and suspicion is protective. And I find a society that has a pragmatic, intellectually wise attitude towards precaution and recognizes the things it must focuses upon, to be a more comforting one. Basically, the people who are dismissive are not actually promoting a more comforting vision, but their very action of dismissing valid problems is threatening, and often a result of them sympathizing if not outright belonging in particular factions that are accused of coordinating to screw over people. The meme of a very tiny cabal is unfortunately false, because influential aspiring factions try to recruit others and do have supporters.

There isn't' a scenario where the CIA, or George Soros, or ADL and others like them representing actual factions aren't t doing plenty of nefarious things, or groups like Epstein's don't exist. Or that things like biological weapon programs of CIA, or that it is possible that covid itself might be the result of such research, are inherently ridiculous claims. The scenario we are dealing with is the one where people are covering up for them and worse vilifying those who do oppose and care as lunatics, or as extremists.

To further give my take, and don't misunderstand my tone here as implying you think otherwise, because I am more explaining my understanding than disagreeing with you:

Now, this isn't to say that any kooky claim is legitimate. Criminal conspiracies are real, and nefarious factions that might or might not fit within the definition of criminality, definitely exist without a shadow of a doubt and we know this. This doesn't mean moon landing is fake, or aliens are here. Just as we know this, we also know flat earth is nonsense. There are simply plausible claims, and implausible. Just like people who promote flat earth theory are promoting something which is nonsense, it is also credulous to be dismissive of opposition to genuine factions and pretend it is ridiculous.

In fact it is a strategy, infamously promoted by Cass R. Sunstein to flood the field with kooky conspiracy theories, to disminish suspicions on 9/11 and other issues. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1084585. So they both promote both implausible takes, but also to try to create weakman scenarios with real factions, like George Soros, or like the communists I mentioned. And then people are going to focus on the more sensationalist, kooky, weakman at best scenarios as a strategy of supporting the actions of genuine factions like the CIA, people like George Soros, groups like AIPAC and ADL, or even factions like cultural far leftists, or cliques of influential billionaires like Bill Ackman, etc. Or try to spin legitimate opposition as ridiculous.

Nobody is in charge is just an excuse to cover for the people with power and their actions. There are always people with influence doing things because they decided to do them. Even inaction is a decision, and someone must be held accountable for the direction things are going. It is also a promotion of lack of standards and servile attitude towards elites, and decision makers in general (which can include a decent share of the public on some issues) and even for mediocrity. Good governance requires accountability and holding people up to a standard.

I believe there are malicious, intelligent, competent agents which plan for humiliation and elimination of large masses of populations,

And that's why I'm dooming on AI. Because enough people aren't psychopathic enough and causing a genocide isn't that easy if all you have is a handful of conspirators.

Meanwhile, in the real world, it took giant totalitarian states to do anything, years of effort. AI systems will however make it much easier to pull off a conspiracy or develop a lethal agent.

They'll also make it much easier to detect anyone trying to do either, but doing so is costly and paranoid so the conspiracies will have an edge. Also, gigadeaths, if it didn't involve just 3rd world getting killed would crash the economy and destroy the supply chain. I think the Venn diagram between "non delusional genocidal wannabe world masters" and "wants to live in ruins, relying on scavenging spare parts" contains exactly zero people, and the former category is also very small too.

We have only one that could probably genocide, and it's in a superpower competition so no matter how feisty they might feel, just doing an actual genocide is pointless. Besides, they're patient and rich enough to not genocide people as you can tell by what's going on in Xinyang.

No, what's happening is basically just chaos+information overload and stress. Schizos of a certain sort are liable to act out in such an environment.

There's a good essay on the guy who killed himself here.

Besides, they're patient and rich enough to not genocide people as you can tell by what's going on in Xinyang.

...Is this sarcasm?

In my opinion, convincing someone to kill themselves or forcing them to kill themselves is morally the same thing.

If you are really going with "China depressed Uyghur TFR to 1.2", is suppressing their religion as being "genocide" then what's going in most of the world is also genocide. Religion is gone, TFR is in the crapper, no one is doing anything about it. The preferable solution is 'import people' to replace the dying out population.

What's true seems to be that a large % of their young males are in labor camps, there are anti-melee weapon measures everywhere (metal detectors, plastic shields, batons), there's a shit ton of police everywhere, much of them Uyghur. Strict surveillance, with people having to have tracking phone apps on.. (link worth reading, it's by a highly disagreeable person with no sympathies for either Uyghurs or Leninists.)

Which again, not nice, but unless they're getting worked to death on low rations, still not genocide. And with Chinese labor costs being as they are, I doubt they're not feeding them properly.

Now, not nice at all, but it's a just another case of 'fucking around and finding out'. Uyghurs failed to rein in their radicals, said radicals killed a couple hundred Chinese in machete attacks, caused the ongoing clampdown. Surely you remember the headlines? There was the big riot in the capital, then a half dozen big attacks in the following years.

I think you're overfitting different phenomena into a limited number of buckets. All of the following are true (IMO, of course):

  • The self-immolator is probably schizotypal and connected a lot of dots that aren't connected.
  • There are many schizotypal conspiracy theorists that believe very weird things about the world as a result of their lack of reasoning ability and overly aggressive pattern matching.
  • Some people lean towards conspiracies because randomness bothers them.
  • Some people lean towards conspiracies because humans have a tendency to pattern-match and attribute causality. They're not bothered by randomness, they're just not very good at understanding it, so they see intentionality everywhere.
  • There are substantial conspiracies that actually exist, including those by intelligence agencies, big corporations, non-governmental organizations, and more.
  • Some of these conspiracies will include trying to discredit people that notice what's going on.
  • There probably isn't a shady cabal that secretly controls everything - the most powerful people are probably the people that appear to be the most powerful people.

This set of positions allows plenty of space for some pretty wild conspiracy theories to be true without needing to add unnecessary moving parts to my understanding of the world. The CIA really does organize coups, but the guy that lit himself on fire is a garden-variety nutter.

The CIA really does organize coups, but the guy that lit himself on fire is a garden-variety nutter.

Has the CIA actually coup'd a government since the Church Commission?

They haven’t been officially admitted since then, but Ukraine in 2014 seems like a good candidate.

There has been no evidence up to even the level of the coup against the Mosaddegh government (ie. not a particularly high bar) that the CIA planned or executed any of it.

I had read this guy's blog before he got famous. I believe his main theory, the one he's held most consistently, is that Bitcoin is literally a vast Ponzi scheme concoted by some financial cabal intent on using it to crash the global economy. As a theory, it's not that much odder than your standard conspiracy theory stuff; what made it slightly notable enough to get my attention is that usually "there's a big financial cabal there trying to crash the economy for nefarious purposes" are pro-crypto and think that crypto's a tool to combat the financial cabal, not the tool of the financial cabal. As such, he didn't seem "crazier" than your average conspiracy guy; YMMV what the baseline of craziness for that crowd is.

That said, his manifesto and pre-suicide entry offer hints that he had been developing into a crazier direction (I suppose getting into the whole conspiracy milieu can't help), so when you get someone who is going down a slope that way and the somewhat notorious Aaron Bushnell immolation, well, that's what you get.

He believed The Simpsons was sending coded messages about an impending global totalitarian government. That’s much crazier than average.

Back in the time when I encountered the blog, he wasn't rambling about The Simpsons, unless I missed something. That's precisely what I was referring to, he has been spiralling to the crazy direction quite fast before his final act.

Kind of seems like you believe in some shadowy cabal keeping you down because that helps you make sense of your life circumstances and gives you someone to blame. There is no actual conspiracy against you, it is just the banality of the human culture machine that grinds on with or without you. The world isn't zero sum, we've proven that by elevating humanity to heretofore unimaginable heights. There is no conspiracy against you.

Nice bulverism.

Not as a reply to that particular poster, but as a general elaboration. My life is pretty carefree. But since 2020 I see what life will be like for everyone really soon, and since it's being steered there by agentic actors, the only escape is death before we get there.

I think the accusation of Bulverism is unfair. 'Me and people like me are being oppressed by shadowy, unnamed forces' is impossible to falsify. The onus is on you to prove it. If you can't or won't do that, then speculating on why you might believe that there are malicious, intelligent, competent agents which plan for humiliation and elimination of large masses of populations is a reasonable thing to do.

It turns out that naming the forces and pointing out their actions and advocates does not actually convince anyone. No level of evidence is sufficient for those who would rather sneer.

Why are you putting something I didn't say in quotation marks as if I did? And then, to add insult to injury, actually quoting me. You'll find that the text in italics is eminently falsifiable. If you want my prediction to be more concrete, then here: by the end of the century human population will be smaller than at the start of it, and an overwhelming majority of the remaining humans will have far less access to energy, resources, and freedoms, both in absolute terms and relative to what those at the top will enjoy.

by the end of the century human population will be smaller than at the start of it

So you are predicting... Two billion dead by the hand of the cabal if they start today?

an overwhelming majority of the remaining humans will have far less access to energy, resources, and freedoms, both in absolute terms and relative to what those at the top will enjoy.

This is already the case, so it's not much of a prediction.

Ordinary humans already have far less access to energy, resources, and freedoms in 2024 than in 2000? You and I have very different definitions of far less. We are not living in pods, eating bugs, and owning nothing yet.

Certainly the median human has "far less access to energy, resources, and freedoms... relative to what those at the top [enjoy]," and by "those at the top" I mean you and me.

The cabal seriously needs to pick up the pace, population is increasing every day and the century is nearly a quarter over.

You're misreading me, two times in a row now. The existence of wealth gap is trivially true and is no prediction at all. I'm saying that it will grow monumentally in 2100 compared to 2000, and also, this part you're completely ignoring for some reason, the absolute value of available energy and freedoms for a common person will be considerably lower in 2100 than 2000. And no, I'm not at the top even if I'm in a position to be a lazy layabout with internet and hookers, and if you're posting here, I assume neither are you. How many banks do you own?

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I think it was pretty clear from the context that the first part was a summary of your views. Plus, I did literally quote you later on with a far stronger claim.

Your prediction isn't predicting all that much. Birth rates are plummeting and have been for decades. Global births peaked in 2016 and the world's TFR is about to fall below replacement. That the global population will shrink significantly is mathematically certain.

The second part is stronger (at least the 'absolute' part if not the 'relative' part), but seems very unlikely to me.

However, we weren't discussing whether or not the average human will be poorer in 2100 than they are now. The discussion was about the 'malicious, intelligent, competent agents'. Who are these agents? Where is your evidence for their existence and motives? What would you accept as falsification of these claims?

And I think I was pretty clear that I sneer at your summary of my views as a strawman. As for what I would accept as falsification, it is simple. Flourishing of common people, rather than death and immiseration. No pods, no bugs, no fifteen minutes cages.

Well, we don't live in pods, nor do we eat bugs. I'm not sure how being able to walk to work counts as a 'cage' but whatever. Falsified, I guess?

But you haven't answered the key question. Who are these malicious actors? What evidence do you have for their exitence or motives?

Why is it consistently missed that this is my prediction for the future? Yes, we don't. We will. Unless we die, or I'm wrong.

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Another C.S. Lewis apologist in the house?

C.S. Lewis apologists generally don't believe the only escape is death.

You did not approve the filtered comment you're replying to, nice moderation there.

Reacting to the shadow on the cave wall, I don't hold Lewis, or any other religionist, in any esteem at all. He had that great quote about tyrants who do it for the moral reasons, I'll give him that, but that's the entirety of my appreciation.

We can't control who gets filtered, and the only sign in the new-comment feed that someone is filtered is a small, greyed-out icon. We try to unfilter them as soon as possible, but it's easy to miss and sometimes we do.

He had that great quote about tyrants who do it for the moral reasons, I'll give him that, but that's the entirety of my appreciation.

Among his many other virtues, his prediction of the trajectory of the sexual revolution was pretty on-point as well.

Don't be a dick.

When we (mods) read comments on the main page, and not by looking in the comments filter, it's not always obvious that a comment we're replying to is currently in the new-user filter and thus not visible to anyone else.

I'm confused. Did Epohon advocate for death as an answer to a question or did he use the term "bulversim"? Why not both?

So the term which is common in political discussions is his invention. Two good things about him, then. Hitler invented autobahns or something.

In the past I've heard a lot of jokes about "The People's Republic of Pennsylvania". I don't know much about the state, but the Secretary of Agriculture has been making news lately.

The latest evolving story is about Rusty Herr and Ethan Wentworth who ran a bovine reproductive services company called "NoBull Sires, LLC".

The dispute arose back in 2010 because the Ag Department sent them a cease and desist plus a statement of fine on the grounds that using an ultrasound was practicing veterinary medicine without a license. The counter argument was that the Ag Department was out of scope of the law. Routine checks don't meet the requirement of "diagnosis and treatment" for practising veterinary medicine, even if they involve an ultrasound machine.

Notably the Ag Department seems to have never filed the paperwork with a court, which is a prerequisite for enforcement. So they were likely aware of the legal issues. In 2020 the Pennsylvania Veterinary Medicine Association sent a complaint to the Department of State.

On April 10-11, 2024 they were arrested and sent to jail for 30 days for "contempt of court". The problem is that the Ag Department seems to have issued the arrest warrant on their own. The case has never been in court. They have not been before a judge.

So they are both in jail serving a 30 day sentence that didn't involve a judge and they haven't been allowed to see a judge.

There is a culture war angle here. The press seems to be reluctant to get involved for a few reasons. These days they like to defer to the bureaucracy, particularly when the Governor is from the right party. Plus Pennsylvania is in play for 2024 so they are reluctant to kick up a fuss that could help Trump.

I'm only finding coverage in the farming press right now and they don't really dive into the legal issues.

https://www.lancasterfarming.com/farming-news/news/livestock-ultrasound-operators-jailed-accused-of-unlicensed-vet-practice/article_39004570-fcd8-11ee-8396-1f8ec41b214f.html

https://agmoos.com/2024/04/17/pregnancy-is-not-a-disease-two-men-jailed-without-bail-for-repro-ultrasounding-of-dairy-cows/

In the past I've heard a lot of jokes about "The People's Republic of Pennsylvania".

I have never heard of that in my life. Pennsylvania is the quintessential purple state, with no one party dominating the state government for more than a term in decades (and that was a Republican trifecta) and it being close to a century since there was permanent partisan control of the sort you see in California or Massachusetts.

Overzealous bureaucracy knows no partisan bounds.

I've heard it before and thinking it over it's poor phrasing. It was always used in reference to bureaucracy.

Specifically back when this was in the news, https://reason.com/2014/12/20/pennsylvania-couple-seeks-return-of-wine/

People were posting about their own stories.

Farmshine has learned that these fines were ignored on advice of their former attorney, so as not to admit guilt. After all, why should Herr and Wentworth admit guilt for actions that have become commonplace and are open to interpretation of the state’s vague and archaic veterinary law in regard to defining ‘diagnosis’ — especially since pregnancy is not a disease to be diagnosed, but rather a condition to be observed?

This advice is so fucking stupid they should be suing whatever attorney gave it to them. I am not a barred lawyer in PA but I am confident that the proper response to "a state executive agency has inappropriately levied a fine and injunction on me" is "file suit challenging the action in a court of competent jurisdiction" not "ignore it and hope it goes away." All that notwithstanding, reading the Veterinary Medicine Practice Act, it sounds like the board has not followed the legally required procedure for enforcing its judgements. Unless there have been some proceedings initiated in a PA court that are not being mentioned.

So... don't walk in a bad neighborhood if you don't want to be raped?

More effort (and, perhaps, tact) than this, please.

good use of commas!

So... don't walk in a bad neighborhood if you don't want to be raped?

A better analogy would be: "If a cop stops you unjustly, don't ignore them or resist, but comply politely and address the issue through the proper channels."

However, it is also not wise to walk through a bad neighborhood alone and unarmed. Someone might do it anyway, but it amounts to bad advice for an expert in that neighborhood to recommend that someone do it.

A better analogy would be: "If a cop stops you unjustly, don't ignore them or resist, but comply politely and address the issue through the proper channels."

Which is a lie Americans tell themselves. Once you comply politely, if you're not arrested, the issue is over. There are no proper channels to go through that will impose any consequences on the cop.

Furthermore, if you do comply, and you are arrested and charged, and you complain, the courts may find that your compliance made the whole thing voluntary, and therefore you have no grounds for complaint.

Wut?

He is suggesting you are blaming the victim. Though really the analogy would need to be: Someone walking in a bad neighborhood was raped, so their lawyer suggested showering afterwards, not calling the police and simply hoping the perpetrator was caught.

I think it would be reasonable to criticize the lawyer, while still being aware that the rape was bad in and of itself as well.

What Jeroboam is trying to say in a very crass and shocking way (he has me blocked and I like it), is that he feels you are victim blaming the guys giving ultrasounds.

So again we see that whatever the supposed rules and procedures about how these things are “supposed to” work, in reality what matters is what you’re able to get men with guns to enforce. (As I’ve said before, a lesson I learned in 7th grade.)

And this gets to one of my common political arguments and frustrations — the perennial criticism of my support for restoring human authority and decision-making. In (the portion I watched of) Benjamin Boyce’s interview with Aydin Paladin, he makes this standard argument against her monarchism: but if you have a king, then won’t he become a tyrant, and take away people’s freedom by enacting a parade of horribles… all of which, Aydin pointed out in reply, are things which democratically-elected governments have done. People ask ‘what if the local aristocrat makes an unfair/unjust/tyrannical decision?’ as if modern bureaucracies can’t do the same (and throw in all the sorts of mistakes and irrationalities — like the classic ‘you must fill out and submit Form A before we can give you Form B, you must fill out and submit Form B before we can give you Form A’ class of problems — of which only bureaucracies are capable).

What if Baron Such-and-such throws you in the dungeon without trial? Well, what if the Pennsylvania Ag Department does it? The difference seems to be that the bureaucracy adds diffusion of responsibility. If the Baron locks you up, everyone knows who to blame. But when it’s a faceless bureaucracy, full of jobsworth human cogs, who ‘don’t make the rules, just follow them,’ where nobody is to blame; and, like @pigeonburger notes below, nobody in government really suffers serious consequences.

Some people talk about “Brazilification,” viewing us as moving in the direction of that South American nation. I say should be worried less about becoming like Brazil the country, and more about becoming like Brazil the Terry Gilliam film.

Great setup for the Brazil joke, but I'm inclined to agree with Hyperion here. There is still a giant bureaucratic apparatus in a monarchy, and you can't even vote out the head of it.

How are kings and nobles going to run anything except through bureauracies? These were things created by kings to run their countries. Kings and aristocrats will still need bureaucrats and courts to run things, your just changing who gets to decide what the laws and regulations are, not the need for them.

How are kings and nobles going to run anything except through bureauracies?

I'm mainly going off of Max Weber's ideas of Modernity as marked "rationalization" and the resulting bureaucratization. A king and his aristocrats may need a veritable army of clerks and petty officials (emphasis on "may"), but those need not be bureaucrats.

The key here is the element of "rationalization" that is the replacement of human judgement and leadership with the implementation rigid, "impersonal" procedures — in short, with algorithms, whether carried out by a computer made of silicon and metal, or one made of a mass of human "cogs." It's the same phenomenon that drives "software eating the world" and much of the "Seeing Like a State" problems — you've got to sanitize your data, reduce the dimensionality of the problem, and lump things together before you can enter it into your spreadsheet, feed it into your algorithm. It also relates to the late William Stuntz's lament that our justice system chose the route of "procedural due process" over the alternative of "substantive due process." It's what leads to the archetypal "Karen" asking to speak to a manager — that is, someone with actual human authority, rather than a meat drone of the Machine.

You can read online about any number of kids suspended or expelled from school for absolutely stupid reasons due to "zero tolerance" rules. Why do schools enact these rules? Because it lets teachers and principals evade any responsibility, which would come with the exercise of even the slightest common-sense discretion (which the lawyers advise, to avoid lawsuits). It wasn't this way in schools a century ago, was it? Teachers weren't always this allergic to exercising authority, were they? And if it wasn't always this way, then it doesn't have to be this way.

To quote Wikipedia:

Weber described the eventual effects of rationalization in his Economy and Society as leading to a "polar night of icy darkness", in which increasing rationalization of human life traps individuals in an "iron cage" (or "steel-hard casing") of rule-based, rational control.

and:

Although he was not necessarily an admirer of bureaucracy, Weber saw bureaucratization as the most efficient and rational way of organizing human activity and therefore as the key to rational-legal authority, indispensable to the modern world. Furthermore, he saw it as the key process in the ongoing rationalization of Western society. Weber also saw bureaucracy, however, as a threat to individual freedoms, and the ongoing bureaucratization as leading to a "polar night of icy darkness", in which increasing rationalization of human life traps individuals in a soulless "iron cage" of bureaucratic, rule-based, rational control.

Weber may have thought this inevitable, but I disagree. Do we really need the buck-passing jobsworths "born to be all obsessive and snotty" (to quote Hermes Conrad)? How many of the sort who will argue it's not his fault he tortured a man to death because someone else brought him the wrong person, so their heart condition wasn't on the paperwork. And even worse, the petty tyrants who aren't simply enforcing the rules, and merely use such as cover.

How far apart are "I don't make the rules, I just follow them" and "just following orders," really? Zygmunt Bauman seems to have had similar views. Again from Wikipedia:

Bauman's most famous book, Modernity and the Holocaust, is an attempt to give a full account of the dangers of these kinds of fears. Drawing upon Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno's books on totalitarianism and the Enlightenment, Bauman argues that the Holocaust should not simply be considered to be an event in Jewish history, nor a regression to pre-modern barbarism. Rather, he says, the Holocaust should be seen as deeply connected to modernity and its order-making efforts. Procedural rationality, the division of labour into smaller and smaller tasks, the taxonomic categorization of different species, and the tendency to view rule-following as morally good all played their role in the Holocaust coming to pass.

How much of this kind of bureaucracy did societies before the Enlightenment and Modernity really have? You say even kings need such to run things. How many of this sort of bureaucrat did Genghis Khan have? Magnus the Good? Alexander of Macedon? Tarquin the Elder? Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui? Sargon of Akkad? How many were in the court of King Kamehameha I? How much bureaucracy does the average Amish community have? How much did the Iroquois Confederacy have? How much do you suppose the builders and inhabitants of Çatalhöyük had? How much bureaucracy do the Sentinelese have?

I've spent much of my life fighting intransigent bureaucracies, and the useless meat machines and petty tyrants that fill them, starting with Anchorage School District administrators. I've spent most of the last year fighting with either Social Security, Alaska's Medicaid department, or both. And I have plenty to say about especially the incompetence of the Anchorage SS office.

I'm tired of these people, and the system that empowers them. I don't want to navigate a stupid "for inconvenience, press 1" automated phone system, I want to talk to a human being. I want to speak to the manager. I want someone to be in charge, someone to be responsible, someone to blame. Whatever it takes to get rid of the Dolores Umbridges, the Carol Beers, even the Hermes Conrads. So many of the people discussed on that "Rationalization" page point to "modernity" and the "Enlightenment" as the root of this process; which is Reason Number One I want the entire Enlightenment project destroyed.

To quote God-Emperor Leto II (from before the awful prequel books retconned the history):

The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines. Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments. Naturally, the machines were destroyed.

Whatever it takes to get rid of the Dolores Umbridges, the Carol Beers, even the Hermes Conrads.

It is worth noting that Dolores Umbridge and Carol Beer are very different phenomena, and the only thing they have in common is that they use femininity as a way of making their obnoxiousness less obvious. But you are not the first person to lump them together - the comments to Scott Aaronson's "blankface" post are a dumpster fire because Scott chooses a word that suggests he is talking about Carol Beer and then writes a long post insisting he is talking about Umbridge.

The basic difference is that Dolores Umbridge does, in fact, have agency, and is abusing it. In Order of the Phoenix Umbridge is a senior official who is given broad discretionary authority by Fudge to root out Hogwarts-based opposition to the regime, and does in fact try to do that (ultimately unsuccessfully) while treating the opportunity to sadistically abuse Harry as a fringe benefit. In Half-Blood Prince she fails upwards to become Senior Undersecretary to the Minister of Magic - which to someone familiar with British bureaucratic titles is a high-level policy making role at the same level on the org chart as a Deputy Secretary or Assistant Secretary in the US executive branch. (The equivalence is complicated by the complete absence of political appointees in the Ministry of Magic), although in so far as we see the internal workings of the Ministry she actually appears to be functioning as Scrimgeour's chief of staff. Umbridge is useful to Power, and Power supports her in her abuse of Harry, and would continue to do so even if they knew everything.

If Curtis Yarvin or Peter Theil was critiquing Fudge's performance, they would see his decision to appoint Umbridge and let her get on with it (including backing her up as necessary when she is e.g. accused by Dumbledore of sadistically abusing students) as a relative high point in his career - he actually tried something that could have worked, and would have worked if Fudge hadn't been forced to resign because Voldemort showed up in person around the time Umbridge was completing her takeover of Hogwarts.

Carol Beer, on the other hand, is a shit-tier grunt with no authority. Her only source of power is that she can refuse to do her job some non-zero fraction of the time without getting fired - and it isn't even clear if she is refusing to do her job, or if she is unable to do it because she does not even have sufficient authority to override the computer. But assuming the unfavourable interpretation, Beer is useless to everyone, and the only reason she gets away with her petty sadism is because her uselessness is beneath the notice of Power. If Karen managed to speak to the manager, Beer would be fired. I suspect if Curtis Yarvin wrote a review of Little Britain, he would say that someone in Beer's reporting line was asleep at the wheel, and needed some encouragement.

The two failure modes (evil backed by Power, and evil operating beneath the notice of Power) both function in the same way regardless of whether Power is personal or bureaucratic. The fundamental case for the Rule of Law and bureaucratic process is that it constrains Dolores Umbridge. The case being made against it in this thread is that it creates Carol Beers. This is a trade-off, and the trade-off is real and is not one-sided in the real world. To give a recent notorious example in the UK, Dominic Cummings noticed and has repeatedly blogged about the legal-accountability-driven incompetence of UK government procurement, including how it was likely to kill people during the COVID-19 pandemic. So during the pandemic he used emergency powers to throw out procurement law and allow the government to just buy PPE from willing sellers. The result was a spectacular feeding frenzy of peculation as people with the right connections realised that selling to the government was now a pure matter of getting into the ministers' in-tray, and that anyone who could do that could buy non-working PPE at retail from dodgy Chinese websites and mark it up even further to the government. The total loss to the taxpayer was c. £4 billion, with the £200 million paid to shell companies linked to lingerie entrepreneur and Tory peer Michelle Mone for unusable PPE being the headline example

There are two sayings I sometimes to use to think about this trade-off:

The Cossacks Work for the Czar. To paraphrase Brad de Long, it isn't immediately obvious if the Cossacks who raided your village are:

  • working for the Czar, and fucking with you because the Czar wants them to
  • working for the Czar, and fucking with you because they want to, and fucking with people like you is within the scope of their delegated authority
  • bandits who the Czar has for some reason failed to hang, who are fucking with you because they can.

What de Long means by "The Cossacks work for the Czar" is that above a certain level of sophistication (which a band of raiding Cossacks crosses), Carol Beers have been weeded out, and you can assume that what the system does or fails to do is the result of (often foolish) choices made by the people in charge of it.

It cannot deal with plain error. The full quote from Conrad Russell's An Intelligent Person's Guide to Liberalism is about the necessity for both political and legal accountability.

Political accountability must deal with gross errors of judgement, unworkably drafted legislation, and measures which cannot be enforced. Legal accountability can deal with gross abuses of power and with breaches of clear legal principles. It cannot deal with plain error.

Not firing Carol Beer is an example of plain error. An awful lot of what goes wrong with modern bureaucracies (State and private sector) is that trying to create legal remedies for plain error creates more problems than it solves. But the world where the local Boyar enjoys a de facto droit de seigneur over the peasants as long as he remains useful to the Czar is worse.

I believe the answer from a leviathan shaped hole perspective is that the local baron is a face to be appealed to directly who can solve the coordination problem leading to arbitrary tyranny directly.

I've met elected officials, I've met aristocrats(well, pretenders to the same- individuals with the bloodlines to call themselves nobles but without the state recognizing their title). Honestly I can't tell you whether the graf von whatever or the representative for bumfuck wherever is more of a reasonable person on average- I suspect they come from basically similar social strata and are basically similar people. But an aristocrat at the very least has a bigger bully pulpit to get bureaucrats to back down on their vogonity and probably has legal privileges in a monarchist society to effect the same.

Now in practice I think it's more complicated; 'if only the tsar knew' is a meme for a reason. But- formal one man rule seems to incentivize anti-corruption drives at the very least.

But- formal one man rule seems to incentivize anti-corruption drives at the very least.

Not clear that's true. Insofar as power is concentrated, it is easier to identify who you have to bribe. Things like monopoly concessions in return for money (formal and informal) happened a lot in e.g. Elizabethan England, and (I am no expert) presumably other cases of one-man (male or female) rule. On the other hand, that could be attributed to the problems that feudal rulers had in obtaining tax revenues.

However, from an incentives standpoint, it seems that the more powerful the state and the more concentrated that power, the greater the gain and the lower the cost of outsiders corrupting those with power. That's leaving aside "power tends to corrupt, more power tends to corrupt more" considerations.

Now in practice I think it's more complicated; 'if only the tsar knew' is a meme for a reason. But- formal one man rule seems to incentivize anti-corruption drives at the very least.

You don't seem to be advocating one man rule. You seem to be advocating feudalism. China had formal one man rule and this rule was carried out by a massive, powerful bureaucracy. Same thing in France, Britain or Prussia. Whether the state was being run by a parliament of nobles, an elected parliament or just a king. They all needed bureaucracies once they became centralized.

You seem to be advocating feudalism.

I don't know if @hydroacetylene is advocating it, but I am.

What does "leviathan shaped hole" mean here?

My understanding is it's saying that the situation calls for a protective institution that doesn't exist or isn't doing it's job.

https://www.themotte.org/post/832/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/180922?context=8#context

https://archive.ph/hLXHa

It's a reference to hlynka(RIP) and also to Leviathan, the 'somebody's gotta do it' defense of monarchism.

What happened to hlynka?

He got permabanned.

What an odd choice. I didn’t always agree with him but he was genuine and a different thinker.

More comments

Permananned for being naughty while arguing with the HBD people.

yes but he was equally obnoxious when arguing with the HBD people about any other topic too.

More like permabanned for being naughty over and over and over again arguing with everyone.

I can't find any records involving either person in the Pennsylvania court system, though given how crappy most court records are, that doesn't mean much.

The underlying complaint is here, and seems to be resting heavily on past adjudications by the State Board in 2010 (for Herr) and 2018 (for Wentworth). Like most state licensing laws, the definition of veterinary practice in Pennsylvania is very broad :

"Practice of veterinary medicine" includes, but is not limited to, the practice by any person who (i) diagnoses, treats, corrects, changes, relieves or prevents animal disease, deformity, injury or other physical, mental or dental conditions by any method or mode, including the prescription or administration of any drug, medicine, biologic, apparatus, application, anesthetic or other therapeutic or diagnostic substance or technique, (ii) performs a surgical operation, including cosmetic surgery, upon any animal, (iii) performs any manual procedure upon an animal for the diagnosis or treatment of sterility or infertility of animals, (iv) represents himself as engaged in the practice of veterinary medicine, (v) offers, undertakes, or holds himself out as being able to diagnose, treat, operate, vaccinate, or prescribe for any animal disease, pain, injury, deformity, or physical condition...

It's not obvious that ultrasounds (or possibly(?) selling bull semen?) are covered, and there's not a ton of great pragmatic arguments for it, but the courts have given near-complete carte blanche to regulatory agencies to anything even remotely near the borders. And for a wide variety of reasons this sorta thing is near-impossible to practically challenge even were courts willing to push back on it.

Given some of the coverage, though ("both men were advised by their former attorneys not to pay the fines or appear in court"), I'm not sure what happened was completely without any court behavior -- this may be referring to the 'court' of the board licensing group, which is more court in the kangaroo sense, but it also could be about enforcement summons for a conventional court. An actually fake arrest warrant wouldn't be unprecedented, but it's left me noticing I'm confused.

That said:

Rusty Herr was arrested the very next morning, April 11, at 6:30 a.m. at his home in Christiana.

godsdammit.

...the courts have given near-complete carte blanche to regulatory agencies to anything even remotely near the borders.

While I don't expect a total fix anytime soon, this is why I'm hoping for rollback on Chevron deference and related doctrines. To oversimplify, I want to shift from a position of tie goes to the government to tie goes to the private party. If a court can't figure out whether the regulatory body is correct and the regulatory body can't providing compelling factual evidence for their assertion of power, they should just lose, not get to claim that they have special expertise that's just too special for a non-expert to understand.

Maybe. There's a lot of people who came away from Loper v. Raimondo thinking that SCOTUS was pretty willing to toss the Chevron under the bus, but then Cargil had a place where the regulatory agency claims to have read the law wrong for twenty-plus years, disclaims Chevron, and most tea-leaf-readers are thinking it'll come out okay. It's just too useful to leave the actual law to the regulatory agencies.

But maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised.

Roberts won't do it. He'll "lay the groundwork" forever but never pull the trigger.

On April 10-11, 2024 they were arrested and sent to jail for 30 days for "contempt of court". The problem is that the Ag Department seems to have issued the arrest warrant on their own. The case has never been in court. They have not been before a judge.

So they are both in jail serving a 30 day sentence that didn't involve a judge and they haven't been allowed to see a judge.

This is what pisses me off so much in the relationship between government and citizens, is that government officials has free reign to do abuse their power pretty much however they want (short of personal enrichment, and even then) because the worse that happens to them is punishment to their office, not to them personally. You can be absolutely certain if those two guys had unlawfully sequestered an employee or official of the agricultural department for 30 days, they themselves would be sentenced to a lot more than 30 days in prison. But we all know that the worst that's gonna happen there is the office gets told they can't do this, maybe someone or two lose their jobs (and don't worry, they won't have any trouble finding another) and maybe Pennsylvania's taxpayers have to foot the bill on some damages (and don't worry here either, approximatively 0 democrat voters in Pennsylvania will change their vote just because their party's officials unlawfully throws people in jail).

If this case isn’t it, then there is no case.

I would love to be proven wrong and for the officials and the police officers who went along with this to be thrown in jail, but at worst the police officers might be sacrificed. And while they shouldn't have executed unlawful orders, I have a harder time blaming them as it seems likely their fault is mere carelessness and not checking that the order was legitimate (after all, the government probably almost never sends bogus warrants to them), while the Agricultural Department would have to be power tripping for things to have happened as they are alleged to have.

The Ag Poole re the ones who should spend years in jail

Am missing something here or how do you get jailed for contempt of court in nonexistent proceedings?

Isn't that just literal kidnapping or false imprisonment?

Do cops who enforce this get any immunity since they're not actually enforcing any legal order?

Apparently the arrest warrant just said "the court" without any reference to a specific court or case number so everyone involved should have known is was invalid. No criminal liability but they are going to be sued individually.

In my experience, dairy farmers (and beef cattle farmers) doing their own ultrasounding is very common... When you have herds of hundreds of cattle that you are regularly artificially inseminating, it's just not practical to have a vet out to the farm to do routine preg checks. I can't speak much to the culture war angle, but this really just seems like unnecessary bureaucracy impeding on extremely anodyne agricultural practices

The issue isn't that they were doing their own preg checks, it's that they were operating and advertising a business that did it for other people for a fee. You can write your own will, for instance, but if you write wills for other people it's the unauthorized practice of law. Now, we can make the argument that that requiring a vet to do this is both unnecessary and outside the bounds of the statute, but there are two general problems I forsee with that.

The first is that the introduction of technology makes a lot of things that used to be the domain of trained professionals increasingly accessible to the general public. Take land surveying. Anyone of average intelligence can pull a deed from the courthouse, buy pro-grade survey equipment, and locate a pin, which is probably enough to do the trick if you're trying to see where you can put up a fence on your own property. But the field is deceptively complicated, and when the same guy decides to go into business for himself as a surveyor with no more training than basic YouTube tutorials, he's asking for trouble. The second problem is that most professional fields are so varied that it's impossible to define every specific thing one needs a license to do. The legislature can't run back into session every time someone comes up with a new medical procedure to make sure that you need a license to do it.

As for specific problems with allowing unlicensed people to do preg checks as a business, I can't comment on because I don't know anything about vet science. But if this is something that's plausible then the solution is to lobby the state legislature to clarify the law to specifically allow it; God knows the farm lobby in PA is powerful enough to make it happen if there's that much of a call for it and the only real opposition is from vets that don't like it. But the solution isn't to start a business doing it and ignore the state when they tell you to stop.

The issue isn't that they were doing their own preg checks, it's that they were operating and advertising a business that did it for other people for a fee.

Isn't the complication here that they were running an AI service? So maybe as part of that it was "after your cow is inseminated, we'll do a follow-up check to make sure she's in calf, no foal no fee" arrangement? They weren't selling pregnancy checks as a separate business. I don't know the fine details and there must be more going on here than we know about.

The first is that the introduction of technology makes a lot of things that used to be the domain of trained professionals increasingly accessible to the general public. Take land surveying. Anyone of average intelligence can pull a deed from the courthouse, buy pro-grade survey equipment, and locate a pin, which is probably enough to do the trick if you're trying to see where you can put up a fence on your own property. But the field is deceptively complicated, and when the same guy decides to go into business for himself as a surveyor with no more training than basic YouTube tutorials, he's asking for trouble.

This seems fine? So long as that person is not allowed to claim to be a licensed land surveyor who's surveys will be accepted by, like, the Land Titles Office (much less the neighbours) -- consumers can probably decide for themselves whether such a survey is of value to them? (hint: the only time anybody is likely to get something surveyed it's because some government agency (or maybe the neighbours) is forcing them to; if that agency won't accept the results the survey is worth zero dollars

The legislature can't run back into session every time someone comes up with a new medical procedure to make sure that you need a license to do it.

Yes they can. Because "you may do nothing without a license unless we specifically say so" is not the law.

Shouldn't their lawyers be able to file a writ of habeas corpus with a real court?

The cease-and-desist simply says to cease and desist illegally practicing veterinary medicine; it doesn't name specifics. Since the whole dispute is over whether ultrasound for pregnancy is "veterinary medicine", for them to stop the ultrasounds in response to that cease-and-desist would be to concede their case.

I suspect ultimately there's going to be some petty corruption here, with local vets being buddies/business partners of the Ag Board members and/or the local sheriff.

Yes, they just got a lawyer a few days ago. Robert Barnes found out about it because he was in town working the Amos Miller case and he wanted to verify some details before he filed anything.

So things are moving but I posted it here now to see if anyone had any interesting takes and also to set up an update post later if there's political fallout.

The situation seems to be that the Secretary of Agriculture has financial links to the major milk producers and is trying to shut down the small Amish farms. The Amish don't like to sue for religious reasons so he's getting away with a lot.

Yes, they just got a lawyer a few days ago. Robert Barnes found out about it because he was in town working the Amos Miller case and he wanted to verify some details before he filed anything.

Oh god. How does this guy keep grabbing these cases up?

Come the hour, cometh the man?

Responding to a late response from last week's culture War.

@curious_straight_ca

I'm aware of this the various accounts of AGPs and I think back to Scott's musings on the anorexia and other culture bound illnesses. His conclusion didn't seem quite right either.

I think what's going on is that the human mind is capable of innumerable states. The uncharted territory of the mind shifts with great plasticity, but once examined begins to harden and harden in response to the type of examination. Like shining a bright on a photopolymer, call this the photopolymeme theory of identity.

The type of examination is dependent on the environment, which is not random. In a trans naive environment you are still exposed to gendered binaries constantly and there is plenty of plausible cause to start that hardening process in a peculiar direction, maybe you made a friend of the opposite gender in kindergarten and when the care takers separate out their charges by gender the nubile mind recoils in being split from your friend and some part of the identity hardens in that you belong on that side of the divide. Maybe a million other things.

When you introduce the trans meme into the environment suddenly you go from identities lightly hardened by stray beams of light to precision directed lazers etching the face of the meme on kids at industrial scale.

It's generally accepted that reading webmd had a normal effect of convincing many people that they have whatever obscure disease they're currently looking at. Symptoms tend to be vague and our senses have difficulty differentiating between imagining symptoms and having symptoms. I'm convinced that when you ask every kid Ina generation to carefully examine whether they're really trans with a laundry list of symptoms that could just be normal cisgender experience you're going to be hardening a lot of plastic minds.

I like this theory because I don't think self described trans people are usually lying. I think they've examined themselves and found these features. I think trying to reshape that hardened plastic might be difficult, painful or impossible. I think adults are probably entitled to shape their identities as they please so long as they don't harm others in the process.

I also think that as @TracingWoodgrains has described before, when talking about frames and cages has some validity. Can we be sure that the Chesterton's gendered cages we're ripping down weren't vital frames that kids need to provide structure for their identity?

I think the big and frankly unmentioned part of the phenomenon is that we in the WEIRD west have long been accustomed to defining ourselves and choosing our lifestyles and interests accordingly. If you’d been born in almost any other era and any other set of countries, your life would have been largely predetermined before you could walk or talk. There were exceptions, but for the majority, what you were was handed to you, and in some cases still is. You practice your ancestral religion, you worked at whatever it was your parents and grandparents did. Your ability to go to school was determined by social class. Your roles and expectations were largely defined fairly rigidly full of expectations for the roles you were born into. Religious rules. Gender roles. Job roles.

Fast forward to today and we really don’t have any of those things. You can become anything you darn well please. The son of a welder can become an artist, or a doctor, or an actor. You can freely choose your religion or lack thereof. You can dress any way you like. You can take on or abandon social roles with little regard for what other people think. Gender is really the final frontier of this process. It’s the only reality of yourself you don’t get to decide on. Everything else, religion, job, hobbies, clothing styles, education, etc. can all be bent to the whim of the individual. So why wouldn’t gender be something a culture like ours would try to negate with medical science? Why wouldn’t a society that treats every other identity as if they’re fashion accessories not try to make gender and sex into yet another consumer choice?

I'm not exactly sure where your disagreement with curious_straight_ca is.

It's not really an either/or kind of thing, it's both. The social contagion theory is definitely a big part of the story. Clearly the trans phenomenon spreads memetically. But it's also an undeniable fact that some people just feel a spontaneous desire to be the opposite gender, even without prior exposure to pro-trans material. Some percentage of men will reliably develop fantasies about being a woman, a desire to wear women's clothes, etc, without any apparent external cause, just like some percentage of men will turn out homosexual with no identifiable cause.

Certainly the memetic spread and institutionalized support for trans people takes the phenomenon to new heights that were undreamed of in past decades. You can't really develop a spontaneous desire for taking hormones and getting SRS if you don't even know that's a possibility, for example. But any complete theory of the phenomenon has to include the understanding that at least some aspects of it are indeed "natural".

You also can't leave the notion of "memetic spread" entirely unexamined - why is this such a particularly virile and attractive meme? How did it spawn its own subculture with all sorts of forums and discords and irl groups and a surprisingly long tradition of its own art and creative writing? If the government decided to go all in on the finger amputation meme, could it gain the same level of traction? I don't think so.

I'm not exactly sure where your disagreement with curious_straight_ca is.

It's not necessary that we have a huge disagreement, althogh I think there is something we disagree on with the underlying phenomenon.

But it's also an undeniable fact that some people just feel a spontaneous desire to be the opposite gender, even without prior exposure to pro-trans material.

This is kind of what I'm trying to examine. We live in a causal universe, I don't think there is such a thing as spontaneous belief. trivially if you were separated from humans at birth and never encountered someone of the opposite sex then I don't think you could develop a belief that you should be categorized on a binary you couldn't know exists. I do think that people exposed to no pro-trans material can still develop something that kind or sort of looks like trans because gender is a salient category and identity formation has some failure modes. I don't think this is a born this way thing, I think it's still social even if that doesn't make it a choice.

Corn/maize naturally developed through evolution in nature and this development tells us something about the corn we've bred/engineered to be giant and calorie dense. But it can't explain everything about our modern corn or our corn syrup products. They're something new of our creation and have tons of down stream implications that may end up being very harmful to society. It might be totally natural for identity formation to go awry sometimes and leave someone in a strange maize level trans predicament. But now that we have the meme we're seeing the corn syrupification of gender nonconforming identities, purified and mass produced.

We live in a causal universe, I don't think there is such a thing as spontaneous belief.

Sure, but that seems like a rather pedantic point to make in this context. If someone says they like eating tasty food because it's a natural spontaneous desire, and you say they actually like eating food because of government propaganda, then on the face of it your explanation is a lot less correct than theirs, regardless of what philosophical hangups you might have about the concept of spontaneity.

I don't think this is a born this way thing, I think it's still social even if that doesn't make it a choice.

I believe I recall from some of your previous posts that you endorse HBD. So presumably you think some people are born some way.

Someone who criticized HBD by saying "well if you kept someone locked in an empty room from birth and never taught them anything then they would turn out to be really stupid, so it's actually all environmental in the end" would be missing the point. We're all in agreement that the outside environment is important and has a big influence. It's the innate disposition of individuals to respond differently to the same environmental stimulus that's in question.

I would describe my position by saying that I endorse an HBD-type view for gender identity and sexual orientation rather than a purely social constructionist view, that's all.

Sure, but that seems like a rather pedantic point to make in this context. If someone says they like eating tasty food because it's a natural spontaneous desire, and you say they actually like eating food because of government propaganda, then on the face of it your explanation is a lot less correct than theirs, regardless of what philosophical hangups you might have about the concept of spontaneity.

I pushed back in that way because you didn't engage with the mechanism explanation I put forward. I was trying to describe a mechanism that would apply to both the environment with and without trans messaging. I describe how it could come about naturally here:

In a trans naive environment you are still exposed to gendered binaries constantly and there is plenty of plausible cause to start that hardening process in a peculiar direction, maybe you made a friend of the opposite gender in kindergarten and when they care takers separate out their charges by gender the nubile mind recoils in being split from your friend and some part of the identity hardens in that you belong on that side of the divide. Maybe a million other things.

and you accused me of not describing that instead opting for putting everything under a low resolution "spontaneity" bucket. So I assumed you have some kind of weird philosophical attachment to spontaneity or did not read my post. I considered the weird philosophical attachment to it the more charitable read.

I would describe my position by saying that I endorse an HBD-type view for gender identity and sexual orientation rather than a purely social constructionist view, that's all.

Bringing HBD in will probably just confuse stuff. I fully admit that people can be born with different characteristics. One of those characteristics could even be predisposition to hardening identities in a trans-like way. But I'm talking about the identity formation itself.

I don't think people have fully built mental skylines from the moment of birth that they then explore like one would an ancient ruin to find buried truth. I think identities are the structures we build on the inbuilt landscape. Someone who loves the Dallas Cowboys and has Dallas Cowboys supporter as a major part of their identity probably had a kind of mental landscape with territory ripe for structures like football fan that in a different time and culture or even just if different life situations occurred could have hosted different identity structures. Certainly one could imagine if the fan was born in New York rather than Dallas at least the team would probably have been different.

People go around building things in their identity skyline in response to environmental factors, not directly consciously. Embarrassingly as a young kid for some reason I had built something like a "picky eater" identity structure. I identified with my picky eating, most likely in response to my parents trying to get me to eat something I for some fickle reason didn't want to eat. This identity seemed useful to me at the time, like a crude shack one might build hastily in minecraft as night falls. I've since dismantled it for good reason but I remember how hard it was to part with, how it was reinforced by others affirming it, even if doing so exasperatedly.

I think I could have built the trans structure in my head if things had gone differently. That's kind of what fascinates me about this subject and what I have a hard time getting across. I think my latent identity landscape was ripe for it. If a few different environmental factors had gone differently, if I had started down that path and been affirmed, I can see it and that terrifies me. In a no longer trans naive world where we have people surveying every young mind looking for places to construct that identity and handing out blue prints and construction advice. I don't think it's good to discriminate against people who have built the trans identity structure, but I do think it's a bad idea to encourage others to build it. It seems like a bad use of that identity space.

If a few different environmental factors had gone differently, if I had started down that path and been affirmed, I can see it and that terrifies me.

What terrifies me more is how often I've heard this.

It mostly confuses me. Like, unless you strapped me down to a dildo machine that boofed me with oestrogen and sissy-hypno at 120 decibels on shrooms, I struggle to think of any situation where I'd want to be the other sex, or even simply have sex with men.

If my medical malpractice gets me locked away in prison, I'm going to be sitting in the corner jerking off rather than being tempted by a bussy. Or a skirt.

For example, when I was growing up I was a noodle-armed nerd whose hobbies were reading and needlework. I liked (but never tried to wear) dresses, almost all my favourite characters were female, and I hated sports. The thought crossed my mind many times that I would have been happier if I'd been born as a woman, and I am very, very grateful that nobody was around to tell me "maybe you were".

@dovetailing put it well:

"What if that part of me that already -- at least somewhat -- wanted to be a woman had been socially encouraged, been amplified, been given a (positive-valence) identity category; what if I'd been encouraged to indulge in this, been offered "specialness" and affirmation and a ready-made memeplex, all when I was young and socially and emotionally vulnerable? Then I could see myself having gone down that path."

I wouldn't expect you to be able to empathize with it, any more than... well... with people who want to have sex with men.

I can't be certain, but I strongly suspect that the vast majority of men saying this have at least a touch of autogynephilia. The sense of "it could have been me" is less "I, as a perfectly ordinary man, could have become socially hypnotized into wanting to be a women" and more "What if that part of me that already -- at least somewhat -- wanted to be a woman had been socially encouraged, been amplified, been given a (positive-valence) identity category; what if I'd been encouraged to indulge in this, been offered "specialness" and affirmation and a ready-made memeplex, all when I was young and socially and emotionally vulnerable? Then I could see myself having gone down that path."

It's so common because some degree of autogynephilia is probably about as common as homosexuality among men. (I remember -- I think it was in Men Trapped in Men's Bodies? -- seeing a reported study estimate of 1-3% of men for erotic cross-dressing alone, and that's almost certainly a substantial underestimate of the fraction of men with any amount of AGP.)

While I can't empathize with either gay or trans people (in the strict definition of empathy), I certainly sympathize with the latter and mildly envy the former.

You know how, for many men, the ideal girl is "one of the guys"? Well, gay men are living the dream in some ways, such as showing up to a random park or club and being nigh-guaranteed a quick fuck in a toilet stall. Straight men have to work for it.

Ah, women, can't live with them, can't live without them.

As for trans people, particularly the ones with body dysmorphia/gender dysphoria, I happen to be a transhumanist and so approve on principle of any change or improvement one might desire to the prison of one's flesh. I mean, I'm not a 6'9" 42069 IQ ubérmensch, so there's room for improvement within mere biology.

But that doesn't mean that the universe, or the rest of us, are obliged to indulge your desires, especially when it comes to how we accept your self-expression. Trans people, I'll consider them women/men when they are biologically indistinguishable from the average natal man/individual of their desired sex. Until then, well, I'll shake my head and use preferred pronouns mostly because I'm polite.

That is a cheque that medical science as it exists today simply can't cash. No amount of hormones, surgery or makeup will get you there. I still sympathize and empathize with them simply not being happy in their bodies, I think the correct solution is to change the body, when that's feasible.

You are allowed to dream. So do I. But the universe isn't obligated to make it come true, or easily. Simple self-identification is suitable only for football clubs.

As for AGPs? I agree that they're a large fraction, potentially even a majority. I have even less desire to indulge them, but I hardly think they're wrong for being sexually aroused by the idea of femininity.

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It's a bit hard to write a response to this because there's already so much we agree on:

  • I agree that environment plays a big role and the same person is capable of going down multiple different paths.
  • I agree that without the trans-industrial-medical complex and access to hormones and SRS, far fewer people would actually try to "transition".
  • I agree that society should not be encouraging people to become trans the way it currently is (although in a general libertarian fashion I think that people should be able to elect to these medical procedures if they want to).

But I still feel like I have to take issue with the account you write here (since you posted it twice I'm assuming that you think this is basically a correct story of the etiology of transsexuality):

In a trans naive environment you are still exposed to gendered binaries constantly and there is plenty of plausible cause to start that hardening process in a peculiar direction, maybe you made a friend of the opposite gender in kindergarten and when they care takers separate out their charges by gender the nubile mind recoils in being split from your friend and some part of the identity hardens in that you belong on that side of the divide. Maybe a million other things.

My understanding of your general theory is that people undergo certain formative experiences, and some people process these experiences in such a way that leads them to adopt a trans identity. It's possible that the difference between people who process the experiences in a trans-way vs a non-trans-way is biological in nature. Correct me if I'm wrong.

My preferred theory on the other hand is as follows: some men (I'm focusing on MTFs/autogynephiles to keep things simple) start out with some sort of natural desire/sensation that is explicitly related to gender or being trans in some way - it could be a simple desire to "become a woman", it could be bodily dysphoria, it could be a general feeling of having a more "female" brain, etc. In the right environment, where being recognized as trans and undergoing medical transition is presented as a viable possibility, some of these men will choose to undergo transition. That's how I would describe the biology/environment interaction here.

Crucially I think these desires/sensations are pre-reflective. They operate at a level prior to what I would normally think of as identity formation.

I don't think that the concept of a "natural desire" is at all objectionable here. Hopefully we can agree that the majority of men naturally experience the desire to have sex with women. Analogously, some men naturally experience the desire to be women. They see what the women are up to and they think "yeah, that seems like a better deal to me". It's really quite straightforward.

I really have to insist on this point that there is something in the individual himself that points him in the direction of wanting to be a woman, rather than individuals being neutral receptacles for formative experiences and just having different "processing styles". I don't think you can fully understand the trans phenomenon without this crucial piece of the puzzle. To my mind it's the theory that best explains the internal phenomenology of what the desires actually feel like, as well as other aspects of the phenomenon like its surprising popularity, its cross-cultural appeal, etc.

I think I mostly agree with you, but I do want to emphasize that

some of these men will choose to undergo transition

is not the only difference in outcome between the "pro-trans" and "trans naive" environments being discussed.

Having the ready-made answers, social encouragement, etc. on offer can not just affect what sorts of actionable options they have available, but also the trajectory of the desires themselves.

As an example let's take the POV of a teenage boy with autogynephilia. Our protagonist finds that he has a recurring desire to be female. Sometimes (maybe most of the time, maybe not) this desire and fantasy is associated with sexual arousal. This is confusing and weird, what is he to make of this?

In an environment without the "trans" meme and social encouragement thereof, this remains a private quirk and fantasy. He knows that he can no more become female than he can become a bird or acquire superpowers (random side note: was Animorphs especially appealing to boys with autogynephilia? I strongly suspect so...). Maybe it wanes naturally over the course of years, or maybe his desire is an inner demon that he struggles with from time to time, or maybe it's just a recurring fantasy his whole life which he occasionally indulges in -- depending on the strength of his desire and his attitude toward it. A lot of things are possible, but probably he lives life as a normal man and most things are fine. (Of course there is the chance that he develops some delusions based on his desires and fantasies -- especially if they are unusually strong or he indulges them unusually much -- but this is not a very likely outcome.)

In an environment where the "trans" meme is present and positively reinforced, he is encouraged to interpret his desires as evidence (or even proof) of identity as a "trans girl". A ready-made, positive-valence identity that fits his experience, at a time when he's naturally (like most teens) going to be confused about his identity and place in the world? It's like catnip. He starts thinking of himself as trans. He talks about it on the internet. Maybe he tells his best friends and they affirm it, or maybe his new best friends are the people who affirm it. He indulges his fantasy, because it's just part of who he is. Maybe he even encourages it, as its presence is proof of his new identity. His ways of thinking of himself get solidified: "I am a trans girl": now each of his desires and every trait that is not stereotypically male is proof of that. He develops a female persona and acts it out; maybe he really believes the propaganda that, deep down, he is a girl, not just wants to be one. Now his identity is all bound up in this: he becomes more and more unsatisfied with the stubborn truth that he is not, in fact, a girl; that his body is stubbornly male. As an adult, maybe he does try to force his fantasy to become reality with hormones and surgery (of course this doesn't actually work, but maybe if he is lucky he can convince himself it does) -- or maybe he just ends up with a weird self-identification and way more unhappy with his life than if he'd never gone down that path.

Regardless of whether our protagonist ultimately undergoes medical transition, his whole life can be dramatically impacted by this difference in his environment.

There shouldn't be able to be an innate "simple desire to become a woman," unless you think we come with innate, from the womb, knowledge of what the two genders are. At some point we figure out what genders are, and such desires would only make sense at that point.

Of course, at that point, we could have innate tendencies that predispose us to manifest certain desires or identities.

Do you think people can be innately straight? I do. It’s like that.

It do be that way -- what if everyone is innately straight, and some butterfly stimulus turns the odd one gay?

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Contra Nate Silver on Political IQ Tests OR On the Limits of Moneyball Philosophy

Nate Silver, on his new Substack argues that Sonia Sotomayor should retire, and that if you don't want her to retire you're a moron. Some pull quotes:

However, I’m going to be more blunt than any of them. If you’re someone who even vaguely cares about progressive political outcomes — someone who would rather not see a 7-2 conservative majority on the Supreme Court even if you don’t agree with liberals on every issue— you should want Sotomayor to retire and be replaced by a younger liberal justice. And — here’s the mean part — if you don’t want that, you deserve what you get.

...

In my forthcoming book, I go into a lot of detail about why the sorts of people who become interested in politics often have the opposite mentality of the world of high-stakes gamblers and risk-takers that the book describes. Both literal gambling like poker and professions that involve monetary risks like finance involve committing yourself to a probabilistic view of the world and seeking to maximize expected value. People who become interested in politics are usually interested for other reasons, by contrast. They think their party is on the Right Side of History and has the morally correct answers on the major questions of the day. And sure, they care about winning. But winning competes against a lot of other considerations like maintaining group cohesion or one’s stature within the group.

Silver's core argument is that Sotomayor, at 70, is old; and according to models the Democrats are unlikely to control both of the Senate and Presidency in the near future, and that therefore Sotomayor should step down now when it might be possible for Biden, Schumer and co to replace her with another Democratic justice.

I find this take to be indicative of the flaws in Nate's own mindset, the Moneyball/Analytics/Sabermetrics venue that Nate comes from applied to politics, and to a certain extent to Rationalism more broadly, so I'd like to dig into why this is so wrong point by point. For the purposes of this argument, I am viewing this from the position of, as Silver defines it, a progressive or a "person interested in progressive outcomes" who would prefer liberal outcomes to SCOTUS cases. We will also assume that Sotomayor is a decent judge. It's not a particularly interesting argument if we argue that Sotomayor sucks, and anyway there's a point about that further down. I've loved Nate since his PECOTA days, I'm not reflexively anti-analytics, but it has to be balanced with humanity.

Much like the Moneyball Oakland As famously put together talented regular season teams that failed in the playoffs, Silver's approach to politics is about grabbing tactical victories, but will never deliver a championship. Sabermetrics types have long derided concepts like veteran leadership, man-management, The Will to Win, clutch play; we can't measure them on the numbers then they don't exist. Yet while analytics have value, so does traditional strategy, team variance isn't entirely random. Let's examine how some of this applies to politics here:

Flaw 1) What Gets Measured Gets Managed Silver builds a toy model, demonstrates that within his toy model SCOTUS seats are really valuable, then assesses possession of SCOTUS seats based on raw-count of votes by partisan appointment. This is an extremely limited view of what impact SCOTUS justices can have. Sotomayor is 70 years old. Going by most projections, she has about 16 years to go. There's some indications of poor health outcomes, balanced by the fact that she'll get top-tier medical care. For reference, Scalia would have been 70 in 2006. Scalia was very important between 2006 and his death. His impact in general has been almost immeasurably huge on American jurisprudence, even the court's liberals owe a lot to Scalia in their opinions. He achieved this mostly by sheer force of will and intellect, and a long stint on the court. Clarence Thomas is another example of a justice who slowly came into his own, and in the last ten years (his age 65-75 seasons) has gone from punchline to influential intellectual force. SCOTUS justices take time to develop, both in terms of their intellectual impact and in terms of their relationships on the court. Replacing Sotomayor early may buy you a few extra years of a nominal democrat on the court, but it may cost you a more influential judge in the meantime. Silver, because his toy model can't account for jurisprudential influence, ignores all this. It's impossible to model, so it is ignored, or worse derided as fake and gay.

Flaw 2) Defeatism Silver derides politicians as irrational, for foolishly believing "their party is on the Right Side of History and has the morally correct answers on the major questions of the day." This is accurate, but also ignores the point: if you don't think your party is on the Right Side of History and has the morally correct answers, then you shouldn't be doing this. The only reason to get into politics is because you think you can win. If you can only lose, you need to change strategies. Silver's models predict that Democrats won't control the Senate for some time; that is within the power of the Democrats to change! Replacing Sotomayor because you likely won't control the Senate for another 16(!) years is like signing a high-priced closer to get a .500 baseball team an extra win, you still aren't making the playoffs. It also ignores history: the Senate has changed hands repeatedly, 8 times since 1980, or roughly once ever six years. If you start from the assumption that the Democratic message is basically unpopular in much of the country, such that they will never hold a Senate majority, then the Democratic party needs to rebuild from the ground up. Don't waste energy lobbying for Sotomayor to retire, lobby for Ds to pull their heads out of their asses in the heartland. If Democrats don't think they can win majorities, they shouldn't be Democrats, and shouldn't care about the SCOTUS majority. If you don't see a path to victory for your project, you need a new project. There's even a sort of "tanking" argument to be made that strategically, 6-3 and 7-2 aren't that different, so it doesn't matter if Sotomayor is replaced by an originalist, and it's politically better for Ds to face a brutally conservative SCOTUS, which might allow them to pass laws to bypass SCOTUS altogether, rather than a mildly less conservative SCOTUS. The only path to a liberal Majority on the SCOTUS is for Ds to win the Senate and the Presidency, repeatedly, they need to be working towards that goal, not maintaining their minority.

Flaw 3) Eliminating the Individual Silver assumes that any D is as good as any other D. That any D Senate is as good as any other D Senate, and any D justice is as good as any other D justice. This is misguided. The D justice that would get past this D Senate is probably going to be a milquetoast, below average, moderate. Sinema and Manchin wouldn't have it any other way, and no Rs have the guts to cross the aisle. If Sotomayor had the opportunity to retire with a 55 or 60 vote D majority, she could be assured of being replaced by a successor with a brilliant career ahead of him. If Sotomayor retires now, she's quite likely to be replaced by a third-rate non-entity. This is the Trump problem that made the original FiveThirtyEight blog unreadable since 2016: Trump didn't just accept the numbers, he changed them. That's what political leaders do: they don't accept facts on the ground, they alter them. Sabermetrics treats the ballplayers like numbers, probabilities of outcomes at the plate, but in order for every MLB player to get to the bigs, to become those numbers, that player had to believe in himself. He had to work hard, thinking he could get better, thinking he could win, even if statistically he wasn't likely to. Nobody ever made it to The Show surrendering to the numbers.

This kind of short-sighted, analytical approach to politics, slicing and dicing demographics to achieve tactical victories, is the noise before defeat. We saw the flaws in this strategy in the Clinton campaign, and to a large extent in the Biden '20 campaign where Trump vastly over-performed his underlying numbers. We're watching Biden '24 sleepwalk towards a possible November defeat, relying on demographic numbers that seem increasingly out of date. And while it's not all Nate Silver's fault, this kind of sneering bullshit is what drives people away from politics. It drives away exactly the people you need: people who irrationally believe in your political project, and will sacrifice for its success. It points away from leadership and towards management. It undermines coalitions by making it obvious they are only ever conveniences. It is bad politics.

TLDR: Nate Silver thinks 70 is a good retirement age for Sotomayor because we might not see a Democratic Senate Majority again for a while, but if we can't get a D Senate for 16 more years, what's the point anyway?

Trump didn't just accept the numbers, he changed them. That's what political leaders do: they don't accept facts on the ground, they alter them.

What do you mean by this? I thought Trump just executed the Sailor strategy and appealed to the neglected Republican base. He might not have thought about it mathematically, he's a great politician by instinct rather than calculation... but in principle a calculator could've done that and concluded that was the way to go. Are you saying a calculating politician couldn't have appealed the way Trump did, he needed to be a true believer? I don't think Trump believes in anything apart from Trump, he has sincere aesthetic beliefs and style yet will do whatever seems easiest decision-to-decision. Consider all the swamp creatures he appointed.

What do you mean by this? I thought Trump just executed the Sailor strategy and appealed to the neglected Republican base.

I don't think he even did that (at least not in the general - I think the case that he successfully executed a Sailer-like strategy in the primary is quite strong, but Steve Sailer presented the strategy as a way for Republicans to beat Democrats, not each other). Trump was the second least popular major-party Presidential candidate in my lifetime, and Hilary was the least popular. Even so, Trump only won because Hilary's e-mails turned up on her secretary's kiddie-fiddling husband's laptop shortly before polling day. It is reasonably clear from the opinion polling that either candidate could have walked the 2016 election by putting up an empty suit.

No. If the Republicans ran an empty suit, the white working class remains Democratic, the rest of Trump's base largely stays home, the "blue wall" is not broken and Hillary wins in a walkover. If the Democrats ran an empty suit, possibly opposition to Trump would put them over the top, but the Republicans didn't have that option.

Older whites with below-average education are now the core right-wing constituency in every historically-white democracy, and hatred for people like Hilary Clinton is a large part of the reason they got that way. In the US, non-College whites started swinging to Republicans as soon as Obama was elected. Taking advantage of a pre-existing trend is exactly the sort of thing empty suits are good at.

What do you mean by this?

Trump had the courage to engage and lead on the issues. Discourse on free trade agreements has changed completely from 2015 to today. Discourse on Russia and the support for Forever Wars has all but flipped partisan valence. Polling of the public, and the positions publicly espoused by Republican political candidates, have changed as a result of Trump's leadership on the issues.

Are you saying a calculating politician couldn't have appealed the way Trump did, he needed to be a true believer? I don't think Trump believes in anything apart from Trump...

I think it is incumbent to pretend to be a true believer in public. Trump's supporters believe that he is a believer, that is enough. If a leader is perceived as cynical, think Mitch McConnell, it is difficult to push public opinion.

We can debate what kind of costly signals are sufficient to reach a point where True Believer vs Extra Savvy Counterfeit become indistinguishable. When the young aristocracy physically fight and die in Flanders, it sort of doesn't matter if they're doing it "cynically" for credibility or honestly for patriotism. There's a broad perception among Trump's supporters that he has suffered for his beliefs, that he could have had an easier time of it personally if he had changed his view, and I do think that is important in terms of his ability to move public opinion.

Consider all the swamp creatures he appointed.

This line highlights the specific reason Trump was able to demolish the Republican establishment in a way no others have succeeded in: Trump does not actually wish to live life as a politician. The glad handing, the genuflecting, the influence peddling... all of that escapes Trumps attention, largely because he's too stupid to realize thats what being a politician is about. The calculating politicians do not want to really do work, they want the recognition and the lifestyle accorded to a politician. Trump has partially upended the dynamic since the swamp toadies make the pilgrimage to Mar-A-Lago, but none of these mutants (including Trump) are invited to the junkets and receptions that characterize the real social calendar that a politician cares about.

If Sotomayor had the opportunity to retire with a 55 or 60 vote D majority, she could be assured of being replaced by a successor with a brilliant career ahead of him. If Sotomayor retires now, she's quite likely to be replaced by a third-rate non-entity.

The elephant in the room is the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I think everyone pretty much agrees that she hung on way too long, and her replacement ended up being Amy Coney Barrett, recipient of some of the nastiest attempts at mud-flinging since Brett Kavanaugh.

Sotormayor is 70 which in itself is not that old, but she is also a diabetic with allegedly poor health. The problem foreseen here is that she either dies or has to retire due to that poor health, which means - who gets to pick her successor?

The new presidential election is going to be held in June. If Biden wins re-election, great, she can drop off the perch the day after he's sworn in and they'll appoint a replacement like they did with Ketanji Brown Jackson (any opinions on how she's doing, as an aside? I was hearing prognostications of 'she'll be terrible/she'll be wonderful' but what's the view now?).

But if Trump wins, which is a possibility, then he's going to appoint another Catholic Theocrat Cultist (ahem) to tighten the grip on the Court of the Conservative Papist Menace.

So that's why the calls for her to not emulate Ruth and for the love of DEI, jump before she's pushed so Biden can get the reliable liberal justice the nation needs.

Sinema and Manchin wouldn't have it any other way, and no Rs have the guts to cross the aisle.

Pardon me while I smile. No, pardon me while I smirk like the Cheshire Cat. The amount of oleaginous gloating I saw on Tumblr when Sinema was elected and sworn in (by Pence) - she's bi! she's a Dem! she's liberal! Old Torture The Gays must hate her, look at his face in this photo!

And now the see-saw has gone to the other extreme, and she's a demon, a traitor who should be kicked out, all because she hasn't been the 200% rainbow flag waving on every cause that the children were hoping to get 😁

I understand why Manchin does what he does, and he's a canny politician. That Sinema is now Cruella deVille, seemingly, in the eyes of those who were all "yaas Mommy!" on her election just makes me laugh even harder.

KBJ

Whenever the Motte discusses a court case, a few people always make sure to drop a note about how she's not very impressive and/or a partisan hack. So I assume she's doing more or less the same thing as every other justice.

For what it's worth, I felt the same way about Barrett, mostly on the weirdness of her concurrence in the Colorado judgment. Looking back on other opinions, though, she seems perfectly fine. Kavanaugh's been a pleasant surprise too. Turns out even getting consideration for the top job in the profession is a pretty good filter.

I was wondering, because of all the controversy around "She's only an AA pick", how she would turn out in the job when she got the chance to do it. So neither terribly bad nor terribly good? That's good enough!

The new presidential election is going to be held in June.

November 5th, actually. The last of the presidential primaries are in June.

Thanks, I did think November at first but wasn't sure. Should have gone with it! But even if there isn't a likelihood of Sotomayor having to retire due to ill-health in the next eight+ months, and even if Biden wins a second term, I think there is enough reason to be concerned that if her health is bad, she may have to retire soon anyway even into a second term, and planning for that is not a bad idea.

Mostly I think it's coming from people pissed-off about Kavanaugh, Bader Ginsburg, Barrett and the astounding decision on abortion, and they're over-compensating for "what if the evil wicked fascists win by a fluke this time again?"

I think that Nate Silver’s approach is correct, though like you, I don’t think his math is right. Probability modeling is just simply more accurate than gut feelings. Or as Ben Shapiro likes to say “facts don’t care about your feelings.” And this is something the left especially has missed quite often. In fact they missed out on putting a liberal on the bench because RBG didn’t retire with a Dem majority.

And if the polling data is showing that Biden loses in 2024, you’re talking about minimum 2029 before we could replace a justice with a liberal judge. If Trum does really good, he might win in 2028 thus making the next replacement window at 2033. That puts her at near 80.

Trump can't win in 2028, he can only serve two terms. I also have doubts he could successfully appoint a successor, his political success is too married to him personally.

My understanding is that he can’t serve more than two consecutive terms. Since Theresa gap, he gets two more.

No, there is a hard limit of 10 years, which is two and a half terms. If you as Vice President got the promotion in the first half of your predecessor's term, you are only eligible for one more full term. If you got the promotion in the second half, you're eligible for two more. Lapses do not reset the clock.

This is the rule for the President specifically--the governorships of various states have a variety of different rules, some of which do include a limit on consecutive terms, where a lapse can reset the clock.

I bet he runs in 2028. Perhaps it’s officially Donny Jr. But the old man is the one giving the stump speeches.

He'll be 82. There's a very good chance he'll be dead or otherwise incapable. Look at how fast Biden seems to have gone downhill - he seemed completely fine when he was VP during Obama's presidency. It can go quickly at this age.

With the right cybernetic chair and daily sacrifices he'll be fine.

I find Nate's arguments pretty compelling here, assuming you actually want woke democrats on the Supreme Court, which I don't. But setting aside my personal feelings on the matter, he's basically correct.

Your arguments can basically be boiled down to the following:

  1. Seniority is important for judges to gain respect through judicial rigor.
  2. Democrats shouldn't bother thinking tactically since they should just win more elections by appealing to more people.
  3. Sotomayor would be more left-leaning than any candidate the dems could nominate now.

The first argument is the strongest, but it only has a marginal impact. The respect of judicial rigor that comes tenure is non-negligible. Further, other people in the thread added to the point that more senior justices get selected first to write opinions. But neither of these are that important. Even if they nominate Dumbo McGee, they're still locking down a lifetime appointment in one of the most consequential positions in America and the world. As a counterexample, Anthony Kennedy had pretty terrible reasoning in many of his opinions, but he was ultra-powerful by virtue of being a swing justice. So while you're making a good point, it'd be a lot stronger if you had some evidence of how much it actually matters in practice.

The second argument is just goofy. The senate has a heavy bias towards rural states, and it's been a minor miracle that Dems have remained competitive thus far, but as blue senators in red states retire or are defeated the bias will become undeniable. Nate has argued many times that Dems should stop pandering to the woke crazies, but he doesn't control the entire Democratic party. Abandoning positions will always come with a ton of pushback and there's no guarantee others will be on board, and the Dems would need to cut extremely deep to appeal to rural conservatives. The "tanking" argument doesn't hold a lot of water since there's a big difference between a 9-0 conservative majority vs a 5-4 conservative majority, just like how there'd be a huge difference between a 51-49 senate split vs a 100-0 split. Doing an end-run around the SCOTUS would be far, far harder than just fighting tactically for a justice now. Dems might end up uncompetitive in the senate in the long run, but they can still delay that for a bit.

The third argument is disproven by Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was recently confirmed in the same environment that a replacement for Sotomayor would face. Jackson is a female equivalent of Ibram Kendi, so no, I don't think the Dem pick would be guaranteed to be some moderate.

I’m going to push back- everything predictable tells us that the optimal game theoretic move for dem policy priorities would be for sotomayor to resign right now. The DNC is weak in the senate and probably performing at or slightly above their ceiling right now, but manchin and tester and brown all vote for dem judicial nominees in a way their replacements, almost certainly republicans, most assuredly will not. And sixteen years is an average, not a hard rule- there’s a good chance of living less than that. Democrats shouldn’t count on being able to fix their heartland problem and our next president will probably be trump.

I also think dem justices are basically interchangeable- the current fashion is low talent partisan hacks like KJB.

I don't know enough about the American legal system, until it's my headache, but how much does seniority matter in the SC?

Are the new "young" judges put on the back bench (metaphorically)? My understanding is that they're all nominally equal, so what does it take for one to establish themselves like Thomas did and get taken seriously. How much does their opinion matter, and how is that sausage made?

The other responses you've got are mostly correct, but I'll elaborate on a few points. I've written a bit about the process before here.

@VoxelVexillologist is correct to point out Roberts' automatic seniority as Chief and its consequences, but the case is complicated by the fact that the right-ish portion of the Court has six Justices, not five. Roberts is certainly inclined to write more moderately than Alito, but if he writes too moderately, Thomas/Alito/Gorsuch/Kavanaugh/Barrett can form a majority without him. Dobbs is an exceptionally high-profile example of exactly that.

Recusal is more of an issue for a new Justice, but still pretty rare unless the new Justice was a very recent Solicitor General (or other high-ranking member of the Justice Department, including the AG). The Solicitor General is the number two guy at Justice and has the special responsibility of representing the US in court--he usually does so personally before the Supreme Court, and delegates to staff in lesser cases--so he'll often be involved in litigation strategy of multiple cases that later appear before the Supreme Court.

Each Justice has exactly one vote. The way any given Justice may punch above or below his weight is based entirely on his personal relationships with the other Justices (this is much more likely to be a negative factor; you don't get to the Supreme Court with a weak ego) and the persuasiveness of his arguments, most often in writing. My personal guess is that Thomas, Kavanaugh, and Barrett are very slightly more advantageously placed than average, and Roberts and Jackson are slightly less than average.

@pigeonburger is right about how the majority opinion of the Court is initially assigned, but not the dissents. All dissents and concurrences are not assigned; they are written by any Justice who chooses to do extra writing. There was a recent case where Kagan registered her dissenting vote on the outcome, but neither wrote a dissent herself nor joined another opinion, so her exact reasoning is unknown. This is perfectly valid; it's just much more common that Justices are inclined to explain themselves, both to their colleagues and to posterity.

One point often missed is that in a given Term--and indeed, in each month--every Justice writes as close as possible to exactly the same number of majority opinions. This may seem unintuitive, but remember that the most common voting outcome in any given case has always been 9-0, and still is. Naturally, the more conservative Justices will be more likely to write for the majority in controversial decisions today, but that just means that Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson are more likely to be assigned the 8-1 or 9-0 cases. This practise is intended to make sure that each chambers is carrying its weight in terms of the essential work of the Court. As I said above, though, dissents and concurrences do not factor into load-balancing--those opinions are entirely discretionary on a Justice-by-Justice basis, and are purely extra work.

I appreciate the exhaustive overview!

Do dissents carry any weight as legal precedent, or the rare instances where a new Supreme Court overturns the established precedent intentionally?

Both dissents and (except in unusual cases[1]) concurrences have zero legal weight as precedent, though this needs a little further unpacking.

Formally, the Opinion of the Court is binding on lower courts, and is precedent to be followed or rejected by future Supreme Courts. The wiggle room is that a lower court may argue that an existing Supreme Court decision is distinguishable from the current case because of [reasons]; that explanation may vary wildly in ingenuousness. The Supreme Court has a fancy legal doctrine called stare decisis, which means that it's more important to be consistent than correct, though some Justices (Roberts) are bigger fans of the doctrine than others (Thomas).

Every opinion of any type can affect future legal development to the extent that the arguments therein are persuasive to future Courts. If a Court decides that a prior decision was in error, it may overturn the precedent by a simple majority, just like every other decision. Often, the dissents in the original case may provide the rationale for a later reversal, though the Court tends to change its institutional mind by individual retirement and replacement, rather than a particular Justice reversing his earlier opinion (though that too has happened).

Also, there is no formal difference between a 9-0 decision and a 5-4 decision. Both carry the full authority of the Court, so a 5-4 decision may overturn a 9-0, hypothetically. Informally, though, every judge can do the most basic of math and realize that a 9-0 decision is less likely to be overturned in a future case than a 5-4.

[1] You can have a situation where the Court splits 4-2-3 or the like on a given case, where the 4 and the 2 may agree on the outcome of a case (and the 3 disagrees), but they do not agree on a reasoning. The case would be resolved as a 6-3 decision as to the outcome, but with no reasoning, as no opinion carried a majority. That said, the lower courts would treat the 4 opinion as a strong hint, since it's the closest to a majority, even though the logic is not formally binding. The Justices try to avoid this outcome, if possible.

You can have a situation where the Court splits 4–2–3 or the like on a given case, where the 4 and the 2 may agree on the outcome of a case (and the 3 disagrees), but they do not agree on a reasoning. The case would be resolved as a 6–3 decision as to the outcome, but with no reasoning, as no opinion carried a majority.

Marks v. United States:

When a fragmented Court decides a case and no single rationale explaining the result enjoys the assent of five Justices, "the holding of the Court may be viewed as that position taken by the Members who concurred in the judgment on the narrowest grounds".

That generally would be the two-justice opinion.

It might be, but not necessarily. In my example, it's impossible to tell, because I didn't assign rationales to any of the positions, so the two-Justice opinion might be broader or narrower than the four-Justice opinion. "Narrowest grounds" means in context 'the opinion that would control in the fewest potential future cases.' Via your link, Memoires, the earlier case referenced in Marks, was an example of a two-Justice expansive opinion added to a three-Justice narrower opinion to form a five-Justice majority (plus Stewart writing for himself to make six), and Marks indicates through your quoted language that the narrower three-Justice opinion is controlling.

You're correct that my "but with no reasoning" was in error, though, and thanks for the correction.

but how much does seniority matter in the SC?

Formally, I believe the task of writing the decisions is given out by the chief justice (if in the majority) or the most senior justice. I've seen some suggest that Roberts keeps some of the potentially-spicier cases for himself and writes more moderately than, say, Alito would. There are also fairly often cases where a new justice has to recuse themselves because they either previously judged the case on a lower court, or sometimes argued for one side. Neither of those is a particularly large concern, I would think. Their opinions are, to my knowledge, formally given equal weight otherwise.

I don't know about informally, where I suspect it matters for at least some time for a new justice.

Americans can correct me if I'm wrong but from what I hear, their votes are worth the same. Seniority matters as to who decides who gets to write opinions. The most senior member of the majority (which is automatically the chief justice if he is in the majority) assigns redaction of the opinion to one of the members of the majority. Same happens for the dissenting opinion (most senior judge in the dissent, automatically the chief justice if he is dissenting with the majority, choses who writes the opinion).

So seniority is important, but not THAT important. What does matter though is that their opinion is taken into serious consideration by other judges. Ideally, a judge to the Supreme Court should never be a blindly partisan hack, but in practice it can (very charitably) said that they are at least preselected for an extreme adherence to one school of thought with regard to how flexible the Constitution should be. But a particularly eloquent opinion might be able to sway swing votes or even peel off a justice or two from the other bloc, so experience and quality as a justice matters.

The reasoning in opinions also impact law students. Scalia’s textualism became much more pronounced when lawyers who read his opinions in law school came to dominate the practice.

This post generally makes sense, but I think you're overestimating Sotomayor's health. She's had paramedics called for diabetic episodes before, and from the claims of some of her former clerks she doesn't do the best job of controlling her blood sugar levels. We can't know anything for sure about this, of course, and apparently she travels with a medic, but "top-tier medical care" only works if you comply with it properly...

Scalia would have been 70 in 2006. Scalia was very important between 2006 and his death. His impact in general has been almost immeasurably huge on American jurisprudence, even the court's liberals owe a lot to Scalia in their opinions. He achieved this mostly by sheer force of will and intellect,

If Sotomayor is as strong a justice as Scalia, then yes, your argument holds and Democrats should keep her on the court. Scalia had a high VORP.

buy you a few extra years of a nominal democrat on the court

Ok I’m going to stop reading right here.

We’re not talking a “few years.” We’re talking potential decades if the replacement is 40-50 years old.

Sotomayor, or basically anyone, does not have value above replacement relative to that risk, when losing a seat means a consistent structural imbalance against your side.

You’re the one being short-sighted here with a fairly wrong take on the “great justice theory of legal history.”

I only skimmed the rest.

Did you not mention RBG even once?

They can just wait until after the election and usher in a replacement in lame-duck session if it turns out badly for the Democrats.

The counter argument is that jamming up Senate proceedings is Mitch McConnell's defining political skill.

The Republicans are in the minority.

Manchin has said that he won't vote to confirm anyone that doesn't get at least one Republican.

Faced with the choice of getting another Trump appointee, he'd cave. Besides, the Democrats have a 51-49 advantage plus the VP; they can lose one vote.

(Yeah, three "independents", all of whom caucus with the Democrats)

Flaw 2) Defeatism Silver derides politicians as irrational, for foolishly believing "their party is on the Right Side of History and has the morally correct answers on the major questions of the day." This is accurate, but also ignores the point: if you don't think your party is on the Right Side of History and has the morally correct answers, then you shouldn't be doing this. The only reason to get into politics is because you think you can win. If you can only lose, you need to change strategies

The big flaw imo with "right side of history" thinking is not that parties don't generally think they're right, it's with the assumption that things will work out eventually (somehow). It's not defeatism or a rejection of your belief in your answers to be pragmatic or to hedge your bets.

Don't waste energy lobbying for Sotomayor to retire, lobby for Ds to pull their heads out of their asses in the heartland.

Yes, this is the sort of advice I'd expect the GOP to give Democrats.

Flaw 3) Eliminating the Individual Silver assumes that any D is as good as any other D. That any D Senate is as good as any other D Senate, and any D justice is as good as any other D justice. This is misguided. The D justice that would get past this D Senate is probably going to be a milquetoast, below average, moderate

This was also "Notorious RBG's" argument - she may have even been right. But, at this point, even the most fervent pussyhat-wearers have begrudgingly admitted that she erred. In isolation this argument works I guess but not if the comparison is with a potential Republican pick. Certainly not for Nate Silver's audience.

The D justice that would get past this D Senate is probably going to be a milquetoast, below average, moderate

After all the nasty partisan fighting over Kavanaugh and Barrett, wouldn't a milquetoast moderate not offensive to either side be a nice change?

Kavanaugh was and is a milquetoast moderate. The Democrats just didn't want someone leaning right. That's why his hearings were about boofing and wild claims about decades-ago sexual misconduct rather than how he'd be as a justice.

This was also "Notorious RBG's" argument

In her case I think the truth is she expected Hilary to win and wanted the first woman President to appoint her replacement. It'd have made for a better story.

I would also add that Scalia and RGB actually did seem like high Value Over Replacement Justices, much more influential than the other justices of their team on the court, whereas Sotomayor does not seem to be. So I'd say that I think RGB might have even been correct to hold on because of her intrinsic value, but Sotomayor would be more valuable to her team by gaming the retirement to ensure her seat is a permeant Dem possession no matter how elections go.

I'd also say THAT is probably the main argument against overly strategic retirements. If that Chesterton's Fence gets knocked down then the composition of the court gets locked in to whatever it is now unless one party can get a seriously long string of victories to wait the justices out or the justices suffer untimely sudden deaths (RGB was a cancer survivor and might have seen it coming and planned ahead, Scalia's death seemed out of left field). And if the only way the composition changes is untimely justice death that sets up a mighty strong incentive for assassinations.

Scalia's death seemed out of left field

He was a 79-year-old portly guy - actuarial tables are what they are and you're basically rolling a d20 to save against death every year at that point, even if there's nothing in particular wrong with you.

I've seen that said but I can't actually find her stating it in response to Obama's light pressure.

She was asked to resign before the 2014 midterms , I doubt she was defending not doing so by saying she'd wait for the allegedly inevitable next Democratic president. I think the above take might have been cope after they lost the Senate and it was clear the GOP wouldn't confirm anyone.

I think people like her honestly just don't want to retire and the rest is just posthoc rationalization. Look at people like Feinstein.

I agree with so much of this, but want to offer one piece of gentle pushback - there's an old sports axiom that you shouldn't do the thing that your opponents want you to do. Don't punt on 4th and 1, don't pitch to Barry Bonds, don't take a race out slow against Mo Farah, don't swang and bang with Derrick Lewis. I'm someone that absolutely despises Sotomayor and the view that the Constitution should be highly malleable to current-year preferences, and what I want is absolutely for her to keep her seat for the moment. This is my preference for purely strategic reasons - if she stays, she may well die and be replaced by someone that views the law much more like I do. If she retires now, it'll be an incredibly stupid spectacle with people insisting that we need another Wise Latinatm and it'll probably be some crank for the Ninth Circuit or something. Regardless of whether you take a Moneyball approach or a trad gut-feel approach, you should generally not give your opponents what they want.

For me, the best argument for her not retiring cynically would be that the goal should not be to game the institutions and that you should stand on the business of insisting that this type of institutionalism should be taken seriously. The problem there is that the left already views the right as having defected from that equilibrium by refusing to confirm Garland and then replacing Ginsberg almost immediately on death.

Your argument for the growth and influence of justices over time makes sense, but the problem really does come down to the object-level justice in question - it doesn't seem like anyone, left or right, sincerely believes that Sotomayor is an intellectual giant that's going to change hearts and minds. I'm sure there's a spin on this from her fans, that it's just that her detractors are a bunch of stupid racists, but it doesn't seem like there's any real disagreement that she's never going to be treated like an important intellectual figure in shaping future courts. This argument would work much better for Kagan, who generally is treated as a serious and influential colleague with incisive perspective by both friends and foes.

there's an old sports axiom that you shouldn't do the thing that your opponents want you to do. Don't punt on 4th and 1, don't pitch to Barry Bonds, don't take a race out slow against Mo Farah, don't swang and bang with Derrick Lewis.

I found the perfect metaphor for this scenario after yesterday: the Falcons drafting Michael Penix Jr. 8th overall, after signing Kirk Cousins for huge money in the offseason. All the possible outcomes are bad scenarios for the Falcons. If Cousins is good, Penix never plays, and they wasted the 8th pick, with which there is no question they could have drafted someone at 8 who could help Cousins win. If Cousins isn't good, and Penix actually plays, then they've wasted $45mm/yr for the years they should be benefitting from the cheap Rookie QB contract, undermining the team they could build around Penix if he's good enough to get picked 8 overall.

It's possible that this all plays out fine, and the Falcons are good despite it. Like the Niners and Trey Lance. But they're betting against themselves somewhere. They're either spending $45mm/yr because they're worried they might whiff on the 8th overall pick. Or they spent the 8th overall pick because they were worried they have whiffed on the massive free agent QB contract. The scenarios where things actually work are worse than they would be otherwise.

Funnily enough, inasmuch as my preference is originalism, I'd expect the Dems to fumble this one and end up with a mediocre judge on the court at best. But looking at that pseudo-majority they're running out there, if I were a Dem I'd be certain that we'd end up handing Trump another pick.

I think this analysis has a fatal flaw in it. Sotomayor is an affirmative action appointment and hence her ability is no greater than a generic democrat. If Sotomayor was essentially Michael Jordan than all the arguments for keeping her on the bench would be in play. But she’s basically Javale McGee and a replacement level justice.

It’s definitely an interesting thought experience that it can be beneficial to keep a justice on the court but I can’t agree with the actionable part of it and basically view Sotomayor as low IQ (relatively) without the talent to be great.

I think this analysis has a fatal flaw in it. Sotomayor is an affirmative action appointment

@ThenElection

This is why I brought up the example of Clarence Thomas, the single most obvious Affirmative Action appointment in the history of the Court, who has developed significantly over the course of his career. Conservatives are much more likely to cite Thomas' concurrences today than they were in 2002, when even Originalists joked that he was Scalia's sidekick.

I spent most of law school hearing obnoxious liberals (mostly white) talking about how dumb Thomas was; the fact is that he is probably smarter than most. Even the AA SCOTUS appointments are really smart people! ((One of the things that's so offensive about open AA is that it undermines the credentials of what are, factually, very accomplished people)) Maybe they're top 1% lawyers rather than top 50 lawyers, but they're smarter than the vast majority of the people criticizing them for being dumb. She might not be putting out top tier stuff at any given time, but she could grow into the role, like Thomas did.

I'm reminded of the Twitter discourse after the Oakland v Kentucky game this March, when a million people made jokes about Jack Gohlke being white and a future car salesman. And it just struck me as so distasteful for black twitter users who are probably fat and out of shape to mock a guy for being merely a top 3000 basketball player in the world instead of a top 200 player who belongs in the NBA.

I happen to like Sotomayor on a personal basis, in that I think it's hilarious that she'll go to Yankees games and sit in the Judge's Chambers. She's far from my least favorite justice, coming in above Kavanaugh, KBJ, and I still hate Kennedy enough to make up for the fact that he isn't actually on the court anymore.

Thomas is great.

Why do you prefer Sotomayor to those judges? She's the one who's most obviously motivated by politics, usually, I think.

Kavanaugh: I hate that he has literally never had a job. In his bio he has no job he's ever had that wasn't either judicial or political. He's never argued a case in court or had a client. Judicial jobs, even as clerks, are rarefied air: everyone treats you with deference. He worked briefly in an "of counsel" position at a law firm, and it's not clear he ever did anything there, literally he couldn't give a good answer when asked. I also find him to be a bit of a government stooge, in regret over his role with Starr he finds the President to be immune from just about everything.

KBJ: I don't like how she was nominated, and haven't seen anything to change my mind as of yet.

Kennedy: Absolute nightmare of a Justice. Obergefell will go down with Dred Scott on the list of universally reviled precedents, if the current structure of the Court even survives the results of Obergefell. The number of ways the fake-test he created in Obergefell can and will be twisted by future Justices has the potential to undermine the constitution completely. The only positive way I can skew his opinion is that he wanted so badly to protect Gay Rights that he ensconced them into a framework that will allow a conservative court to protect other rights that they care about more than they care about gay marriage.

And it just struck me as so distasteful for black twitter users who are probably fat and out of shape to mock a guy for being merely a top 3000 basketball player in the world instead of a top 200 player who belongs in the NBA.

This is one of those things that actually playing any sport at all really shifts your perspective on. Guys that are D1 scrubs are still really, really good at their sport. Guys that are capable of having one shining moment on the biggest stage of their sport in college are a whole other level.

As it fits with the Supreme Court, I've had this argument with a few conservative friends that think KBJ is "stupid" because she's an affirmative action appointment and couldn't answer the "what is a woman?" question cogently. They're wrong, just plain wrong. I could give a lengthy rant on how much I dislike her, how utterly dishonest I think her jurisprudence is, and what a mistake I think it is to explicitly promise a SCOTUS seat to a demographic group, but it remains true that if you listen to an oral argument that she's participating in, she's obviously a smart person. Listening to the recent Missouri v Murthy case made me genuinely angry, but it wasn't like Jackson was struggling to keep up with the conversation or doesn't understand the relevant law - she's just wrong. As off-brand as it is for me, I am inclined to think that insistence that she's actually stupid has quite a bit of racism built into.

KBJ is still "young", a prospect of sorts. One of those, "She needs some refinement to bring her play up to the level of wily, consistent veterans, but she shows flashes of potential greatness," situations.

Whereas with Sotomayor, I think we pretty much know what she is. I would submit that the Thomas Revolution was less about Thomas changing/growing and more just about how people viewed his work. Lots of folks were so focused on Scalia during his life and just thought Thomas could never live up. It wasn't until Scalia passed that they re-evaluated. I don't think Sotomayor is suffering from that. Perhaps a bit of a Kagan effect, but I would find it quite difficult to imagine someone sitting down now, putting their hypothetical brain to work, removing Kagan from the picture, thinking hard about what Sotomayor's core contribution is, and coming up with a great argument that it is something that can be rallied around to really deliver. KBJ totally could.

Didn't she confuse de facto and de jure?

https://twitter.com/RogerSeverino_/status/1587611399668342790

I will give you Thomas. Though part of Thomas is he’s great at pissing off the left and it’s not only thru legal reasoning but being a player in the federalist society and his wife being intimately involved in 1/6.

More likely than not at this point though Sotomayor is who she is. I think the left could make a strong case for replacing her on her merits alone and not her age. If you have 3 SC justices I don’t think you can claim she is one of your top 3 liberal legal minds. If you are going to lose a lot of cases it still makes sense to have your best writing you le disagreements.

Side note but I loved Shaqing a fool love affair with Javaleeeeee McGeeeee

I spent a few minutes trying to come up with a replacement level athlete with name notoriety. Got excited when he hit me.

Considering some of his recent statements, maybe Nate believes that the Democrats have got off the deep end, and are dragging the country in the same direction. From that perspective, a republican supreme court can help avoid some of that, or at least won't contribute to it, while Democrat supreme court would end the first amendment for example, and implement a woke partisan agenda.

So you’re saying Silver, who thinks the MAGA GOP is even more insane, is purposely giving bad advice so that Dems in fact lose even more seats on the court?

The Republican judges have much more leash compared to the dem judges.


What is this place?

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

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

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


Why are you called The Motte?

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

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


New post guidelines

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

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

If in doubt, please post it!


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