felis-parenthesis
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User ID: 660
felis-parenthesis
3mo ago
The dark meaning of mercy for the villain is the same as the dark meaning of opposition to the death penalty. Brutal thugs are not executed, but given long prison terms. Warehoused. Saved for later. This reserve army of brutal thugs is a valuable resource for avant-garde revolutionaries. Think 1917 Russian revolution. Its was a close run thing with a brutal civil war. Typically the avant-garde don't have the numbers. They may win power, but not have the numbers to hold on to it. They need to put boots on the necks of counter-revolutionaries. Since their tests for counter-revolutionariness have too many false negatives, they have to go large and put boots on the necks of the general population. Where do they find the feet to fill the boots? They release brutal thugs from prison to provide the muscle for the NKVD, KGB, Stasi, etc.
It is a very dangerous game. The avant-garde revolutionaries need to retain control of their brutal thugs. The thugs need to be kept divided. If some get ideas above their station, others are sent to kill them. But the Russian revolution and the French revolution both ate themselves. One faction within the revolutionary avant-garde sends their tame thugs to kill a rival faction within the avant-garde. The death toll rises and Stalin or Napoleon comes out on top.
I'm unclear on the causal connections here. Perhaps opposition to the death penalty is all high minded mercy. When the revolution comes, it is an unfortunate accident that the revolutionaries are gifted a reserve army of brutal thugs to help them consolidate their power. Or perhaps there are some strategic thinkers covertly funding the merciful people naturally inclined to oppose the death penalty. The money boosts the opposition to the death penalty, enough for mercy to defeat prudence.
It is not just domestic revolutionaries that one has to worry about. When the USSR took over Eastern Europe at the end of WWII, releasing brutal thugs from prison, to provide the muscle for the secret police, was one of the techniques used to impose the new communist governments.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
The sociological interest lies in watching people fail to join the dots.
The airplane safety card has a section on depressurization and the oxygen masks dropping down. "Put your own mask on first."
The danger being guarded against is that the parent takes too long trying to fit the mask on their frightened child and the parent passes out themselves. But how could that happen? Surely the parent soon suffers respiratory distress that forces them to fit their own mask before resuming helping their child? No. Hypoxia doesn't work like that. It is the carbon dioxide that makes you want to breath and the parent is breathing that out just fine. You can pass out from hypoxia with very little warning. I think this is now widely know, mostly due to the warning on the airplane safety card. The warning retains its place on the terse card because they want every-one to know.
There are other routes to this knowledge. Starving My Brain of Oxygen…For Safety?!? is two minute video on pilot training
Without proper training, pilots may not recognize the symptoms of hypoxia
More on the hypoxia training story I was looking for a much older video, which I think was an upload of a historical film of hypoxia training for pilots, with the low oxygen environment being some kind of Nissen hut. Hypoxia training isn't new.
There is a classic industrial accident involving a storage tank. Workman climbs down inside to do maintenance after the tank has been drained. But the residual chemicals have reacted with the oxygen, so he climbs down into a nitrogen atmosphere and dies. His safety buddy sees that he has passed out and, forgetting his training, climbs inside to do a heroic rescue. He also dies. Do you prefer Deaths from Environmental Hypoxia and Raised Carbon Dioxide or Confined Spaces Deadly Spaces: Preventing Confined Space Accidents? The YouTube video has a cute animation with a plumber with a mustache (Mario?) testing the air in the sewer. This also happens down on the farm Incident Investigation: Worker Loses Consciousness in Manure Spreader Tank | WorkSafeBC.
News coverage pretends to know none of this
In his Guardian interview, Smith said he feared that if Alabama carried out his execution it would put the new killing method of nitrogen hypoxia on the map.
The news coverage makes it seem that you can blunder into a confined space with little oxygen, gasp and struggle, and face the horrifying prospect that if you cannot escape in twenty-two minutes, then the lack of oxygen will kill you. And that this is a new hazard. I would feel more comfortable with agit-prop headlines screaming: Capitalism has been killing workers with nitrogen hypoxia for decades.
I'm feeling a little lost. Was the execution deliberately botched by pro-death-penalty activists trying to persuade the impalers and the crucifiers that the method is sufficiently cruel? Were the difficulties invented by anti-death-penalty activists trying to persuade us that the method is excessively cruel? I can tell that I'm being lied to, but not why or by whom or which details are false.
I can also see that the lying isn't being called out, perhaps not even noticed. The lies contradict well known stories about how the world works and how to avoid being killed by it, and yet people don't seem to join the dots and complain about the contradictions. That troubles me.
felis-parenthesis
6mo ago
The most scary damage is that universities have been training young people in how to do science. The replication crisis, while bad in itself, also shows that the universities have actually been training young people in how to do science wrong. How does that damage get undone?
felis-parenthesis
2yr ago
Responding to the blog post, Wayward Axolotl misses an important argument against free speech.
Consider how generational forgetting and the brevity of human life impose an upper limit on how high civilization can rise. Maybe there are five great truths to learn before we can build utopia. Learning the first takes up our youth. Learning the second takes as through middle age. By the time we have learned the third, we are old. We die and utopia is not built. Our children and grandchildren following behind run the same race against time and also lose.
But what kinds of knowledge are the great truths that I have in mind? Some of them are negative in nature. We learn "Don't do that!". For example, society responds to a crisis (a virus, a war, an outbreak of greed) by printing money. This leads to inflation. We combat inflation with price controls. The economic distortions accumulate, but we are trapped, needing the price controls to combat inflation. Eventually we learn vital lessons, against printing money and against price controls. We learn two vital lessons and vow not to repeat the mistakes. We (the individuals) keep our vows. We grow old and die without repeating the old mistakes. But our wisdom is interred with our bones.
Eventually our descendants face a crisis (a virus, a war, an outbreak of greed) and respond by printing money. The cycle repeats. The individuals kept their vows, but society did not, because society is made of people, who not only grow old and die, but...
The previous paragraphs trails off. Is the problem that old people fail to pass their wisdom down the generations? Is the problem that young people fail to learn? Why not both? We need to accept that we are not fixing the problem of generational forgetting any time soon.
Freedom of speech requires us to accept the eternal recurrence of bad ideas. No matter how many times mankind learns that printing money is a bad idea, the idea comes round again. Recurring bad ideas are often defeated. Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) was defeated this time around. But that dodges my initial point about generational forgetting limiting how high civilization can rise. Imagine that the first two of my five great truths are negative truths. We spend a long time learning to do this and to do that and finding out that we are wrong and the actual lesson is don't do this and don't do that. We suffer the opprobrium of historians who lament that "we" always knew those two "don't"s. Then the meta-historians berate the historians: if they had read their own books they would have noticed that people don't learn from history. The lessons of history are undoubtedly correct, we have learned them, forgotten them, and relearned them, many times.
When do we say: enough! At some point we have to censor recurring bad ideas. Life is too short to debate, argue, lose, and be proved right by time. Life is shorter than that. Life is too short to debate, argue,and win. We need to ruthlessly suppress certain potent, recurring bad ideas, so that we may have a chance to break the ceiling on civilization imposed by generational forgetting. The prize to be grasped is that we can skip learning the first two great truths, because they warn us against bad ideas, now suppressed. Then life is long enough to learn 3, 4, and 5 and build a Utopia for our grandchildren to enjoy.
felis-parenthesis
10mo ago
There are important conversations to be had about whether drug addiction is more of a choice or more of a disease.
The situation is darker and bleaker than that because of the third option: social contagion.
In Scotland, drug overdose deaths have soared to over a thousand a year in a country/(region of the UK) of merely five million. There is a big concentration of deaths in Dundee. The dynamics are rather like a contagious disease. How does social contagion mimic the in-person spread of an infection disease in the internet age? Junkies in Dundee are not going to Glasgow to buy their drugs; it is friend of a friend stuff with-in Dundee. The need to pass physical drugs from hand to hand creates geographically local dynamics.
But I'm old. I'm already familiar with the heroin cycle. Heroin is really cool. The fluffy cloud happiness of the high. The don't-give-a-fuck charisma of the users. The bodies piling up. And piling up. The rising part of the heroin cycle doesn't last. You don't introduce any-one younger to heroin use after your own funeral. And the occasion itself puts a damper on the whole scene. Soon heroin gains the evil reputation that recreational use deserves. "Nobody" uses any more. But every year, Mr Nobody grows a year older. Eventually the young people, who won't touch the stuff because they saw what it did to those ten years their senior, are no longer young enough to be at risk of starting. Those young enough to start, look to those a little older and see neither use nor warning signs. Some of them work out for themselves that heroin is fun. They tell their friends. The cycle closes and heroin in cool again.
I came of age during a low point of the heroin cycle, so I never tried it. But the micro-foundations of the cycle were evident in parallel matters. Things spread by word of mouth and from hand to hand. Friends warn against some things and endorse other things.
He was 35. Which brings my comment to the edge of the abyss. Back when needle sharing made Glasgow the AIDS capital of Europe, the prognosis for a heroin addicted was to become addicted around 20. Use for ten years. 50% die. 50% hit rock bottom (or just age out) and quit. 35 is old for an addict. Now that AIDS is treatable, the prognosis is probably better. Now that fentanyl is on the scene the prognosis is probably worse. I'm not keeping up with the statistics and don't know how it balances out. When some-one dies of drug addiction, we bury an "innocent victim". His "friends" in the drug scene play the role of his personal angels of death. And walking my comment over the edge of the abyss: did he take his curse to the grave with him, or did he manage to pass it on before he died?
I suspect that there is a missing demographic on the Motte: married with children. They are too busy to comment here. But I'm guessing that they want the junkies gone. They want the junkies gone before their children grow up and reach the age to be at risk. They don't want that to coincide with a high point of the heroin cycle. The stakes are much higher than a friend having plumbing gear stolen out of his truck.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
Furry fandom is benign. If your children get involved in furry fandom, the worst that can happen is that they get mixed up in inverting Laplace Transforms. Yes, there is Yiff, and Bad Dragon, but humans are obsessed with sex; human social life is equally obsessed with sex outside of furry fandom. Keeping them out of the fandom provides zero protection.
One example of the fandom keeping it sane is Fox Dad with its gentle self-mockery reminding everyfur not to take it too far. And notice that fursuits are removable. What frightens parents about transgenderism is that it encourages changes that are permanent. Or take a moment (or an hour and a half) to enjoy the Anthrocon 2023 fursuit parade which is taking place inside the convention center. I'm tempted to argue that there is no backlash because the fursuits are so cute, but I'm missing the point. It is inside the convention center not in the street! The normies are not going to reject something that they never see. Furry fandom doesn't have a toaster fucker problem because it is really just Beatrix Potter and Peter Rabbit.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
The NSDAP was not radically socially conservative in its treatment of gender or sex.
Here is a link https://counter-currents.com/2014/06/heimat/ that discusses Hermann Sudermann's play Madga, and the film made from it. The author claims that the popularity of the film clues us in to what the National Socialist ideology really thought about sexual morality. The article goes into great detail in describing the film. The film is anti-bourgeois propaganda that paints the sexual morality of the time, (play:1893, film:1938) as both rigid and hypocritical; the hero of the piece is the single mother! So the NSDAP is very much not socially conservative.
The author of the 2014 Counter Currents article, Derek Hawthorne, wrote a long and nuanced piece, digging into the weirdness of German culture back then. It is a long time since I read it, and I haven't time to reread it properly to tonight, but it made a big impression on me. The hot take that has stuck with me for nine years goes like this:
There are two sisters. One well behaved sister who conforms. The other sister has a wild side and ends up a single mother. Due to the messed up social conventions of the day, the mediocre, well behaved sister needs her father or other relative to come up with a lot of money for a dowry. Due to the power of the playwrights pen, becoming a single mother make you special and turns you into an opera diva who earns a lot of money and is able to swoop in and save the day by paying her sisters dowry.
A social realist play written for 1893 would have things work out OK/mediocre for the conformist sister and a bit of a disaster for the wild sister because of the social reaction against her getting pregnant outside of marriage. If the playwright wanted to argue for social change, the argument would be the cruelty of the system towards the wild sister. Sudermann's play cheer leads for sexual liberation with a crude propaganda technique: make things work out extra well for the single mother, just because playwrights are writing fiction and can do that. The excellent outcome tends to legitimize single motherhood in the eyes of audience. But it makes no causal connection; it is just crude propaganda.
Back when I first read the article in Counter Currents I still thought that right wing was a single thing, with a core creed. And before the 1960's that creed would obviously include no sex before marriage. Strong families, children need fathers, each child needs their own biological father, not mummies current boyfriend. The social conservative thing. So I'm reading on with wide-eyed astonishment. When do the NAZI's realize that the play is degenerate art? When do we get the theatrical equivalent of the Röhm-Putsch and the banning of Sudermann's Madga? Never happens.
I already knew that the NSDAP was a little bit pagan in spirit. You can see that in the pictures from the time of women athletes in their skimpy attire. https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=third+reich+women+athletes&qpvt=third+reich+women+athletes&form=IGRE&first=1
I'm trying to update my views. Is right wing a pagan, lusty, fertile creed, accepting of female promiscuity? Is it a Catholic, keep sex in the marriage bed, creed? Is it it a pagan, lusty, honor creed, with female promiscuity leading to lethal violence? Mostly I've stopped believing that "right wing" is an actual thing.
felis-parenthesis
10d ago
I see a parallel fault line within socialism, with Syndicalism in conflict with Central Planning. For me, this goes back to the 1973 miners' strike in the UK. The mines were owned by the National Coal Board(NCB), a branch of the government. Much of the coal was sold to the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB), another branch of the government. The basic idea of the strike was to raise electricity prices (by government fiat) to get the money for higher coal prices to get the money to pay the miners higher wages. Or just subsidise the NCB out of general taxation. That was the Trades Union perspective, but the Socialist Planning perspective was that the British coal fields were pretty much worked out. Paying high wages for the horrible job of going under the North Sea to mine small amounts of coal from narrow, wet, fractured seams was a bad plan. Much better was to send the miners to work in factories above ground manufacturing things and stuff to trade for coal from places with more favourable geology.
Basically the National Union of Mine Workers was butting heads with the planners in the socialist part of the British economy and seeking rents based on their ability to crash the economy by coming out on strike.
In a capitalist economy, with fragmented private ownership of the means of production, and lacking national trades unions, this specific kind of rent seeking works badly. The employees at one company come out on strike. They win an excessive pay rise. Their employer starts losing money, and goes bankrupt. The workers lose their well paid jobs. Whoops! Both capitalism and socialism suffer from rent seeking and capitalism has some internal defences to it. Capitalists are entitled to say that rent seeking is not narrowly specific to capitalism; they don't have to own it.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
The Anasazi question reminds me that adults forget what it is like to be young and are oblivious to the social constructs of middle age; there are cases to be made for B and C and a nit to be picked about D.
B The author depicts the Anasazi as doing fine weaving. Both by using the word, in the case of sashes woven from hair, and implying it in the case of basket, with a mesh without holes. fine is more work than coarse. Doing all that work will keep them busy. The child is probably dragged round the supermarket on shopping trips. Meat comes from the chill cabinet. Perhaps neighbors go hunting, but the child is discouraged from asking to go too, because guns are scary and dangerous. Hunting sounds forbidden and dangerous; certainly exciting. Hunting long ago, with a bow or s spear sounds harder and more dangerous. harder speaks to the Anasazi leading busy lives. You hunt, you catch nothing (you cannot just shoot your prey) so you hunt again the following day. You are kept busier than people today who can guarantee to get the whole weeks shopping with one car trip to the supermarket. dangerous might stand alone to the adult mind, but a child will pick up the message that the Anasazi lead exciting lives. B is a contender.
C "baskets woven tightly enough to hold water." is a strange claim. The child might have been paying attention when history covered the Spanish Armada. Sir Francis Drake Singed the King of Spains beard. One historian emphasizes burning stocks of seasoned timber, needed for wet cooperage. Wet cooperage is when a cooper makes a barrel so well that it is suitable for storing water. That is much harder than dry cooperage and needs seasoned timber. Burn that and there are no new barrels for storing water on board ship. No barrels, no Armada. What the attentive child knows is that holding water is a major pain under earlier, lo-tech conditions of life. The author is depicting the life of the Anasazi as difficult in two senses. First they do impressive feats of basket weaving. That is technically difficult. Second, they are likely forced to do this by a lack of technology (though what has gone wrong with their pots? Why aren't they holding water in pots? Unsuitable clay? Lack of glazes?). We would ordinarily summarize the problems posed by lack of basic technology by saying that life was difficult.
The author talks of beautiful pottery and turquoise jewelry. The thirteen year old boy answering the question knows just what the author is talking about. It is the fine china that lives in the cabinet, and the Meissen figurines, with their boring pastel colors. The limbs are not articulated, eliminating any play value, and you are not allowed to play with them anyway because of their impractical fragility. Turquoise jewelry is stupid, girly crap. The author is implying that the Anasazi lead lives that are boring as fuck. dreary is one of the polite adult words for this, difficult and dreary. C is a contender.
D Since the author uses the word peacefully, the use of the word peaceful immediately makes D a strong contender. The problem lies with the word productive having two conflicting meanings. A school pupils perhaps learns the school room notion of productivity from history lessons on Luddites and weavers. Power looms made weavers more productive. A lot more productive. It made those who wore clothes better off by bringing down the price of cloth. That is a lot of people and a big price fall, so a huge gain overall. On the other hand, weavers who expected to be better off, because prosperity comes from productivity, were shocked to find the surplus of cloth and the resulting price falls more than offset the gain in the amount of cloth produced. productive is an output measure, not an input measure. productivity is a specific measure of output: output per hour of labor.
You are productive when you pour a sack of polyethylene pellets into the hopper of your injection molding machine and produce a thousand water bottles an hour. You are unproductive when you spend a week or two weaving a basket so tightly that it just about holds water.
The alternative meaning of productive lies at the intersection of pastoral romance and the Protestant work ethic. You are unproductive in the taverna, drinking Ouzo and playing Back Gammon. You are productive when you return to your farm and tend your olive grove. It is not about the fertility of the grove or the price of olives. You are unproductive when you play a video game; you are productive when you write the program for a video game (but why would any-one buy a video game if playing it is disparaged as unproductive?)
Since I'm middle aged and middle class I'm acculturated to school as a center of pointless busywork that keeps children off the streets. The devil finds work for idle hands, and we use the word productive to praise keeping those hands busy with the right kind of pointless busy work (such as making beautiful pottery that doesn't hold water, and turquoise jewelry). It contrasts with the word unproductive which disparages the forms of pointless activity preferred by younger persons or those of lower social class.
Answer D is checking that the children are picking up the correct meaning of productive. Are they well on their way to being middle aged and middle class? We wouldn't want them saying that the Anasazi are "unproductive and peaceful". We prefer them to have a fashionable sense of "Ted Kaczynski"-lite, and ignore the crassly industrial notion of productive.
I'm in a pickle. I don't know what my comment implies. On first reading I'm defending the intelligence of Illinois 8th graders. They are not stupid, the question is bad. On second reading I'm trashing a question, chosen by a clever person, to illustrate a point. That is to say, chosen by a person who is clever compared to other people. But the question is still trash, so even "clever" people are smug and stupid and we as a species are ultra-doomed :-(
felis-parenthesis
5mo ago
But I see no reason that an ideological system involving uniting the elites to rule over the rest is a problem
My theory of how society works is that it depends on a competent ruling elite, but there are problems of ossification and egalitarianism, with ossification leading to the rise of egalitarianism. I'm going to make up illustrative numbers. The ruling elite is 10% of the population. Elites don't breed true, but the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Half the next generation of ruling elite are the children of the current ruling elite. So that is 5% accounted for. Where do the other 5% come from?
One in eighteen of the children of hoi polloi is talented. 1/18 of 90% = 5%. They are the scholarship boys, talent spotted, educated in grammar schools and inducted into the ruling elite.
My theory of how society works generates two opposing theories of how society fails. First ossification or the protection of the failson. Half the children of the ruling elite are downwardly mobile. As time passes the elite fail to change the heritability of the genetics, but they do change society to save their failchildren from social descent. The second generation of elite are 5% true elite, 5% ordinary, while the scholarship boys are locked out of upward mobility. The third generation of elite are 2.7% true elite 7.2% ordinary. (I'm assuming that the child of a failson has the usual 1/18 chance of being talented). Degeneration continues 1.8% elite, 8.2% ordinary; 1.35% elite, 8.65% ordinary. The asymptote is that the ossified elite regress to the mean and end up looking like the original society. The original society was 10% elite, 90% ordinary. Thus the end state of the ossified elite is 1% true elite 9% ordinary. Their badly governed society also has its hoi polloi. That 90% of the population spilts 9% true elite talent, locked out by the loss of social mobility and 81% ordinary. This either ends in revolution as the 9% fight for their place in society, or in collapse, because 1% true elite isn't enough talent to keep society functioning.
Second, egalitarianism. Meritocracy gets rejected. I like the way that @cjet79 puts it here "A job is work to be done" versus "A job is a ceremonial position". Jobs get redistributed to ensure fairness, ending the elites' lock on the best jobs. The 10% of prestige jobs get filled, effectively at random. 1% true elite, 9% ordinary people. There are too few talented people in the top jobs leading to collapse. It could be worse. Maybe, post-revolution the children of the previous elite are locked out of the top jobs. Of the 10% filling the top jobs, only 1 in 18 is talented = 0.55%. That is less than the 1% of a completely ossified society. Dysfunction and collapse come quickly.
The two tendencies, ossification and egalitarianism play off each other. In a partially ossified society, hoi polloi look at the elite, and compare the official story with what they see. Officially a job is work to be done and the 10% top jobs are filled on merit. But many of the elite are ordinary, and their jobs are ceremonial (except that sometimes a failson has a real job that he lacks the skill for, which is even worse). As the generations turn and ossification gets worse, every-one can see that many top jobs are ceremonial. Ordinary people resent that their children are largely locked out of these top jobs. Meritocracy is seen to be a sham for two reasons. Society is functioning poorly (due too little genuine talent in the ossified elite) which undermines the official position that jobs are given to the best candidates. Some jobs are all to obviously ceremonial and merit doesn't even apply. This boosts belief in egalitarianism until DEI seems reasonable.
felis-parenthesis
5mo ago
uranium only has around 100 years of proven reserves,
That is a big part of your answer right there. There is an important distinction between reserves and resources.
Reserves are uranium ore that it is profitable to mine and process at current market prices with today's technology. Some reserves are being mined as I type; they are really there, with absolute certainty. Other reserves as less certain. One might want to drill a shaft and get some samples to check. Proven reserves meet a threshold for certainty set down by the financial regulators. Thinking of investing in a mining company? Reading about the proven reserves that they own? Proven is a term of art for investment grade certainty.
Resources are a guess about the amount of uranium that is actually there. In some sense. It needs to be possible to mine it and refine it, but it doesn't have to be profitable today. The guess work can include some guesses about technological advances in extracting Uranium.
It is the same for natural resources generally. The case of oil is notorious. Yes, back in 1920 we only have 30 years of oil reserves. (I've not checked the history, but it is well know that we have many times run off the end of oil reserves) Prospecting for oil is expensive. If an oil company wants to borrow money from a bank to build an oil refinery, the bankers will ask: will the oil run out. If the oil company only has 25 years of reserves on its books, it may be worthwhile prospecting for more. The bankers will take a risk, but for a price. How does the cost of prospecting compare with the price of risk? Bankers rarely look more than 30 years ahead. If the oil company has thirty years of reserves, paying prospectors to find more, and increasing that to 35 years, will not get the oil company a cheaper loan. It is not worth the money.
We only have thirty years of reserves because it is not worth looking for more, so we don't bother. Notice that the results of prospecting include discovering bodies of ore that fall a little short of what it is currently worth extracting. They count towards the resource. But not towards the reserve. However, prices can rise. If the electricity price rises, prices for oil and uranium to fuel power stations are likely pulled up. Now some of the resource becomes reserves. It is routine for reserves to fluctuate due to price changes elsewhere in the economy, independent of consumption and discovery.
You can build an argument for collapse around the idea that there are only 100 years of uranium resources. The logic of the argument is (maybe) valid, but since the premise is false the conclusion does not follow.
You can build an argument for collapse around the idea that there are only 100 years of proven reserves of uranium. Now the premise true, but the logic of the argument is invalid, and the conclusion still doesn't follow.
The equivocation between reserves and resources has been going on all my life, and I find most discussions of social collapse tainted by this.
felis-parenthesis
7mo ago
In the particular case of fluoridating water, the ruling elite had a good story. Scientists knew that naturally occurring levels of fluoride varied from place to place. Did it matter? They did the epidemiology thing and decided that less than one part per million made tooth decay noticeably worse. More than four parts per million caused dental fluorosis, but nothing else showed up strongly with natural levels of fluoridation. So topping up fluoride to bring low fluoride water up to one part per million seemed super safe; lots of people were already living with 1ppm. And had been for their entire lives. It was a rare case where we have data (albeit epidemiological) on all cause mortality, due to pre-existing "natural experiments".
... without facing widespread riots or resistance is just insane ...
Your confusion is the result of a garbled account of events. That is bad in itself, but I want to make the case that it is important to say that "topping up" and "adding" are different and that the claim that we "add" fluoride to the water supply is a lie.
First I will offer paradigms of "topping up" and "adding" and then make my case that things can go horribly wrong if we tolerate people confusing them.
Topping up Measure the level. If it comes in at 0.5 ppm, add enough to increase the level by 0.5 ppm. Measure again. If it is in the range 0.9 to 1.1 ppm declare victory. If outside that range, find out why, and adjust appropriately.
Adding Don't bother measuring, or if some-else has measured, just ignore it. Add enough to increase the level by 1 ppm. Continue to fail at measuring and be smug that the level is at least 1 ppm because our addition guarantees that out-come.
Now picture a town debating water fluoridation. Why? Well, Mr Bad Guy hopes to get kick backs from the contracts for fluoridation equipment and chemicals. He persuades his fellow citizens to top up fluoride levels at public expense. They vote for it. Mr Bad Guy sets it in motion. The measured natural level turns out to be 1.3 ppm. There is nothing to be done. No contracts, no kick backs. Mr Bad Guy looks around and notices that nobody is watching. He arranges contracts for equipment and chemicals to add enough fluoride to increase the levels by 1 ppm. He pockets his bribe money. Fluoride levels increase to 2.3 ppm. Mr Bad Guy feels safe. No-one will notice 2.3 ppm and if he falls under suspicion for corruption, he can always say that he misunderstood.
Later Dr Nerd measures the fluoride and checks the records of the old measurements. Dr Nerd is unhappy about the waste of public money, or about the dangers of fluoride, take your pick. He tries to "blow the whistle". But what language does he speak? If he uses the vernacular he complains that we are adding fluoride to the water supply and we shouldn't be doing that, we should instead be adding fluoride to the water supply [sic]. Nobody understands his point. So he switches to Nerd-speak and complains that we are adding fluoride to the water supply when we should be topping up; very different. Topping up is free! But the towns-folk don't speak Nerd-speak, so Dr Nerd still fails to make himself understood.
Talking about topping up fluoride levels using the word adding is bad. It covers up corruption and is why we cannot have nice things.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
Solving rape by teaching men not to rape has the same kind of energy as solving inflation by teaching men not to print money. You actually need to target rapists and central bankers.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
Do you make the same commitment that you will .... absolutely accept the result of this election?
I've added emphasis to a question that I see as a disgusting example of linguistic trickery. I don't know the name for this trick, I'll provisionally call it Schrodinger's Context.
The question is being asked ahead of the election. How absolute is absolute? What if Dominion program their machines to ignore Republican votes and the Democrats win with 100% of the votes counted? Clearly there has to be some limit, at which one notices that the vote is rigged and one rejects the result. So absolute isn't to be interpreted in the most literal way possible; there is an implicit context and that context contains limits on the extent of electoral anomalies the the candidate is expected to tolerate.
The context is not spelled out. It is just understood that the election will be basically honest. But, if after the vote, some amount X of fraud gets discovered, that is like Schrodinger opening the box and discovering that the context was really about accepting the result if there is ≤ X amount of fraud.
I think the traditional context goes like this:
Politicians get to campaign hyperbolically. They can rile their base by saying that the Chinese are building car factories in Mexico and these cars will flood the American car market causing job loses among American auto-workers. Politicians are allowed to describe the these jobs loses as a bloodbath as if the Mexicans themselves will flood across the border, armed with machetes, and hack the American auto-workers to death in a literal bloodbath. No, it is just job loses, no actual blood spilled, but the hyperbolic rhetoric is allowed. "Every-one" knows not to take it literally.
"Every-one". There is a problem here. There is always some-one who gets over excited and attempts electoral fraud, thinking that they are the good guy, because they are averting a literal blood bath. Hyperbolic rhetoric is permitted, and the cost of this is that some people are not quite right in the head and break the rules on counting the votes because the hyperbole wound them up to the point of madness.
So the traditional context has two more parts. First, a few nutters attempting electoral fraud doesn't invalidate an election. It can be literally true that some Democrats cheated, and yet perfectly reasonable that Donald Trump concede the election. Second, there is a gentleman's agreement that rival politicians police their own side and try to prevent electoral fraud in their own cause. If a Democrat cheats, fellow Democrats call them out, and a Democrat Attorney General prosecutes. That is the quid pro quo for Trump conceding despite a small amount of fraud.
That is my understanding of the traditional context. I think current problems are due to the gentlemen's agreement breaking down. If a few nutters are committing electoral fraud, well, smirk Donald Trump should still concede, without asking "how much?" and without expecting Democrats to police their own side.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
The COVID lockdowns in the UK point to a darker problem with expertise. Life is short, people grow old and die; it takes about 70 years. Suppose that being locked down causes a 10% reduction in quality of life (I'd prefer to say 50%, but I'll err on too low because I want to focus on a different controversy). Government locks down 70 million people for a year, which costs 7 million Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs). Actual deaths, if spread across the age range, cost 35 QALY's each. The lock down needs to be saving 200 thousand lives to break even. But deaths from COVID were concentrated among the frail elderly. Say 7 QALY's each. To break even the lock down needed to save the lives of one million frail old people. It is not remotely plausible that it did so.
The lockdowns were a national disaster on the scale of 200 thousand dead. Compare that to American loses in Vietnam at 50 thousand. The lockdowns were a huge national disaster.
But how did it happen? The experts were socialized into an "identified cause" model of morbidity. If something specific kills you, that counts. If something makes you a year older, that counts zero. Since zero times anything is still zero, it doesn't matter how many people are affected. Basically expertise here was so narrow in scope that the fact that people grow old and die lay outside of its scope and was neglected.
The darker problem is that growing old and dying is basic to the human condition. The experts let themselves be socialized into collective insanity. I don't see any way around this. Experts are dangerous in much the same way that fire is dangerous. Essential despite being dangerous. You have to be able to spot that experts have gone mad and flat out reject what they say.
felis-parenthesis
2mo ago
Have I misunderstood the over-turning of Roe-versus-Wade? I thought that it was over-turned on the basis that abortion was a matter for States, not the Federal Government. So a Federal abortion ban would be struck down by the Supreme Court; no point voting for one.
felis-parenthesis
6mo ago
One idea of how it could work is that the points system only gives points to construction workers. Then house prices rise at first, when every-one turns up, but they get jobs building houses. Eventually, having imported too many construction workers, builders' wages fall, and construction gets cheaper. House prices fall, or houses get larger :-)
That isn't going to work for immigration from India to Canada. Even if the construction workers are genuinely qualified, the Indian construction workers know how to build houses to withstand monsoon rains, but have no clue about the high level of insulation needed to stay warm in the Canadian winter.
felis-parenthesis
11mo ago
Your argument, about the implied gender of foreign names, builds the case for traditional pronouns, not preferred pronouns.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
I had a very negative reaction to this article. I think it reads much better with the following set up to contextualize it.
Start by contemplating the power of bench top science and theory. The partnership of bench top science and theory has some spectacular successes to its credit. You can experiment with Newtonian mechanics in your laboratory, verifying the basic laws. Then you get a top mathematician (Euler) to work out what those laws imply for gyroscopes. Later engineers build a gyrocompass for a submarine. Will this really work? Underwater? A thousand miles from the laboratory? Yes!
Or think of James Clerk-Maxwell, taking the bench top science of Ampere and Faraday and coming up with Maxwell's equations. The equations predict electromagnetic radiation. Hertz does the experiments in his laboratory and finds them; a great triumph for theory. Later Marconi takes this out into the real world. Theory shows that electromagnetic radiation goes in straight lines; Marconi's attempts at radio communication beyond the curve of the earth are not going to work. And sure enough they fail. Wut! Marconi actually succeeds! But rather than concede that there are problems getting out of the laboratory and into the real world, we discover the ionosphere and chalk it up as another spectacular success for the partnership of bench top science and theory.
Move on to contemplating the contrasting situation in medicine. The human body is too complicated for the human mind to comprehend. Basing medicine on theory works badly for the patient, no matter how much money it brings in for the doctor. This has lead to evidence based medicine. Never trust the combination of lab bench chemistry and theory. Always do a randomised controlled trial to check that medicines really work. Theory said that vitamin E was an anti-oxidant and would reduce oxidative stress and prevent cancer. Epidemiology confirmed this. Randomised controlled trials refuted it. Examples are so numerous that you can fill a book.
Returning to climate science, we must ask whether it is like gyroscopes or like Vitamin-E/Vioxx/vertebroplasty. Doing bench top science with an infrared spectroscope and a sample of Carbon Dioxide yields uncontroversial results. But does it have implications for the weather?
I've picked up the impression that every-one agrees on the importance of feedback loops. If you believed that climate science was a like a gyroscope, you would compute warming on the basis of the infrared characteristics of Carbon Dioxide and conclude that we are in for some warming, but not enough to constitute a crisis. No-one believes that climate science is like a gyroscope. Some think that warmer air means more water vapor which means more warming and more clouds and more clouds mean mumble. Subtle feedback in the atmosphere is putting us on a course for disaster. Others disagree.
The article emphasizes one particular disagreement. Scientists attempt empirical confirmation of the theory, but they mess it up. All the empirical work is heavily contaminated by theory. It cannot refute the theory because it assumes the theory.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
This meme raises the question succinctly. The bald bipeds beasts that bestride the Earth in 2024 are really into lying, scheming, manipulating, and cheating.
They are clever, and have won great victories in the competition of Man against Nature. They are clever, and have created terrible weapons in the competition of Man against Man.
The rationalist project is that science and reason get used to build utopia. Are we actually headed towards global thermonuclear war, or towards a Lebanese style multicultural kakistocracy? The rationalist project has failed because it refused to engage with human greed, selfishness, and delusion.
The discussion moves on to the theory of second best. What is possible within the limits of human nature? If space aliens turn up and their space ship is an ant heap with monoclonal genetics, they will diagnose our problems easily enough. The scientist who values truth and refuses to sell out, is a nerd and doesn't get the girl. The scientist who monetizes "truth" and sells it to the richest corporation marries and has a mistress and propagates his anti-science-and-reason genes into the next generation. That is the diagnosis, but it offers no treatment.
One idea is bringing up children to believe in God. A God who commands scrupulous honesty and always is watching, even when all humans present are in on the scam and bought or compromised.
That probably gives the interstellar ants a good laugh. Humans have such a complicated relationship with self-awareness. What happens when the children brought up to believe in God work out that God is a pro-social myth? Some of them retain the honesty in worldly affairs that they were brought up with, and work to promote and preserve the pro-social myth. This involves an attitude adjustment from telling the truth because God commands it, to participating in the lie and the cover-up because society depends on the prosocial myth. But that is rare. Most fall into these two camps. Those who blurt out the truth in front of the children, as though the God they no longer believe in was watching, ready to punish them for telling the lie that He exists. Those who revert to instinct and seek reproductive success by lying, scheming, manipulating, and cheating, while also believing that they are choosing a variety of behaviours for themselves, not simply following their genetic programming.
Do you have an alternative idea? The rationalist project implicitly assumes that man was created by God with a divinely granted capacity for good. The rationalist project implicitly denies that man is an evolved creature, whose self-defeating duplicity is enforced and created by human genetics. The rationalist project, in as much as it ignores the true horror of being an evolved creature, is just another high fantasy. What is there left to discuss?
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
Does this argument work the other way? If ODs had in fact dropped 50% the next day, would we likewise be asking if this was only a temporary effect, and entirely dire outcomes were still to be expected at some indeterminate future date?
I bite the bullet on this. I claim that America's experience with the 18th and 21st amendments is the template for how these kinds of things usually play out.
Its starts off with X fully legal and embedded in society, despite a vociferous minority pointing to the substantial harms that X causes. Eventually X is prohibited by law. The shop shelves are swept bare. The factories shut down. Xaholics get a brutal wake up call. Many quit X cold turkey. Some get medical help tapering. Perhaps some die of withdrawal or toxic substitutes. By the end of the first year prohibition is looking like a great success. Skeptics predicted a tidal wave of prosecutions for X-offences, but it doesn't materialize, because people cannot get X.
(Possession of alcohol was never illegal, just manufacture, sale, and transportation. Initially that was tactically shrewd. Ordinary people could see it coming, stock up, and then consume their private stocks, expecting others to do the hard work of campaigning for the 21st amendment. The day of the last bottle of wine was different in different households, weakening coordination against prohibition. In the long term that was perhaps the undoing of prohibition. Only the seller faced legal penalties, so the black market that developed was asymmetrical, with lots of undeterred buyers and a few sellers, well paid for their legal risk.)
Time passes and the initial success wears well. At least it seems to. Networks of friends are gradually forming. Brewing at home. Making a still. Getting hold of a bottle of wine to share with trusted friends over Sunday dinner. It is all metaphorically flying under radar. The Prohibitionists don't see that their victory is rotting. Now-a-days there would be drone smuggling, literally flying under radar :-)
Home brewing and piece meal smuggling are annoying for those who just want a drink. Money starts changing hands. The black market grows. Prohibitionists start to realize that alcohol is still for sale, but covertly and for a fancy price. Some are inclined to turn a blind eye. If it is too expensive for people to afford to become alcoholics, that mitigates the harms. Other prohibitionists resent the disobedience and insist on stronger penalties.
Full time employment in the black economy now splits into insiders and outsiders. Outsiders get rich on the high price of booze, but they sometimes get caught and go to jail. Insiders don't get as rich because they share their money with the police as bribes. It gets complicated. The bribe-taking police need to make a show of doing their jobs. The insiders resent the endless supply of outsiders in search of easy money, increasing the supply and lowering the profits. Fortunately they have the police on their side to enforce their monopoly of the alcohol supply. They tip off "their" policemen. It gets more complicated, with rival groups of insiders setting their own paid-for police on intruders on their turf who are also insiders, just bribing other policemen.
Meanwhile the smugglers are tackling the volume issue. The secret compartment has a limited volume V. The more potent your version of X, the more doses you can fit in V. In the 1920's that meant smuggling spirits rather than beer. Today that means smuggling fentanyl rather than heroin. Then there is the business of cutting drugs, adulterating them to increase the bulk after smuggling.
Eventually the situation is out of control. Every-one who wants X knows the secret handshakes and the special places. They get their hands on it. Some of it is adulterated and death rate is higher than before prohibition. The point I like to emphasize is that this takes twenty or thirty years. By the time the death rate comes back up and exceeds the old death rate from legal X, the world has changed.
The world has changed, but how much? You get one group of public health experts saying that prohibition has failed and must be repealed. Others saying that we must pivot to harm reduction. Still others say that the world has changed a lot and for the worse. Thank God that we have prohibition keeping a lid on the problems of X. If we repealed prohibition the death rate would soar still higher. Who is right?
My claim is that prohibition is a dangerous policy option because it may well fail, and that the American experiment with the prohibition alcohol was untypical in exactly one way: it proved possible to repeal it. You should expect that prohibition of X works well for the first five years. When thirty years have gone by and it has clearly failed, you will not be able to repeal it. Campaigners for prohibition will have happy memories of the first five years, and consider that short term success proves the eternal correctness of prohibition.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
You have only grasped half of the reason why open borders are bad. There are deeper problems with open borders. The way you frame it, with "bad guys" crossing the border, suggests that the problems are fixable. Just dial it down a bit and have a semi-open border, closed to "bad guys", porous to "good guys". But open borders is a path to catastrophe, even on a homogeneous clone world, with no races and just one culture.
I've made two lengthy attempts to explain the point, one as a modernized version of Malthusian Immiseration, the other in response to a discussion of Bryan Caplan's ideas.
Did I manage to distill the essence of the issue here? Lightly edited, it reads:
Think about the collapse of the Canadian Grand Banks cod fishery, and the survival of the cod fishery around Iceland. People are not very good at taking care of their natural resources. It is 50:50.
"Open borders" is the idea that if you screw up, you can move on. If the Canadian fishery collapses, Canadian fishermen can move to Iceland and carry on fishing. If the Icelandic fishery collapses, Icelandic fishermen can move to Canada and carry on fishing.
Once the idea of "open borders" gets into peoples heads it tilts the social dynamics towards collapse. We don't want "open borders", regardless of cultural issues. People either take care of their own lands, or when it comes time to move on, they find that there is nowhere left to go.
felis-parenthesis
1yr ago
It's a well-known property of correlation that it's not transitive in general.
See https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vfb5Seaaqzk5kzChb/when-is-correlation-transitive
thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, sometimes abbreviated to TTS
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