Anti developer Hallmark movies--I've said for years I want to write a tragic musical about a heroic real estate developer who wants to revitalize a dying slum, but is stopped by a bunch of pretentious and self destructive trust fund hippies (one of whom MURDERS HIS DOG.)
I mean I love RENT more than anyone, but sometimes theater needs to send better messages.
Putting this link in the post might be useful for readers of your blog who don't have a Tumblr account, as Tumblr interrupts posts on the www.tumblr.com subdomain with a login request.
"“Allocative efficiency” seems to be decreasing—firms are less likely to be replaced with more productive and successful firms." From footnote 7 in the Asterisk mag: "increasing market concentration, higher markups, and reduced entry of new productive firms." How much of it's just market consolidation--i.e. increased market power from the biggest firms, driving out new entrants and collecting larger profits as a result? (Like the author says.) A while ago I remember the whole point of starting a startup was to sell it to Microsoft for a nice payout. Obviously it's a different company now but how much has changed?
Centrist v liberal: yeah, that's an interesting point! Our polarized system means people tend to think the bag of opinions corresponding to modern progressivism and MAGA are some sort of absolutes and if you hold one you must hold all the others, but as Jay Vandermer says below, you could want gun rights and socialized medicine. (There's a funny bit in Alison Bechdel's Spent where the characters run into Vermonters wearing anti-Trump t-shirts who also enjoy hunting.)
But there's all *kinds* of other possible ideologies. Old-school free-speech liberals often found themselves on the right in the past few years, and you get into stuff like Catholic social thought that's pro-life but wants higher taxes on the rich. Or libertarianism, which is the reverse. Your old right-liberals (as WSCFriedman says) were against regulation but for free speech (and open borders). If you have n issues, you have 2^n possible ideologies even before you bring intermediate positions into it.
Sandcastles is really interesting reading as someone who's neither a rigid radical nor a joyful militant (and indeed fear of such people was part of what kept me from getting involved in anything in my more liberal eras). I genuinely think if I had tried to get involved in progressive spaces, with my natural lack of self-esteem and self-criticism, I might have engaged in serious self-injury. I feel like being a not-great person kept me from self-harm. Maybe there's only so much sanctity the average person can have.
Epstein: well, a part of getting away with a lot of bad stuff is looking trustworthy. If you're an evil priest, etc. who abuses children appearing above suspicion is how you get away with it for a long time--otherwise you get caught. (Also, he didn't kill himself.)
Brangus: all I can do is just be really jealous.
That's great about Veggie Tales--it's not exactly 'worldbuilding' in their view, but sometimes the little bits really do make it all cohere better. Of course it's never exactly clear how old Batman is or when he was born, and that franchise keeps chugging.
On the centrist vs liberal thing, I hold a slightly different version of the same basic point: people use the word "centrist" to mean two overlapping things. One is "roughly in the middle politically compared to other people in the country", which is what you'd think it means, but it also gets applied to "person who judges each issue on its merits instead of automatically agreeing with their party/allies/side". Probably because some tribalist people don't understand the concept of making decisions for reasons other than tribalism.
On the other side, this all makes people like me sound like the wise and reasonable people in the room, so I need to be a bit careful.
Non-human creatures' lack of original sin is the basis of C. S. Lewis's interplanetary trilogy.
That and the conflict between the humanities and the sciences.
VeggieTales could have had an origin story where a mild mannered philologist puts a-demon-possessing-a-cabbage through a food processor to prevent the temptation and fall of all Vegetable Kind.
Anyway, my tattoo contains a line from a movie that had a special meaning to myself and my late wife. (She was into tattoos and we were going to get a corresponding pair as a gift to each other - I got mine but she ended up being too sick to get the one she wanted to get.)
The liberalism vs centrism article felt very straw-manny to me.
People I know who call themselves centrists tend to be people whose political views don't sufficiently align with either side. I'm Canadian but here's an easily understood US example: an American who wants both socialized medicine and gun rights might identify as centrist.
The author's claim that liberals are YIMBY and everyone else are NIMBYs is laughable. In both Canada and the US, conservative regions have an easier time building things (on average).
And finally, older liberals sometimes find themselves being labeled as moderates because of the Overton Paradox rather than a meaningful change in their political views.
Lots of liberals are on the right! Right-liberals were an important part of the neoconservative coalition, and they played an important role preventing and reducing stupid regulations. MAGA is booting them from the Republican Party coalition, but that's recent.
Also helped drive economic inequality to the point where populism of some sort (ironically it seems to have been the right-wing kind) was inevitable, I think.
There's all kinds of tradeoffs--we got the Internet and a lot of technical advances out of it, of course. But they were also able to, say, prevent climate change action when it was more feasible by spreading lots of FUD and making it a partisan issue.
Absolutely there were pluses to the neoliberal era, which will become more apparent as we leave it. (Less extreme political polarization and respect for freedom of speech, for instance, which probably had a lot to do with the prominence of liberals on the right, as you say!)
The neoliberal era itself was a response to 70s-era stagflation and unions that were getting too greedy and making crappy products (70s-era Detroit comes to mind).
In the end it'll probably be seen as another era in history, like the post-WW2 era or the roaring twenties, with its own pluses and minuses.
I love a sordid tale as much as anyone, but sorry, the Nuzzi affair article was just too much. Characterizing RFK as dismantling science was just too disgusting. But I will give the author this: his tone of smug condescension was a classic of the genre.
And the vaccine recommendations. Jesus. *Measles* is making a comeback? It's like we decided to stop flushing the toilet to see what would happen. I guess everyone who would remember polio is dead. Next thing you'll see people reevaluating the Nazis...oh, wait...
Much as I agree with you on the merits of your argument, getting sarcastic is of limited value here. While slugging it out on Twitter's a different story, on an EA Substack better to stay elevated in tone and keep calmly stating facts while your opponent keeps getting angry and looking stupid. Like they say, you're not arguing to convince the opponent, you're arguing to convince the audience.
This vaccination thing is an area where we actually do have the science on our side and while it might not be enough on X, on this part of the Internet I think sounding calmer and more rational is probably the high-status play.
True enough, I should try to be better. However, I'm not sure what else to say to someone claiming modern medicine itself is unreliable. If viewers find that plausible, they're hardly going to find interest in any of the sources used for a rebuttal. Pointing out that the primary figures of the opposing side regularly claim obvious nonsense is about the best response I can think of to an argument attacking the standing of medical institutions. Who are you going to trust, your doctor or a guy who claimed he couldn't pay child support because he was mentally incapacitated by a parasitic brain worm he got from bad food hygiene?
Of course that side won and here we are. I'm not sure where to go from here.
I observe the depth of your analysis of the current scientific situation. Must be very comforting to have such smug certainty. Especially when said certainty cites an easily disproven anecdote. Lol. Enjoy your own version of science, buddy, and make sure you get all your boosters. You might still get sick and die, (it’s in the fine print) but it will surely be a comfort to your loved ones that you followed “the science” to the end.
Your lack of understanding that dramatically lowering a risk is worthwhile even if the risk does not go to zero is likewise illuminating. Remarkable how your type loves nothing more than to talk about how upsetting it is for other people to act like they're more knowledgeable than them and then immediately demonstrate their failure to grasp middle-school level math concepts. Keep it up, I'm sure it will get people to respect you one day.
No. The two articles are only related insofar as both are about sex differences in personality.
Scott is criticizing a specific motte-and-bailey argument, where someone rebuts the claim that "men are more aggressive than women" by citing that "most gender differences are small", even though one of the not-small differences is in aggression.
The Asterisk article rebuts claims about specific gender differences by citing research on those specific differences. It does not rely only on the claim that most differences are small:
"[Dimensionality] was also true of a construct labeled “moral orientation,” which assessed adherence to “justice” (“the difference between right and wrong”) and “care” items (concepts like “intimate relationships” and “caring for others”) — the exact types of attitudes that, according to Andrews, have been most shifted by “feminization."
The Argument's article mentions a study which concludes that 'For about 80% of the effect sizes, gender differences were either weak or nonexistent', which looks an awful lot like the study Scott is discussing in his old post.
You're right the point about 'taxons'/dimensionality is also important in the article... but like... I don't know if I misunderstand how they use the concept, but it seems completely irrelevant to what people mean what they talk about genre differences.
Here is from the actual research paper :
"The statement that men are more aggressive than women, for example, implicitly assumes that there is one group of people who are high in aggression (men) and another group of people who are low in aggression (women). This assumption treats an observed mean difference between men and women as a special kind of category called a taxon."
Hum, no ? Very few people are saying anything about taxon, or asserting that no woman has ever been more aggressive than any man. What most people are saying is that there is in fact a noticeable and important mean difference in aggressivity... which this research paper just casually confirmed.
So my impression is that the all discussion about taxons/dimensionality is just some big misdirection : 'People are saying that there is no overlap at all between measured male and female aggressivity, and we're proving them wrong'. Then they use the fact that there is *some* overlap to argue that there is no *difference*, which are two very different things.
The Argument article is *not* making the argument that there is no difference between male and female aggressiveness. You need to stop blindly pattern-matching to claims made by unrelated third parties.
The research paper is making a dubious interpretation of the phrasing, sure, but it's a semantics dispute and not particularly relevant.
They were a little too taxon-y themselves, I thought, from reading it. I preferred the articles where they calculate the difference over the spread (difference in means divided by standard deviations for math people) and give numbers to it. It's quite variable for different things.
I feel like a big problem is in most heterosexual mating you tend to accentuate the differences to be attractive, so if men have a 50% higher alcohol tolerance than women they will turn drinking each other under the table into a macho thing.
The accentuation effect seems plausible, but I have no trouble thinking of counter-examples, so I'm not sure how much it matters compared to other factors.
I'm a little biased in that I spent a lot of time believing the blank slate and some early version of the toxic masculinity thesis (this was the 90s so they weren't calling it that), and when I started reading PUA and redpill stuff my luck improved somewhat. But it's possible other people had the exact opposite trajectoy.
I always said EA people are never cynical enough. Of course they're not collecting the data you'd need to prove they're killing people! It's not darkly ironic, it's standard procedure.
Anti developer Hallmark movies--I've said for years I want to write a tragic musical about a heroic real estate developer who wants to revitalize a dying slum, but is stopped by a bunch of pretentious and self destructive trust fund hippies (one of whom MURDERS HIS DOG.)
I mean I love RENT more than anyone, but sometimes theater needs to send better messages.
You know, we don't know if Cyberland got built or not - all we know is that the police cleared out the protest.
And the second act makes it reasonably clear that Benny and the rest stayed friends in spite their differences of opinion and what happened in act 1:
"You realize that you just paid for the funeral of the person who killed your dog?"
"I always hated that dog."
From Finale A:
[MARK]
In honor of Benny's wife
[ROGER]
Muffy
[MARK]
Alison
Pulling Benny out of the East Village location
Yeah, I must have missed that line. ;)
Saphroneth has also posted Fascist, Thus Inefficient on AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/56280850/chapters/150162775
Putting this link in the post might be useful for readers of your blog who don't have a Tumblr account, as Tumblr interrupts posts on the www.tumblr.com subdomain with a login request.
Lots of interesting stuff as always.
"“Allocative efficiency” seems to be decreasing—firms are less likely to be replaced with more productive and successful firms." From footnote 7 in the Asterisk mag: "increasing market concentration, higher markups, and reduced entry of new productive firms." How much of it's just market consolidation--i.e. increased market power from the biggest firms, driving out new entrants and collecting larger profits as a result? (Like the author says.) A while ago I remember the whole point of starting a startup was to sell it to Microsoft for a nice payout. Obviously it's a different company now but how much has changed?
Centrist v liberal: yeah, that's an interesting point! Our polarized system means people tend to think the bag of opinions corresponding to modern progressivism and MAGA are some sort of absolutes and if you hold one you must hold all the others, but as Jay Vandermer says below, you could want gun rights and socialized medicine. (There's a funny bit in Alison Bechdel's Spent where the characters run into Vermonters wearing anti-Trump t-shirts who also enjoy hunting.)
But there's all *kinds* of other possible ideologies. Old-school free-speech liberals often found themselves on the right in the past few years, and you get into stuff like Catholic social thought that's pro-life but wants higher taxes on the rich. Or libertarianism, which is the reverse. Your old right-liberals (as WSCFriedman says) were against regulation but for free speech (and open borders). If you have n issues, you have 2^n possible ideologies even before you bring intermediate positions into it.
Sandcastles is really interesting reading as someone who's neither a rigid radical nor a joyful militant (and indeed fear of such people was part of what kept me from getting involved in anything in my more liberal eras). I genuinely think if I had tried to get involved in progressive spaces, with my natural lack of self-esteem and self-criticism, I might have engaged in serious self-injury. I feel like being a not-great person kept me from self-harm. Maybe there's only so much sanctity the average person can have.
Epstein: well, a part of getting away with a lot of bad stuff is looking trustworthy. If you're an evil priest, etc. who abuses children appearing above suspicion is how you get away with it for a long time--otherwise you get caught. (Also, he didn't kill himself.)
Brangus: all I can do is just be really jealous.
That's great about Veggie Tales--it's not exactly 'worldbuilding' in their view, but sometimes the little bits really do make it all cohere better. Of course it's never exactly clear how old Batman is or when he was born, and that franchise keeps chugging.
On the centrist vs liberal thing, I hold a slightly different version of the same basic point: people use the word "centrist" to mean two overlapping things. One is "roughly in the middle politically compared to other people in the country", which is what you'd think it means, but it also gets applied to "person who judges each issue on its merits instead of automatically agreeing with their party/allies/side". Probably because some tribalist people don't understand the concept of making decisions for reasons other than tribalism.
On the other side, this all makes people like me sound like the wise and reasonable people in the room, so I need to be a bit careful.
Non-human creatures' lack of original sin is the basis of C. S. Lewis's interplanetary trilogy.
That and the conflict between the humanities and the sciences.
VeggieTales could have had an origin story where a mild mannered philologist puts a-demon-possessing-a-cabbage through a food processor to prevent the temptation and fall of all Vegetable Kind.
I don't think that's quite correct about the Space Trilogy.
It looks like Perelandra has no original sin, while Malacandra has original sin that is much more mild than that of Earth.
Oh yes. Perelandra didn't have a fall. Because Ransom beat the crap out of the demon possessed physicist trying to tempt them.
December? Do you mean January?
Anyway, my tattoo contains a line from a movie that had a special meaning to myself and my late wife. (She was into tattoos and we were going to get a corresponding pair as a gift to each other - I got mine but she ended up being too sick to get the one she wanted to get.)
You seem to have swapped "before" and "after" regarding the priors link!
The liberalism vs centrism article felt very straw-manny to me.
People I know who call themselves centrists tend to be people whose political views don't sufficiently align with either side. I'm Canadian but here's an easily understood US example: an American who wants both socialized medicine and gun rights might identify as centrist.
The author's claim that liberals are YIMBY and everyone else are NIMBYs is laughable. In both Canada and the US, conservative regions have an easier time building things (on average).
And finally, older liberals sometimes find themselves being labeled as moderates because of the Overton Paradox rather than a meaningful change in their political views.
(I otherwise enjoyed the linkpost - thank you!)
Lots of liberals are on the right! Right-liberals were an important part of the neoconservative coalition, and they played an important role preventing and reducing stupid regulations. MAGA is booting them from the Republican Party coalition, but that's recent.
Also helped drive economic inequality to the point where populism of some sort (ironically it seems to have been the right-wing kind) was inevitable, I think.
There's all kinds of tradeoffs--we got the Internet and a lot of technical advances out of it, of course. But they were also able to, say, prevent climate change action when it was more feasible by spreading lots of FUD and making it a partisan issue.
I disagree pretty strongly about that, but don't particularly feel like getting into a long internet argument about it would pursue the good.
Absolutely there were pluses to the neoliberal era, which will become more apparent as we leave it. (Less extreme political polarization and respect for freedom of speech, for instance, which probably had a lot to do with the prominence of liberals on the right, as you say!)
The neoliberal era itself was a response to 70s-era stagflation and unions that were getting too greedy and making crappy products (70s-era Detroit comes to mind).
In the end it'll probably be seen as another era in history, like the post-WW2 era or the roaring twenties, with its own pluses and minuses.
I love a sordid tale as much as anyone, but sorry, the Nuzzi affair article was just too much. Characterizing RFK as dismantling science was just too disgusting. But I will give the author this: his tone of smug condescension was a classic of the genre.
You object to describing the guy who cut massive amounts of medical research funding as having in fact done that?
https://www.clinicaladvisor.com/news/rfk-jr-cancels-500m-in-mrna-vaccine-research-projects/
And the vaccine recommendations. Jesus. *Measles* is making a comeback? It's like we decided to stop flushing the toilet to see what would happen. I guess everyone who would remember polio is dead. Next thing you'll see people reevaluating the Nazis...oh, wait...
Measles was always a mild and survivable disease ffs
People would get pneumonia, encephalitis, and blindness. Used to kill 1-3/1000 kids who got it. What's the complication rate on vaccines?
Money doesn’t equal knowledge. Science right now is mostly a mixture of churn and confirmation bias.
Sure buddy, the extinction of multiple diseases within our borders is "confirmation bias". Have fun with Team Bleach Injection.
Pardon the 'eldering' but...
Much as I agree with you on the merits of your argument, getting sarcastic is of limited value here. While slugging it out on Twitter's a different story, on an EA Substack better to stay elevated in tone and keep calmly stating facts while your opponent keeps getting angry and looking stupid. Like they say, you're not arguing to convince the opponent, you're arguing to convince the audience.
This vaccination thing is an area where we actually do have the science on our side and while it might not be enough on X, on this part of the Internet I think sounding calmer and more rational is probably the high-status play.
True enough, I should try to be better. However, I'm not sure what else to say to someone claiming modern medicine itself is unreliable. If viewers find that plausible, they're hardly going to find interest in any of the sources used for a rebuttal. Pointing out that the primary figures of the opposing side regularly claim obvious nonsense is about the best response I can think of to an argument attacking the standing of medical institutions. Who are you going to trust, your doctor or a guy who claimed he couldn't pay child support because he was mentally incapacitated by a parasitic brain worm he got from bad food hygiene?
Of course that side won and here we are. I'm not sure where to go from here.
You may be right. I just don't see the point doing it here. On X it may work perfectly.
I observe the depth of your analysis of the current scientific situation. Must be very comforting to have such smug certainty. Especially when said certainty cites an easily disproven anecdote. Lol. Enjoy your own version of science, buddy, and make sure you get all your boosters. You might still get sick and die, (it’s in the fine print) but it will surely be a comfort to your loved ones that you followed “the science” to the end.
No personal attacks, dude. Chill.
Your lack of understanding that dramatically lowering a risk is worthwhile even if the risk does not go to zero is likewise illuminating. Remarkable how your type loves nothing more than to talk about how upsetting it is for other people to act like they're more knowledgeable than them and then immediately demonstrate their failure to grasp middle-school level math concepts. Keep it up, I'm sure it will get people to respect you one day.
Glad one of us knows all about vaccination risk.
> I thought that this article [The Argument] about the reality of sex differences in personality was very sensible and balanced.
Isn't the main point in the article discussed and critiqued by Scott Alexander in part 1 of this old article : https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/ ?
No. The two articles are only related insofar as both are about sex differences in personality.
Scott is criticizing a specific motte-and-bailey argument, where someone rebuts the claim that "men are more aggressive than women" by citing that "most gender differences are small", even though one of the not-small differences is in aggression.
The Asterisk article rebuts claims about specific gender differences by citing research on those specific differences. It does not rely only on the claim that most differences are small:
"[Dimensionality] was also true of a construct labeled “moral orientation,” which assessed adherence to “justice” (“the difference between right and wrong”) and “care” items (concepts like “intimate relationships” and “caring for others”) — the exact types of attitudes that, according to Andrews, have been most shifted by “feminization."
The Argument's article mentions a study which concludes that 'For about 80% of the effect sizes, gender differences were either weak or nonexistent', which looks an awful lot like the study Scott is discussing in his old post.
You're right the point about 'taxons'/dimensionality is also important in the article... but like... I don't know if I misunderstand how they use the concept, but it seems completely irrelevant to what people mean what they talk about genre differences.
Here is from the actual research paper :
"The statement that men are more aggressive than women, for example, implicitly assumes that there is one group of people who are high in aggression (men) and another group of people who are low in aggression (women). This assumption treats an observed mean difference between men and women as a special kind of category called a taxon."
Hum, no ? Very few people are saying anything about taxon, or asserting that no woman has ever been more aggressive than any man. What most people are saying is that there is in fact a noticeable and important mean difference in aggressivity... which this research paper just casually confirmed.
So my impression is that the all discussion about taxons/dimensionality is just some big misdirection : 'People are saying that there is no overlap at all between measured male and female aggressivity, and we're proving them wrong'. Then they use the fact that there is *some* overlap to argue that there is no *difference*, which are two very different things.
The Argument article is *not* making the argument that there is no difference between male and female aggressiveness. You need to stop blindly pattern-matching to claims made by unrelated third parties.
The research paper is making a dubious interpretation of the phrasing, sure, but it's a semantics dispute and not particularly relevant.
They were a little too taxon-y themselves, I thought, from reading it. I preferred the articles where they calculate the difference over the spread (difference in means divided by standard deviations for math people) and give numbers to it. It's quite variable for different things.
I feel like a big problem is in most heterosexual mating you tend to accentuate the differences to be attractive, so if men have a 50% higher alcohol tolerance than women they will turn drinking each other under the table into a macho thing.
The accentuation effect seems plausible, but I have no trouble thinking of counter-examples, so I'm not sure how much it matters compared to other factors.
Gosh, I wish I knew.
I'm a little biased in that I spent a lot of time believing the blank slate and some early version of the toxic masculinity thesis (this was the 90s so they weren't calling it that), and when I started reading PUA and redpill stuff my luck improved somewhat. But it's possible other people had the exact opposite trajectoy.
I always said EA people are never cynical enough. Of course they're not collecting the data you'd need to prove they're killing people! It's not darkly ironic, it's standard procedure.