domain:nytimes.com
wayfarer
3d ago
It can't even do something the US government could do in the 1960s consistently.
what specific you mean here? Manned moon landings?
SpaceX instead focused on vastly lower launch costs and managed to do this.
SpaceX is a classic case of overpromising and underdelivering.
Still, what was delivered just crushed competition.
$INSERT_VIDEO_OF_ESA_HEAD_LAUGHING_AT_MUSK.MP4
FtSoA
3d ago
Is there an easy way to port over a substack article with images and links?
I don't see one, so I tried to provide enough context to tell someone whether they might want to click or not.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
3d ago
Insofar as they're able to maintain cohesion and will to power, the opposite is true.
Revolutions happen when elevated factions with higher internal cohesion than the ruling elite figure they'd be better off without their supposed betters. Unity of purpose in the ruling elite makes these conditions less likely to happen.
SkoomaDentist
3d ago
Black Sabbath effectively invented heavy metal and anyone who denies that is just trying push their own niche pet theory that nobody gives the slightest shit about.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I would argue that before Tesla, an electrical car was for the greenest 10% of the population who were willing to drive an expensive substandard car because they wanted to stop CO2 emissions. Rich people who wanted a nice car typically got a premium brand German gasoline car.
Tesla changed that. Suddenly you could drive a car which would impress the ladies while also being electric. In response, the German car industry (which had largely dismissed electric cars as a fad) worked hard to build electric models. While I would probably by a SE Asian car instead of an American or European one, I really think that Tesla moved the industry forward a lot.
Often, the premium brands are trendsetters, and the things they implement (e.g. ABS, airbags, backwards-facing cameras) eventually trickle down to the cheaper brands. Before Tesla, you could belittle that die-hard green running an extension cord through his garden to charge his car. After Tesla, it was clear that electric cars were a viable (if still expensive) alternative.
The main innovation of SpaceX is that they are able to recycle first stages. The Saturn V was very impressive on capabilities, but it also cost about 1.5G$ per launch in today's money to get 140 tons to LEO. The Falcon 9 costs 67M$ for 23 tons to LEO. Sure, SpaceX is overpromising and underdelivering a lot, but that fact alone is impressive.
AvocadoPanic
3d ago
It's because we live in a broken and fallen world corrupted by sin.
While it's useful to have meritocracy at the top, I'm less convinced of its usefulness at the middle and bottom levels
This has been debated before---look up the o-ring model of economic development. One of the conclusions you can draw from this is that it does matter to have a very deep pool of talent to draw from. Again, people have a general bias towards underestimating just how hard most jobs are, especially jobs with technical content to them.
Even beyond that, the measured outcome of letting the side that's seemingly ancestry-over-all-else have power is to not even have meritocracy at the top: Terry Tao also appears to be getting his grants cut (though this is recent news so take it with a large grain of salt. EDIT: confirmation).
Hmm. How about this:
Someone once said that every genius needs a translator. A mind that thinks of new ideas often has a perspective too different from ordinary people to be able to communicate that idea to them.
Returning to cisheteronormativity (which is even worse when typing on a phone), it is not the case that somebody was idly musing and accidentally summoned Cthulhu into being.
The word’s creators were not normal people. They were mostly gay activists and Marxists who for various reasons wished to tear down both the concept and the existence of normality.
Their particular position allowed them to conceive of the word ‘ cisheteronormativity’ because they were already living the opposite of it, but that word remains an infohazard. Even hearing it summons a conceptual shadow into peoples’ heads because cis and hetero (and normal) are words with known opposites. To hear cis is to understand that transness exists, to hear hetero is to know that homoness exists. You don’t even necessarily know what they mean yet, but now you ‘understand’ that they do exist and you want to find out more. You also need to find out more, because the word is fashionable and you want to be able to use it. The construction also suggests expertise and knowledge because of the way we treat Greek roots, of course.
It’s as if we started talking about homo-morphic societies. It instantly summons a concept of heteromorphic societies, waiting to be filled.
In short, peoples’ complaint is broadly that academia has being creating, popularising and lending authority to infohazards. Granting that there is some chicken-and-eggness, it remains an escalating cycle. And I do not believe that the people who invented ‘to problematise’ as a verb are doing this on accident.
You could YesChad and say you approve of cisheteronormativity but you now have to fight about it, and that battle will be fought on the plain of words and definitions and identities, where everything is slippery and nothing is ultimately defensible.
Think of the famous dialogue from Life of Brian:
LORETTA: It's every man's right to have babies if he wants them.
REG: But... you can't have babies.
LORETTA: Don't you oppress me.
REG: I'm not oppressing you, Stan. You haven't got a womb! Where's the foetus going to gestate?! You going to keep it in a box?!
LORETTA: crying
JUDITH: Here! I-- I've got an idea. Suppose you agree that he can't actually have babies, not having a womb, which is nobody's fault, not even the Romans', but that he can have the right to have babies.
FRANCIS: Good idea, Judith. We shall fight the oppressors for your right to have babies, brother. Sister. Sorry.
REG: What's the point?
FRANCIS: What?
REG: What's the point of fighting for his right to have babies when he can't have babies?!
In the real world, men cannot have babies. But in the free-floating world of words and dignity, men can have the right to have babies, and good luck suggesting otherwise. Once you concede this argument, you will find it unacceptable to point out that men in real life can’t have babies because you are now infringing their commonly accepted rights.
In this way academia has been midwife, facilitator and enforcer of vast and IMO largely negative trends in our society, and is attracting opprobrium accordingly.
NunoSempere
3d ago
strawmanning of EA in general
I think EA does have a fair share of pure altruists. I know of at least four people that have gone celibate over the last few years as a result of being too concentrated on their jobs (and I claim they could have had romantic success if they had chosen to). I think coordinating around "we are doing the most good" also has an easy attractor in pure altruism.
the Soviets did not rely on charitable giving to fund their efforts
The thing I was pointing at is that the job of the apparatchiks was to nominally be pure altruists towards the population of Russia as a whole, and this predictably failed.
SSCReader
3d ago
Sure, not disputing that at all. They also tend to skew female which also skews left at pretty much all ages.
This is of course one of the oldest questions in meta-ethics, known to the Greeks as the Euthyphro dilemma:
"Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?"
Substituting "the gods" for whatever is the source of the workings of the universe.
There's a large variety of answers to this, from divine command theory, to moral realism, to many others that reject or make meaningless the question, from Thomism to moral skepticism. Take your pick.
I tend to work under the faith based assumption that the world was not constructed by evil, and that there is thus unity between virtue and flourishing in the long run. On account of the terrible track record of gnosticisms.
SSCReader
3d ago
So maybe because I've worked in public health this is not particularly bothersome. We already trade off deaths vs other values. Increased speed limits leads to economic gain but more deaths. Another hospital in an urban area will save more lives than funding one in a rural area. Deaths simply are a trade off at a population level. People here argued we should have allowed more Covid deaths in older populations in order to preserve the economy and rights of free movement et al.
Having said that, from the point of view of vaccines, they have two purposes, protect the individual who takes the vaccine and try to achieve herd immunity (or at least reduced spread). Black communities were among those worst at taking up the vaccine (for a few reasons). With increased obesity and other health conditions, even low risk black age groups are at higher risk than similar white (or asian) age groups.
"In people 65 years and older, Blacks are nearly 5 times more likely to die of COVID-19 than Whites. This increased risk of COVID-19 mortality in Blacks is even worse in younger populations—up to a 10-times greater risk in adults 35 to 64 years old. In fact, younger Blacks are dying from COVID-19 at a rate greater than older Whites. For example, Blacks 55 to 64 years old are dying from COVID-19 at rate two-times greater than Whites a decade older."
So their community is less likely to have protective levels of vaccination, more likely to get sicker than an equivalent white person and more likely to die. They're also disproportionately more likely to work in a customer service or retail role and therefore get exposed. Are you sure that it would be the wrong decision to push more vaccines that way, even if all we were looking at was deaths prevented?
If ethnicity impacts outcomes then logically it should be at least a factor when looking at policy. How much of a factor depends on what you're trying to achieve.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
3d ago
Come on son, at least put the primary parts of the essay here, if not the whole thing.
Porn also still has a small amount of leftover leftist street cred from the “pissing off the Moral Majority” days in the 70s and 80s. Not a lot though, leftists have started to sour on porn and I only see that increasing in the future.
FtSoA
3d ago
K-12 teachers get a solidly large does of lefty canon exposure, and a default assumption of "government intervention to fix things is good and necessary."
Even in a quite red state decades ago, my teachers were disproportionately left of center.
FtSoA
3d ago
I think "pure altruism" is a strawmanning of EA in general and Open Philanthropy in particular. One of EA's main tenets is that the traditional hyperfocus on overhead costs of charities is unhelpful as a measure of actual efficacy. If you want smart, driven people to do good work in allocating resources, paying them something like market rate is advisable. Otherwise, you're selecting on something other than merely talent for the job.
Of course, it's always possible OpenPhil is actually bad at their stated mission for whatever reason, including design flaws. So having different models out there, like volunteer crowdsourcing, is a good thing.
Famously, the Soviets did not rely on charitable giving to fund their efforts. Donors can always stop donating.
Scott has addressed this kind of thing--how much altruism is mandated or what is sufficiently pure--multiple times. Numerous essay in EA Land focus on the emotional unsustainability of pure altruism.
Some level of partiality/self-interest is allowable on pragmatic grounds alone. Martyrdom should not be a standard requirement.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3d ago
It looks like they source batteries from Panasonic and then integrate them into packs. So they’re involved relatively early in the process.
ABigGuy4U
3d ago
This is just my head cannon (I think), but I always interpreted his terrible heart condition as just him having a normal human heart and not a eugenically selected überheart.
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
Mostly this. There's probably more to be said about that optics of the deal than the substance, not least because of the multitude of interests in inflating / signal boosting the more propagandastic elements for, well, propaganda. At the end of the day, though, it doesn't 'make' people buy stuff, and almost certainly includes a lot of purchasing that would already happen regardless.
I do think one of the more salient / relevant / 'why this deal will pass despite the critics' is that it puts an end (for now) the tariff issue, whereas deliberately trying to scuttle it would re-raise the issue and likely lead to higher. As much as, say, Paris will love to hate on this bill and decry it and so on, the BATNA tariff is higher, not lower, to the tariff in this agreement.
I suspect- though can't say with too much confidence- that another of the elements of this deal is how it will probably shape the European military modernization funds. A lot of the most recent discussion on the face-saving/'what's really in it' has focused on the limits of compulsory purchasing. However, a bigger issue is if EU-wide funding mechanisms will have the 'buy Europe' clauses that were being pushed for. I wouldn't be surprised if even if this deal doesn't 'make' anyone buy US military goods, it also undoes legal restrictions on EU funds being used for that purpose. As in, no one has to buy American, but at the same time people can buy American with funds that were previously being advertised as excluding American.
FtSoA
3d ago
In my latest essay, I try to list the major points I'm aware of that puncture the progressive narrative on economics, without trying to directly touch on the Culture War's social fronts.
Reality Has a Poorly Recognized Classical Liberal Bias
I think most people here have enough exposure to libertarianism that they are at least aware of these issues (even if they don't agree with them). If you think I missed one or I'm somehow dead wrong please do indicate so.
SSCReader
3d ago
A society where people use 'cisheteronormativity' in conversation is simply not the same as one where people don't. The creation of the word cisheteronormative innately destroys cisheteronormativity.
I can't see that it does really. A word for water doesn't destroy the society of fish or Atlanteans. It describes their reality. You could create the word and then say, this is the word for what is normal and correct and good so lets not change anything. Or you could create the word and say this is the word for the status quo and that is not good and needs to be changed. But the word itself isn't doing the changing. How it is used (or how the concept is used really, because the word could be blargle for all that it matters).
In fact, I'd suggest the evidence shows the opposite, people were working to tear down what was "normal" BEFORE the word in question was created. Gay rights movements were campaigning to normalize gay people and spread well before cisgender and heteronormativity were coined (the 90's from what I can see). Showing the words are not necessary for people to try and change the status quo. The words come second. The awareness comes first. For what we observe in reality that must be the case. The existence of the word does not destroy "normality". The existence of people who challenge the concept might but that predates the creation of the word.
It might be true that creating the words make it easier to describe and campaign for perhaps, but they clearly aren't necessary.
Ioper
3d ago
What's any large company (say, over 10,000 people), in any other field than tech, that you positively like? If you're like me, you'd struggle to name one.
They're mostly large manufacturers and some resource extraction companies. If we look at smaller companies there are a lot more.
What makes big tech vile is the same bad impulses that exist in other industries dialled up to eleven due to scalability, network effect driven lack of competition, cultish customer behaviour and finance driven lies. For example, everyone hates rent seekers and tech are just currently the best and most visible ones at it.
NunoSempere
3d ago
There is a philosophical problem regarding whether pure altruism is conceptually possible; if you help someone, and you receive in exchange nothing but the satisfaction of having helped someone, then haven't you received something of value, thereby rendering the altruistic act "impure"? What if you don't even feel good about it, could it be pure then? But then, how were you motivated to help in the first place if you didn't even feel good about it? Regardless of how we answer these questions, I believe we can put the idea of absolute pure altruism to the side, because if it exists at all, it surely encompasses a minority of human interactions--source
I have a different perspective here, where a) I think it's conceptually possible, b) the interesting question is whether people who say they are are really only doing the pure altruism. I first encountered the term pure altruism in two papers by James Andreoni, from 1989 and 1990. In them, Andreoni lays out a model of altruistic giving, where agents contribute to a public good both because they value it in itself, but also because they get a private benefit, a "warm glow". He has some nice academic results, like a quick mechanism for indexing one's own altruism (if one was taxed one dollar less, or a thousand, how much more would one donate?), and other observations (taxation may not produce warm glow, and as a result increasing taxation by some amount doesn't reduce donations by that amount; when parents get a warm glow from giving to their children, children are incentivized to be more "spoilt" in a technical sense).
Are people who are saying they are doing pure forms of altruism actually doing so? Often not so. There are aspects of the EA community that just don't make sense by considering its participants as pure white cherubs of innocence and selflessness, although each particular case will be uncertain and ambiguous, and although pointing the discrepancy is tricky.
One of the biggest bets Open Philanthropy—a large philanthropic foundation I'm acquainted with—is making is in its own people. 161 people, earning say 150K to 250K salaries, with overhead of 20% to 40% (?) is 30M to 52M/year—probably higher than any one of their grants in 2024 and 2025. This does not include the cost of their office, another cool 16.5M. This leads them to have a class interest: they are invested in that form of doing philanthropy—rather than anonymous part-time rotating grantmakers whose funds under management grow or shring depending on their evaluated success (like the Survival and Flourishing Fund).
Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed outlines how this happened with the apparatchik in Russia. The apparatchik are in charge of the wellbeing of the Soviet Union and ended up reallocating ressources to themselves. Some of my experience is that the grantmakers just want to be sucked up to, their ideas confirmed, their egos upheld, their strategies validated, their personalities admired. But at the same time they are selected for not rocking the boat in a deep way. More mundanely, people get grants from projects that don't work out, and don't pivot, because they think that would involve losing their jobs. EA seems like a failed Schelling point to me, because it advertises itself as doing pure altruism, but the actors end up fighting for their own self-interest, sometimes in quite obvious ways.
Is pure altruism selected out? If you do something for someone such that you don't get something out of it, can you continue doing that into the future? What is the mechanism? I think this is a key question that leads to rederiving some form of non-naïve form of altruism. Or alternatively, it leads to exploiting the pure altruism until its ressources are exhausted. One of the first guys to think about this ended up killing himself.
On the other side, pure altruism can be understood essentially as a mating display because it's a costly signal of strength, and it. The underlying purpose of ideology X isn't ideology X, it's displaying that you can still be a well-adjusted person even with its iron around your neck. Some version of this is fine by me, but the problem becomes when people really believe their ideologies and do cripple themselves for real, as happened with Germany's industrial economy as a result of their terrible energy policy. This matters to me, I made a heavily real, non-fake investment in learning German. I passed the C1 exam but probably at some point did have a C2 level in German. Now I just do business with Americans instead. I also do find it aesthetically distasteful when people do something which is nominally about, e.g., helping the homeless in a way that makes the problem worse, partly because nobody taught me how to do the Straussian reading.
At the same time, how do you coordinate around public goods? One cool answer is dominant assurance contracts but in practice this hasn't been implemented much, perhaps because the people who could have jobs as grantmakers they would rather preserve, but also because part of the problem of setting up a new project is just distribution, and you have a chicken an egg problem here (you could do a dominant assurance funding model if only you had already built the distribution funnel for your thing, but that's a big part of the job).
Anyways one answer here is to try to get people in man vs. nature games because man v. man conflicts are just fucked up.
No I don't disagree, that's within the realm of plausibility as far as I know so I won't argue against it very confidently.
There are two reasons why I'll say "so what?" to this however. First, the charge you're making is just about speech and recruitment. Having opinions you disagree with is not a reason to destroy something---rather you should focus on the people acting on those opinions. This is why I really think it's important to focus on concrete material impacts, like the example of researchers fleeing the US and the subsequent significant hit to research output and therefore general economic productivity in the US. In the long run, scientific and technological development is and has always been the single most important thing for making people's lives better, so hindering it is a really big deal.
The second issue is treating academia as a monolith---you might as well say that the San Francisco Bay Area is dominated by Leftism, etc. etc. so when the next big earthquake hit we shouldn't disburse federal disaster aid. Sure, there might be specific parts of academia that are organs of the far Left, and these parts may be the most loud and visible. However, the vast majority of it is not. The current US administration's response seems particularly insane since it's targeted at exactly these parts that aren't. This really pushes me to the conspiracy theory of "well, that's the part that has the most people with glasses so of course that's the part they'll target" from the analogy---that the damage is exactly motivated by ancestry-over-meritocracy and not any good-faith attempt to fix the problems with academia.
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