EverythingIsFine
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I know what you're here for. What's his bias? Politically I at least like to think of myself as a true moderate, maybe (in US context) slightly naturally right-leaning but currently politically left-leaning if I had to be more specific.
User ID: 1043
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
3mo ago
The reason I asked is because I feel that if the median Briton does agree, it makes it more important to properly distinguish between the two rather than lump all immigrants in a group. That means if the phrase "second-generation immigrant" is available, "recent immigrant" makes no sense to use, no matter if it's born from linguistic laziness or excessively biased language. At least here, because I know my limits and I don't actually know that much about the UK's overall relationship between culture/immigration/politics/etc, I'm definitely not trying to do any kind of persuasion in "the other direction" but rather just insist on precision of language where it makes sense. Ignoring the use of a relevant word and idea when most people would consider it important context only hurts the discussion. Frankly I don't really know how well or poorly integration goes in Britain, but it's worth noting that genetics still isn't the only plausible explanation. For example, it's possible that the British culture just sucks in the first place, or that it doesn't transmit well, or something like that. Again however if you put a gun to my head I don't know if I could quite express what British culture is, really.
I will concede that, on a meta level, I am more concerned with "precision of language" than the median person, of course :). I think it still makes sense here to insist on it. As an interesting aside, I think The Giver had it completely backwards -- rather than linguistic precision being a tool to hurt and restrict and direct thought, I think it actually helps communication when people say more precisely what they think and pay attention to the connotations words carry as well as being careful to select the word with the closest matching denotation.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
3mo ago
Thanks for bringing the receipts!
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
3mo ago
Do you think there is any meaningful difference between first and second generation immigrants from these countries, and do you think the median Briton would agree?
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
3mo ago
Seriously? People speaking up on media is directly proportional to outrage, not principles. That doesn’t mean you can conclude “I don’t see social media outrage, thus there must be no principles”. This is so obvious I’m confused why I have to say this out loud.
EverythingIsFine
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3mo ago
I had seen the phrase show up two times, maybe three, in the thread and it seemed a little too systemic for me not to mention it. It's all about the "context window", and yes it's true that LLMs are very sensitive to that (sometimes in a helpful, human way but not always) (and aside from of course the sometimes clumsy attempts at making the output PC). A fun example is I put your version of the question (which frankly I consider to be slightly more of a leading question due to the word "native" having strong connotations, but to some extent all LLM questions are leading, so what can you do) into chatbot arena. I got one answer that said not usually, but sometimes for individuals in "years and decades" maybe (and gave some context about the "Windrush generation" who came in the 50s and 60s), and a second answer that said it would probably be offensive, briefly mentioned it might be occasionally accurate, but then ended by saying that using the term would be a "microaggression". The first turned out to be a ChatGPT variant like you used, and the second was Gemini (lol). I still think my question phrasing gets more to the meat of the issue, but yeah, you can only get so far with LLMs. Asking "If we're having a conversation about immigration policy, and someone started talking about "recent" immigrants, what do you think would count as "recent"?" produced yet another answer that said usually 1-3 years and sometimes 5-10, and a second answer that basically said "bro that's actually super duper subjective, here's some things that might influence that". *shrugs*
I still think it's misleading. The news articles we're usually slinging around here usually employ the phrase to mean a few years at most. If "recent" introduces a significant misunderstanding, doesn't offer any advantages over the more generic "immigrant", and a better alternative "second-generation immigrant" exists, to me that's three strikes.
This is a little off topic, but along the lines of thought about how good arguments sometimes lose their power over time.... I actually do give good stock to the theory that CBT specifically as a psychiatric tool has lost a lot of its effectiveness because it's seeped into the water of the common understanding and provides almost a type of immunity to it.
EverythingIsFine
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3mo ago
But she's right, isn't she? That is her job: to look at a dispute, people make arguments, and she (and others) decide. To jump straight to the "deciding" step is illogical (that's what Sen. Blackburne was asking her to do, in effect, to jump right to an answer/decision by providing a rigid definition) and so I view her answer as fundamentally similar to Souter's. Souter basically said "I don't want to say one thing and then end up deciding another and so I'm going to keep my mind open" and Jackson basically said "I'm not going to say something because I don't need to" and the second is, I will grant you, obviously much less eloquent but they get at the same general idea? Can't you see the Souter motivation could equally apply to Jackson's answer even if she didn't explicitly say so? That's my view on it, at least.
If I had to point a finger of blame about the process, I've said this before but I feel the questions asked of potential nominees are in many cases insufficient and misdirected. I think there's a higher burden on the members of the committee and Senate to conduct a better hearing and would love to see that improve before putting the main burden on the "defendant" as it were. More job interview, less grandstanding. If we get that, I'd feel more comfortable taking the nominee to task for "bad" answers.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
3mo ago
I'd be willing to bet money that if you did a textual analysis of every use of the word "recent" as used by British people you'd find that easily 95% of the use of the word is used for lengths of time less than 10 years. Probably more. Challenge: can you even find a single example of the word being used, in a politics-adjacent way, to mean 20 years or more? I honestly don't think you can, not without breaking out the history books. The modern debate is one with the context of politics, not history. While I realize "history" is an extremely slippery term, there's a reason we don't really start to use it until the 20-30 year mark. The distinction? If I had to take a stab at it, I'd say "politics" is implicitly something you can do something about, and history is not (and history is also something you need a little distance from to gain greater benefits of hindsight as well as some extra objectivity). Although anecdotally that window seems to be narrowing (I've seen some "historical"-oriented analysis of events as recent as 15 years ago).
EverythingIsFine
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3mo ago
Location of birth mattering or not is, yes, a unique cultural concept that differs across time and place. The simple fact however is that the parents did not give birth, move back to Rwanda, raise their child there, and then bring him back to the UK right before the murders. Much of the conversation in this thread makes it sound like this is the case. No, AFAIK, he spent all 17 years of his life in the UK. That's 100% of his life, and also, a pretty substantial chunk of time. So if we're playing the blame game, we have to ask about UK culture at least to some degree. That's why I bring up assimilation. You can't just ignore it. Insofar as it makes sense, there's a reason that sometimes in for example a legal examination of a car accident, we sometimes go so far as to talk about "percent of blame" due to different parties. That's the broad idea I'm getting at here. He, himself, is not an immigrant in most meaningful senses of the word. He must be understood as a second-generation immigrant, a term which exists as its own, different "thing".
Please note I was fairly careful in my wording, and for good reason. I talk about counterfactuals as applied to individuals, because there's a big risk of bias interacting with numerical/scientific issues in latching on to the wrong thing. We can still have a conversation about counterfactuals, but they need to be grounded in larger, more visible, and more real effects, perhaps using statistics. To say nothing of the fact that making conclusions about large populations from the actions of one or a few child murderers is already a bit suspect. Again, we can have this conversation. Your last paragraph even starts one! But it requires nuance. And it requires at least some degree of rigor which I'm not seeing. A point you make quite clearly when you dismiss counterfactuals so easily without an understanding of why they are problematic in any sort of evidentiary or logically consistent sense.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
3mo ago
I realize I'm doubling down a little, but I feel it's justified. As an example, we can ask a LLM (here, Claude): "If I say "recent immigrant" what time-frame would people most expect that to mean?"
The term "recent immigrant" doesn't have a universally agreed-upon timeframe, but it generally refers to someone who has immigrated within the last few years. Most people would likely interpret "recent immigrant" to mean someone who has arrived in the country within approximately the last 1 to 5 years. However, the exact interpretation can vary depending on context:
In casual conversation, people might consider "recent" to mean within the last 1-3 years. For statistical or research purposes, "recent immigrant" might be defined more precisely, sometimes covering a period of up to 5 or even 10 years. In some government contexts or for certain programs, "recent immigrant" might have a specific legal definition, which could vary by country or purpose. The perception of "recent" can also depend on the speaker's own frame of reference or the immigration patterns in a particular area.
We're probably within the realm of "casual conversation" ranging to "research purposes" so lo and behold, exactly what I said. In politics, "recent" usually means at most the recent election which even in the UK is only at most 5 or 6 years in the past. Even a follow-up question to Claude about the UK turns up that some media would use the word to mean a decade, at most. I'm glad you can acknowledge that the word might not make sense but the fact you used it in the first place is, if not an indication of outright dishonesty and manipulation (which given you as a mod I'm going to say no this is not the case, let's be charitable :) ), at least a major warning light that should be going off in your head about bias creeping into your language. And bias to the point it's leading to what I still insist is objectively an outright and blatant misrepresentation. If your word means 95% of the time (or more! I think textual analysis would produce 99% or higher) something that is factually false, using it is just straight up bad, no two ways about it.
Stepping back from the brink a little, I suppose you could see the context as "is immigration writ large any good"? In which it makes a little more sense. I do quite like your point about being caught in a double bind between not being able to critique 20-year-old policy and also not current policy. And yes, I think the European model of combating racism has its clear drawbacks here -- my general observation is that Europeans like to pretend it doesn't exist and sweep it under the rug when possible, while Americans talk about it much more directly and often. I'm sure both have their merits, but (despite my bias) I think the American model is still better. In psychology, we've sort of learned that it's usually better to err on the side of "talk about your feelings" rather than "bottle them up" even if there are actual risks of talking problems too much (and there are). I think the same idea roughly applies to politics. So the UK approach of trying to keep things bottled up is fundamentally doomed.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
3mo ago
I'm just over 30, which means 9/11 happened in elementary school, and I came of age right when society was starting to question the Iraq war and if all the post-9/11 stuff was worth it. I especially remember people (myself included!) being very upset about the Do Not Fly list, which used to be absolutely horrendous nightmare-fuel (people wouldn't get told they were on it, would get on it for stupid reasons, even if you were obviously on it by mistake they wouldn't even admit you were on it much less take you off, the list grew very large very quickly, etc etc), as far as I knew that was still the case, and so in that context finding out the new version is "they let you fly but someone has to secretly babysit you" is kind of underwhelming in terms of "I should be upset". It's possible even I have been gaslit into thinking this is all okay and fine, but I won't pretend that kind of upbringing didn't play a role.
One thing I am quite upset about is the biometric Clear thing, which seems like a nefarious corporate conspiracy to steal your biometric data (and for airports to bilk the public out of money). Like, my home airport dedicated a TSA officer just to the Clear line, and they used to pay literally half a dozen salesman to sign people up for their "free trial" (yearly price over 100 bucks) (if you can afford to pay that many salespeople, your product is dodgy). So not only are they worsening TSA wait times for poor regular people, they are dedicating public money to do so (my airport is at least ostensibly owned by a public benefit type thing).
EverythingIsFine
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3mo ago
Right, of course context matters, but in the realm of politics two decades is almost never recent. You usually mean something within the last few months to a year, and sometimes 5 years at most, 10 if you really stretch. This holds true virtually 90% of the time, probably even higher, 99% wouldn't even surprise me. A simple search of literally any news article will demonstrate my point quite succinctly. Or even books.
If you use "recent" to mean 20 years ago it's almost explicitly dishonest.
For example, if I tell you that I "recently" moved -- even if I am catching up with an old friend I hadn't seen in like, 40 years, you'd still probably assume recent = last 5 to 10 years at most. I struggle to even come up with any sort of comparable example outside of literal world history where recent would acceptably mean almost two decades ago.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
3mo ago
I mostly understand and certainly respect your point, but I think you're using the wrong vocabulary, or at least, using words the way most people do not mean them. When we say "intelligence" with regard to anyone in or adjacent to the field of law, we usually talk about some mix of competence, rigorous logic, and holistic grasp of issues including their context. None of which is cast into question here. Of course a SC nominee has double adjacency here, to politics as well as law, and politics might have a slightly different connotation of "intelligent" -- one that may include manifesting this intelligence in all of their comments, but I still don't think that's the prevailing connotation.
Second of all, I don't view her refusal to answer as "corruptible" much less "evil". I view it as a -- correct! -- suspicion that she was being presented with a "gotcha!" question, and decided it was better for her to avoid the question, and that any potential benefit from a frank and honest response was outweighed by the chance of her comments being misconstrued or used as a political cudgel. Plus, she's kind of correct on the face of it. If we're being completely fair and practical, if the question of the definition of "woman" were indeed to come before the court, subject matter experts would be available if the question was one where being incredibly precise were important. In law this is very often the case (the easy cases don't usually make it to the Supreme Court!). Additionally, you'd have plenty of time to consider your exact wording and any implications in great detail. This kind of time and attention to detail cannot be done in any meaningful way in front of a panel during your nomination. In fact, giving an "honest" answer but with an implication you didn't consider is potentially even harmful! Realizing this is a positive trait, thinking before you speak, is it not?
Don't get me wrong. I'm very sad that our current politics makes this a gotcha question in the first place. But her answer improved my opinion of her as a judge. It says more about our current politics than it does about her specifically.
EverythingIsFine
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3mo ago
How is it harassment if she's unaware? About the details, I found this 2018 ACLU article about the same program interesting. A few points:
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Allegedly the program is largely algorithmic in who it selects, and this algorithm is often pretty irrational. This means while it's still possible it was targeted at Gabbard, on balance I'm inclined to say it wasn't. Apparently a group is considering suing on her behalf, and this might (we would hope) surface some details, and I support that kind of accountability and attempt at transparency, so I approve.
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Allegedly the marshals use some subjective judgements about "suspicious" behavior, which does raise false positive concerns, but presumably the escalation is simply banning flying altogether, which I would assume (could be wrong) would be a higher bar and one especially unlikely for a high-profile person like Gabbard, so I'm not quite convinced this is a real worry.
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In terms of waste of money? Yes, it sounds like an absolute waste of money. I would appreciate this program were to receive more scrutiny. But sadly, this seems fairly par for the course in terms of the American paranoia about terrorism. And to be fair, taken in aggregate, the government does seem to have been fairly effective over the last decade in preventing mass terror attacks, including on planes, so I think it's quite possible that the general public doesn't mind this kind of cost too much.
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What does the enhanced checks look like? Sounds like "Quad S" which means your luggage might be swapped for explosives, might be searched, and you go through a metal detector and a patdown. Most of those things are fairly normal in today's situation, though of course
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We should also consider the alternate hypothesis: maybe she did actually deserve scrutiny? Certainly we don't want politicians to be above the law. This is admittedly a super-tricky balance to strike. IMO, this being exposed is good and so are any lawsuits that come of it.
In other words, at risk of sounding cliche, but the system is working fine. Politician suffers minor inconvenience and secretive government program receives more scrutiny. Not a bad trade.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
3mo ago
Of course that would be a problem. I'm slightly more sensitive to privacy violations than the average American, but... scale matters, as does the risk of privacy violations (and other considerations not exhaustively listed here, such as the risk of false positives). The act of flying in a domestic passenger airplane is fundamentally a public act, but not only that, it's somewhat infrequent even for a career politician and only captures a small subset of behavior and time. In other words, the risk of the government violating your privacy is low. In fact, the government already has your flight records to start with, so what exactly is at risk here is unclear. Let's make a contrast to your example. Following someone 24/7 is of a fundamentally different nature than monitoring you on an airplane flight. As a crude but effective example, they might accidentally discover that you are having an affair, which is none of their business.
Of course we also have to address the intimidation angle too, but if the process was indeed secret and unknown to the subject as is alleged to be the case, that angle doesn't really exist! So again, the main detriment to Gabbard is not a privacy concern but a mere inconvenience, plus an allegation about waste of public funds. I'm writing a separate comment in this thread about the degree of inconvenience, but at least according to the info I'm looking at, it's nothing too exceptionally different than what everyone else in America has accepted as par for the course for flying nowadays - the chance of pat-downs, waiting a little longer for the special scanners, a chance of having your luggage hand-searched. I don't like the placement of the current bar, and think a lot of it is mere security theater, but pretending it's abnormal is just incorrect.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
3mo ago
Always good to hear from DTulpa Gabbard herself! :)
EverythingIsFine
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3mo ago
This seems kind of... fine? It's not a "do not fly" which creates real and tangible problems, it's rather at worst a waste of government money, right? The program description also mentions that very much unlike the Bush-era program, they take at least some people off the list after a while. If Gabbard temporarily has a few ride-alongs, maybe she gets to be outraged personally for a little while but it doesn't seem like she suffers any actual, uh, harm?
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
3mo ago
This line of thought is so illogical to me. It's patently obvious that there are incentives to anyone even adjacent to politics to be mealy-mouthed and delicately sidestep questions that don't have a "good" answer. I know people get annoyed at politicans for giving non-answers but the fact of the matter is that giving non-answers actually works well, because politicians often rather slightly annoying many people over enraging a few people. Rather than acknowledge that these incentives exist, and they are quite strong, you're deliberately attempting to take the evasive answer at face value rather than acknowledge that smart people sometimes choose to say dumb things because it's beneficial for them to do so.
For example, lawyers do this all the time. Just because a lawyer states a fact in a tortuous way doesn't make the lawyer stupid, it just means they want to win their case and realize that sometimes even an absurd linguistic distortion that would make their middle school English teacher cry might help them win their case. I don't see a lawyer twist words into pretzels and then conclude "oh this lawyer must not understand English very well"...
A supreme court justice position is inherently a political position in the broad but most accurate meaning of the word (the philosophy of how we govern ourselves), and pretending otherwise does no one any favors. There is not an expectation of complete truth in all of their responses to a nomination board, merely a hope of general integrity.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
3mo ago
I'd argue that wording actually does matter. There might be some misrepresentation all over the spectrum, but people do think differently about e.g. a program that deliberately goes out and seeks underrepresented groups and helps them prepare better for applications, and e.g. a program that sets a soft or hard quota for hiring a certain amount of underrepresented people, or even sets aside individual positions for certain people explicitly. Sure, you can argue that they might be roughly morally equivalent. But the shades of meaning do matter to people. In my examples, both technically fit the goal of promoting equity, but one is much more palatable than the other.
So yeah, though it doesn't make for snappy debate, you do actually need to define DEI at some point, and people define it differently. But if we're talking about the "basic idea" then Outlaw is completely correct, the basic idea IS popular. People are almost hard-coded to value "fairness" and so if DEI shows up with that framing, people will go for it.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
3mo ago
Strongly agree. Also, I think a lot of commentators are reading too much into the current media wave. There's still a very, very long time until the election. We won't even get a debate for another month! Elections always tighten and get more intense in the last few weeks; it always amazes me how much people tend to forget this. She will be stress-tested eventually. Current enthusiasm is a mix of a ton of Democratic-leaning orgs and individuals who were keeping their powder dry due to Biden fatigue suddenly igniting it all at once, and some genuine ground-level celebration that something on the wishlist of at least 3/4's of America ("don't give us another Trump-Biden election with two soon-to-be-80-year-olds") suddenly came true (or at least half-true). Human psychology is such that a feeling of "relief" doesn't immediately give way to being confronted with the demands of reality, humans like to bask or indulge in the relief for a little while.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
3mo ago
What's most interesting to me about Walz, though I've been uncharacteristically out of date with politics the last week or so, is that I did see that he has a pathetically low net worth. Without his pension, it's only like 300k or something like that. Which is actually quite nice and rare! I can't remember the last time we had a major presidential or VP candidate who hadn't at least made a million off of books or something. So at least in one sense, he has a legitimate claim to the everyman title.
EverythingIsFine
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3mo ago
I mentioned this above, but surely the parents aren't "recent" immigrants in nearly any sense of the word, right? Unless I have my timeline wrong they must have been in the country for at least 17 years, yes?
EverythingIsFine
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3mo ago
Even though I think kneeling is stupid and I also strongly dislike it, I'm inclined to have more respect, not less, for people who continue to kneel even after it's the issue of the day. Though yes, international bleed-through of American cultural issues continues to amaze me.
EverythingIsFine
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3mo ago
Just a quick point which has been bugging me in several of these Motte threads about the issue...
Isn't it definitely worth mentioning that if he were born in the UK, it's not at all a "recent" immigration? That's just flat out wrong!! Objectively! I don't know why all the comments seem to conveniently gloss over this. Even if we're playing the counterfactual game, which is always epistemically suspect in the case of individuals, the debate would be about immigration policies 18 years ago, not current immigration policies. Now, given, the PM at the time was Tony Blair, who was Labour, so maybe there's a connection there, but still (it's not like Labour has been in charge for long enough to meaningfully affect immigration policies themselves, and instead it's the Conservatives who were in power for much more than a decade). The situation also pretty much requires asking "how well does assimilation work in the UK"? Answering that is pretty much required context if you're going to connect it to immigration, because otherwise the local UK culture is presumably just as much "to blame" as his parent's upbringing.
But yeah, Taylor Swift being repeatedly brought up is a little odd. But if your goal is to create maximum media attention to an act of terror, choosing as your target a bunch of sympathetic young people and even kids at a Taylor Swift event ( a figure who has a ton of built in attention already) is probably close to the "ideal" target. Now, of course, this kind of terrorism is consummately counterproductive, but to the more delusional kind of terrorist (such as a 17 and 19 year old) it might seem attractive.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
3mo ago
That's not what I said. There's principles, but we're talking about the context of people making a big fuss on Twitter. Making a big fuss on Twitter requires more than one's principles being breached, it requires some degree of outrage. I'm just saying that many of these "peaceniks" do continue to in good faith call for a ceasefire, but they may be understandably less motivated to loudly call for a ceasefire in this case.
The highly-upvoted post I responded to is alleging a double standard where none actually exists. It's also doubly frustrating that at least on its face, their post seemed to ask (really, allege, but hiding behind an insincere question) about where is the outrage and use that as evidence of a double standard. I provided a literal and direct answer to their question (i.e. people probably still are consistent but the "outrage"/"demonstrated harm" dial isn't very high here) and was downvoted for answering that very question. Guess people writ large aren't actually all that interested in other perspectives after all, it seems. They just want their echo chamber. Do better, Mottizens.
Like, did you read my comment? Read it again. I'm saying that most people see the news and see "rich international hobbyist loses a part time gig after political overreaction" and obviously that's a different level of harm and thus outrage as "poor working-class person gets fired from their minimum wage job due to online crusade". The difference is pretty obvious?!? Of course people are going to be louder about the second case! No one gives two shits about often faceless "Olympic Officials". Hell, no one gives a shit about the jobs of refs in practically any sport!!! So expecting a twitterstorm of outrage as "proof" people are being morally consistent seems misguided at best.
It's worth noting that at least for the US, a program already exists with similar time terms, but the price is more like a million dollars and creating 10 jobs. There may be others I don't recall.
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