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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   7616 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 16, 2024

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A Window Into How Health Insurance Companies Harm Consumers by Threatening to Deny Coverage

From the New York Times, we learn about how health insurance companies hire PBMs (Pharmacy Benefit Managers) to help them restrict access to doctor-prescribed drugs. For all the talk of insurance companies directly denying coverage, when it comes to pharmaceutical drugs, specifically, they're able to offload a significant amount of Delay, Deny, Defend onto third parties, in this case PBMs. By restricting coverage, insurance companies are able to reduce costs and increase profits. A bonus is that they don't even have to be The Bad Guy; they can pawn that off on a third party, who is ostensibly making the choices for them. They don't have to personally defend the decisions to deny; they can just obfuscate, wave in the direction of the third party, and let the complexity of The American Healthcare System stymie consumers.

The Times does a deep dive into a Good Guy Pharmaceutical Company and the lengths they have to go through to navigate this minefield to get their high-quality, purity-assured drugs into the hands of the market. Primarily, they've gotta give the PBMs a cut of the money, who in turn share it with the insurance companies and employers they represent. For a while, they were rebating 23% on average, allowing patients to access the drugs their doctors prescribed at prices that were reasonable to them, their employer, and their insurance company. One PBM reportedly wanted (and got) more - 60% rebate to keep prices low and avoid inflaming popular anger with denials. Of course, that still doesn't quite reach how good some Medicare plans were at 'negotiating'; they got about 70%!

The Good Guy Pharmaceutical Company knew how much people wanted its product; they knew that doctors were prescribing it; they knew how dangerous the alternatives could be for many in the market. They were offering a well-known, well-tested product, clean from any adulteration, and outrage would surely rule the populous if folks had to turn to alternative products or sketchier outlets, possibly with less-stringent quality control. So, they selflessly paid the toll to do the right thing, to get their product into the market, to save lives. NYT rightly applauds their admirable efforts to do what they could, at cost to their own bottom line, to protect consumers from the restrictive, denial-focused tactics of health insurance companies and their lackeys.

Oh wait. NVM. It's Purdue. It's Oxy. Flip everything 180 degrees. Apparently, nobody (other than Purdue and their supporters) thinks it's good to flood the market with high-quality, pharmaceutical grade opioids with well-known potency properties. They somehow don't think that this is preferable to folks getting funneled toward lower-quality, potentially dangerous alternatives. They're back to liking the gatekeeping of insurance companies and their lackeys, ya know, so long as they're doing so in keeping with their own political proclivities. Gatekeeping is Good and Right, so long as the folks who buy digital ink by the barrel can browbeat the gatekeepers into doing things the way they want it to be done. ...and they sure ain't even thinking about including libertarian politics on drugs in the list of their demands. Woke politics, tho? Sure, why not?

I've seen a lot of strong factual repudiations of how misguided Mangione was because he didn't seem to understand how insurance works. I agree with that in principle, but there's a risk of missing the big picture when crafting too technical of a response. People are furious because, among other things, you can go broke trying to pay down medical bills for health conditions you have no control over. It makes people feel powerless and angry and confused about why a better system cannot exist.

It used to be that people would curse God when they were struck down by fate, now they curse insurance companies.

So, corruption?

If I had a point, which I'm not sure I did, it would be that how you view it turns on other politics. How many people who are screaming about how they want the gov't (Medicare) to "negotiate drug prices", presumably making them cheaper and pulling profits out of drug companies, are going to call these rebates "corruption"? ...can they do so with a straight face, when Medicare plans were getting the biggest rebates of them all? How many people viewed all doctor prescriptions (and their charges for their own services) as sacrosanct, with any gatekeeping by insurance companies being evil, and will now be dissembling that these doctor prescriptions totally need gatekeeping, because doctors are apparently dumb and bad? How many people who would be crying, "Legalize all drugs!" with arguments about how important it is to have quality-controlled pharmaceuticals available are going to say that Purdue actually was "Good Guy Pharmaceutical Company", just fighting for the cause of reducing fentanyl deaths by taking the hit in profits to get their product in the market?

The whole industry is an awful mess, with kludge upon kludge, and many folks can't even figure out what they want from a system. They're easily swayed by framing, and so "negotiation" becomes "corruption" if it's framed that way; doctors are sacred and we need to stop insurance from getting in their way or they're dumb and need gatekeeping depending on how it's framed, etc. The lack of a clear vision and susceptibility to framing makes the whole thing prime for more kludges promising to be fixes, more unintended consequences from a lack of clear purpose in the heaping of regulation upon regulation. (I didn't even mention the confounding factor of people wanting to use it to transfer incomes or the sheer constitutional (little c) inability of folks to allow people to make choices with prices.) It lets anyone be the temporary Bad Guy in the fervor for the latest Current Thing. We broke it, now we've clearly bought it, with no bloody clue what to do with it. So the best thing people can do is try to part it out in favor of their political goal of the minute.

Corruption isn’t always and everywhere a bad thing. Sometimes bribery is just straight an improvement on the official process of bureaucracy is bad enough.

If the bureaucracy is so bad that bribery is preferable, that doesn't make corruption not bad. In that case, both the official process and the corruption are bad.

I think the bottom line, is this is just what a low trust society looks like. Everyone smashes the defect button as often and as quickly as possible, in every situation. There is literally no solving this problem, only clearing the way for a different species of defector who will ruin things, do material damage, and end lives with their greedy, corruption and indifference.

I was sitting in the car one day, pondering how low trust our society has become. I was at a gas station while my wife was using the bathroom. And I couldn't help but notice that the emergency gas shutoff switch is just out there, in the open, totally exposed. It got me thinking about the damage that will be caused when our low trust society devours that. I mean, it's there, unguarded, for a reason. Gasoline is dangerous, you can't just have it spilling all over the place. In case of emergency, you might not have time to grab the manager, have them get their keys, etc, etc. So it's just out there, for anybody to hit, whether there is an emergency or not. Which makes me wonder how long until some asshole tiktok prank becomes smashing that button as many times a day as possible until gas stations across the country have to start locking them up. Which then leads to more avoidable accidents at gas stations.

It's just going to be this way with everything. Nothing is going to be too trivial, or too important for some asshole to pillage, either metaphorically or literally.

What it looks like to me is that it's far from "everyone" that smashes the defect button - more like 10% of dysfunctional criminals and elite sociopaths. The rest try to cooperate, it's just that your tribe's definition of "cooperate" is not the other tribe's.

I often feel like people get the system they deserve. That the system is a product of the people, and trying to change a system’s rules on its own can only have marginal effect. We have a low trust, somewhat dysfunctional society and so any form of healthcare is going to be similarly dysfunctional.

Nerdy discussions of voting systems like ranked choice vs FPTP always trigger this feeling in me, like the voting system doesn’t matter at all. Maine implemented ranked choice and it’s not really going to improve Maine, Maine was only able to do it because it’s the whitest state in the country and as a result extremely non-polarized.

I think honestly this isn’t a system we created and thus don’t “deserve”. The thing is that we’ve been taught to be cynical hyper-individualistic, hedonistic, lazy jerks. It comes from everywhere. You’ve been taught that your traditions are old and stodgy and nobody cares about them anymore. You’ve been taught that your ancestors were rotten, terrible people who genocide their way around the globe. You’ve been taught that striving is pointless and that the rich will keep you down. You’ve been taught to deconstruct everything, but never to construct.

There are lots of reasons for it. Some are hyper-consumption: if you lose access to a community in which someone can solve your problem for free, then you have to buy that service somewhere. You don’t know someone who can cook and you don’t know how to? Door Dash. Daycares are essentially replacements for extended family. It used to be that if both parents needed to work, grandparents were close by and retired and the kid could stay in a place where he’d be safe and with a loved one. Now you hire a company who pays strangers less than $20 an hour to do the same. Go down the list of home repairs, car repairs, lawn maintenance, and a lot of services replace community.

The other part is that traditional systems are terrible for governments who want to control their populations. A strong community doesn’t need or want much government interference. The Amish have their communities in pretty good order without too much need for the state to come in and control them. They don’t need welfare because they have their church to help those in need.

The final thing is the issue of legitimacy. Legitimacy comes from the people. But in order to get people to vote for whatever it is that you want, job one is to convince them to want it, or convince them that they’ve always wanted it, or that “good people” are like this. So people vote as they’ve been taught to do. You have to be taught to believe in an atomized society with no deep connections so that you’re more willing to accept the breakdowns, less willing to trust community.

I think you’re assuming the conclusion. The economic forces which make babysitters and dishwashers ubiquitous wouldn’t disappear if we’d never started critiquing imperialism.

I also think your view of the past is rose-tinted as hell. 1700s America wasn’t an endless quilt of Amish communities, waiting to be tempted out of Eden. It was a hungry, dirty, disease-ridden frontier just starting to climb the curve of industrialization. Communities weren’t solving each others’ problems “for free.” They were paying their dues on their own social contract.

We've seen a remarkable, unprecedented increase in GDP per capita in the last 200 years. However, the GDP gains may overstate the actual gain in wealth. In 1800, someone would take part in fulfilling but unpaid labor such as child rearing or food preparation. This is not measured in GDP because no goods or services were exchanged. Nowadays, the equivalent person might use daycare and Door Dash while they pursue their higher paying job as a laptop worker for a big nonprofit. More GDP is being created by the commoditization of previously unpaid work even if no more value to society is being created.

So maybe GDP per capita has increased 5,000% but real wealth has only increased like 2,000% or something. We're vastly better off now than before, but imagine how much better things could be with stronger communities.

I think this is a large part of it. Scott even has an essay on this topic where he discusses reasons the Amish pay between a fifth and a tenth of what the rest of us pay for healthcare. A few of those reasons (the second, fourth, sixth and arguably the seventh too) basically come down to the Amish being honest and everyone else knowing they're honest.

Which makes me wonder how long until some asshole tiktok prank becomes smashing that button as many times a day as possible until gas stations across the country have to start locking them up. Which then leads to more avoidable accidents at gas stations.

By law, they can't lock them up. In a blue state we'll just get op-eds and politicos opining about how this is why we need to ban gasoline cars and go to all electric. There IS a solution to this particular class of problems, but it's banned. Basically the "railroad bull" solution -- swift and painful punishment for the assholes that do it.

I have lately wondered if what we're missing is a bunch of, I suppose, nuns with rulers or the equivalent to punish modest anti-social behavior (defecting, in this conversation) promptly with a transient painful stimulus that neither leaves lasting marks nor a permanent legal record.

But I don't think it would work in all cases, or maybe even at all. And it's almost certainly disallowed by the Constitution. And suffers from a lot of ambiguity as to where to draw the lines.

And it's almost certainly disallowed by the Constitution.

There's nothing in the Constitution that bars corporal punishment. There's a prohibition on "cruel and unusual" punishment, but we know this doesn't mean all corporal punishment, because it was widely practiced at the time and not ended until long after the ratification of the Bill of Rights.

Certainly it's plausible that a Supreme Court containing at least five left-leaning Justices who take a somewhat cavalier attitude towards their oath to uphold the Constitution might rule that the Eighth Amendment bans corporal punishment, but that would be them, not the Constitution.

Here's a two minute video explaining PBMs in a humorous fashion by a Doctor/Comedian influencer.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=_khH6pZnHCM

TLDW: United IS its own PBM.

Reposting another post from last week which @Blueberry put up right before the CW thread switched over:

—-

So any opinions on the drone sightings in New Jersey? Is it just mass hysteria and people mistake airplanes for drones? Are they aliens? Supernatural phenomenon? Just a distributed prank by drone owners?

So far the confusion and appeal to the government is bipartisan:

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/15/politics/mysterious-drone-sightings-lawmakers-criticize-response/index.html

Lawmakers from across the political spectrum on Sunday criticized the federal government’s response to mysterious drone sightings in the Northeast, as officials emphasize there is no evidence of a security threat.

Democratic Rep. Jim Himes, a ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, also expressed frustration with the administration’s response to the public. “The government has a real responsibility to put more information out there so people better understand what the real dangers are,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.”

Trump said Friday that the government needs to convey more information and shoot down the drones.

Asked Sunday about the president-elect’s post calling on the government to shoot down the drones, Mayorkas said, “We are limited in our authorities.”

What drives me crazy is that only phone videos seem to exist and phone cameras suck for faraway objects in the night. Is there not one good camera with a zoom in New York/New Jersey?

Edit:
This orb ABC News was puzzled over is really an out of focus Venus:
https://x.com/MatthewCappucci/status/1868052013164134899

—-

I know many Mottizans think this is all just deep state weapons testing or something, and I’m curious for theories in that vein along with more esoteric ones?

What does the U.S. gain from this? Will Trump meaningfully increase what we know about these drones or muddy the waters?

How much do we not know still about what the spooks are up to?

Trump talked about the drones at a press conference. As best I remember, he refused to say if he had been briefed, said they couldn't be foreign, and said the US government should say what they are. Assuming Trump was briefed and is not being misleading this means the drones are likely controlled by the US government. The military has massive bases on which to test drones, so I'm guessing the drones are looking for something.

Tests on a base in the middle of nowhere are necessary, but running tests in more real-world conditions (such as over other bases or naval formations) is extremely valuable. It's quite possible that's what this is.

Could be, but then why wouldn't the military admit what it is doing?

Their default is to not tell anyone anything and they aren't getting enough political pressure from the Biden admin to be more open.

Why would they? If they leave it vague, "we are conducting tests of classified defense technology over civilian airspace," that would make everyone freak out more. If they say specifically what they're testing, that compromises our counterintelligence efforts.

Is that true? There is a military base within 50 miles of where I live and we occasionally get loud military jets going overhead. We don't expect to be told the purpose of the flights and accept the inconvenience as part of the price of having a strong military

Because the first, second, and third impulse in the classified world is to keep your mouth shut and admit nothing. Admitting the program's existence to the public (assuming it exists) would likely require pretty high-level approval, possibly even the SecDef, or the CIA director if it's under them instead of the military.

Like most UFO’s, these are almost certainly mundane flying objects getting misidentified by onlookers. That should be our default assumption in a ‘see Bigfoot think black bear’ type way. This case is bolstered by the sheer number of sightings which are clearly identifiable as planes.

It would be very exciting and cool for this to be ayys, but each of the videos I've seen ends up looking either like a regular drone, a commercial airliner, or something else that happens to have FAA red-green lighting (which wouldn't make sense for a military stealth drone experiment or for alien aircraft).

So yes, I think you're right. We are seeing mass hysteria possibly coupled with people just not having taken the time before to notice just how many flying objects are actually in your typical American night sky. And really, I can relate to this (at the risk of typical minding I suppose) because over the last year, my toddler has become obsessed with planes and seeing them at night so I didn't have any idea myself how active and busy aircraft are at night until we started watching them all the time.

something else that happens to have FAA red-green lighting (which wouldn't make sense for a military stealth drone experiment or for alien aircraft)

Seems like a decent disguise, though.

As someone who flies model aircraft in NJ... it's 99.9% fake, and getting more fake by the sighting. There's a LOT of air traffic in this area, and no shortage of private planes, and nearly everything I've seen online has clearly been a full-sized plane. The exceptions are mostly either unidentifable lights which are also probably full sized planes (further away) or stationary lights (yeah, that's not a hovering drone in your neighbor's yard, it's a light on a lightpost, genius). Some do appear to be quadcopter drones... the catch is some police departments have been putting their own drones up to try to spot the original drones, and the police drones then get spotted.

It's possible it was kicked off by a real sighting of a formation of drones; there have been such sighted elsewhere (near military bases, including US bases in the UK) fairly reliably. Those drones, if they exist (which they probably do) are almost certainly military, though "ours" or "theirs" is an open question. If they are "theirs", whoever "they" are is pretty brazen, but China did do that balloon thing, so it's not out of the question.

So YOU'RE the one responsible for all this!

Naa, none of my model helicopters even has lights. Model aircraft are mostly illegal* in NJ, wouldn't want to be noticed.

  • everything's at least mostly illegal in NJ.

There are lots of people jumping into the conversation who have not looked into it. People will say: why waste my time? Simple answer: its fun. Its a mystery and clearly people get a lot of enjoyment from participating in the whole thing. Its trivial to go on X and watch some videos, read some threads, and come up with an opinion.

Here are few thoughts I've had from watching this for the past week:

  1. a narrative started to form over the weekend that the drones were military WMD sniffing drones doing a grid search of NJ. It originated with some DOD drone manufacturer speculating on tictoc and then went viral. It seems plausible, if not more likely than not, that this story was the psyop. If the cover story is a lost nuclear warhead coming to the USA, it makes you wonder what crazy shit is actually going on.

  2. It seems like there are at least 3 categories of phenomenon. 1) misidentified airplanes, helicoperts, and lens flares, 2) unmanned drones (the size of a car or a SUV) flying very low over populated areas using traditional aerodynamics and 3) orbs, lights, or other true UAPs that are hovering or exhibiting flight maneuvers that do not correspond to known physics. I am not convinced that the things in category 3 are easily explained. The debunkers are just as invested as the pro-UAP crowd and they generally always assume the person who filmed the object is a liar or an idiot. There are pilots, air traffic controllers, and professional photographers that are posting some interesting evidence. Air traffic control reports of objects at 50k ft elevation. Military air traffic control shutting down a base due to extreme UAP activity. The ABC video of the "orb" is professionally shot. I would imagine the camera man knows how to operate his camera and is not showing venus out of focus.

  3. There have been a number of high profile military pilots that have been reporting their experiences of seeing objects, orbs, and other unexplained phenomenon. Most people do not think these military pilots are lying. Theyre clearly seeing something. If there has been a large uptick of these UAPs over NJ over the past few months, it would not surprise me if the government were to fly the drones from category 2 in order to muddy the waters. Then you get the mass hysteria and most people start writing off the story.

The answer does not have to be extra-terrestrial. Mark Andresen recounted a story on the Bari Weiss podcast where he was in a meeting with the white house and he is representing that the WH claimed to "have classified whole branches of physics during the cold war". If you take that language plainly, they are not talking about specific nuclear weapons engineering. "Whole branches of physics". It seems fairly reasonable to me that the USG, after realizing how powerful nuclear physics was in WW2, decided to move all fundamental physics out of the public domain. It would not be the least bit surprising for me to learn that there are groups within the government that have spent the last 70 years progressing their tech into something that would look totally alien to us. Such a group, with no oversight, would essentially be a rouge element of our federal government.

There is really no way to know or prove any of this and its mostly speculation. That being said, there is a lot of circumstantial evidence out in the public domain for those who are interested. Eric Weinstein has speculated about this in public. There's a few good youtube channels out there that talk about this stuff.

ET are often part of the story that gets told, but they are not necessary. It could be as simple as "the US Government took all fundamental physics in house after the Manhattan project and the group that controls that tech is doing some sort of power play with feds".

If you take that language plainly, they are not talking about specific nuclear weapons engineering.

I would love to believe that we classified psychotronics or faster-than-light-travel or quantum communications or time travel something crazy like that but I tend to think this was probably just nuclear engineering (which as I understand it can get pretty exotic). If it was something more exotic than that, I just sorta doubt the White House LLM Czar would be familiar with it. Like, if we classified time travel, let's say, what are the odds that you send your Time Travel Czar - one of a handful of people who know Time Travel is real - to go work GAI policy and then he goes around Darkly Hinting that we classified Time Travel during meetings with GAI people? So I tend to think he was talking about nuke stuff. That (and less-remembered, cryptography) were areas of physics and math that were the focus of government containment.

The answer does not have to be extra-terrestrial. Mark Andresen recounted a story on the Bari Weiss podcast where he was in a meeting with the white house and he is representing that the WH claimed to "have classified whole branches of physics during the cold war". If you take that language plainly, they are not talking about specific nuclear weapons engineering. "Whole branches of physics". It seems fairly reasonable to me that the USG, after realizing how powerful nuclear physics was in WW2, decided to move all fundamental physics out of the public domain. It would not be the least bit surprising for me to learn that there are groups within the government that have spent the last 70 years progressing their tech into something that would look totally alien to us. Such a group, with no oversight, would essentially be a rouge element of our federal government.

This sounds implausible. As the saying goes, "Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead".

As an example of a rather successful government conspiracy, consider the NSA spying program. Pre-Snowden, there were certainly credible rumors that the big ISPs passed their cables through a government-controlled room. It would take an especially naive person to say "Surely the US government would not spy on its citizens." Internet veterans will remember the crypto wars, the US gov decision to classify PGP as munitions for the purpose of export restrictions and the attempts of the NSA to push broken crypto on the people. The thing which Snowden delivered was rather substantial evidence regarding the specifics -- which was admittedly a bit worse than I would have estimated. But the fact that state actors had the tech, the money and the incentive to spy on people was plain as day even before that.

Now you claim that the US government decided to move all fundamental physics out of the public domain (but bizarrely only after the Teller-Ulam design became public knowledge). Consider what it would imply. A cabal of Nobel laureates sitting in some smoky room in their anti-grav chairs having a meeting to decide what the exact mass of the Higgs particles which will be "discovered" at CERN should be. Of course, CERN is international, and over the decades, a lot of countries who were antagonistic to the US (i.e. the USSR or China) have had their own "fundamental physics" research programs. Unless the first secret discovery was a particle which makes it trivial to change the outcome of any physics experiment on Earth (in which case why keep pretending to have a cold war), the US would have had to have the convince at least some senior physicists in these countries to keep their mouths shut. Now if I were a senior researcher in the USSR, no amount of Nobels would convince me it would be a good idea to deceive the party leadership about the nature of reality as related to the feasibility of new weapons. Or would the Soviets have been in on it, too?

Also, there have been some areas of applied research where the US has allowed and indeed lead tremendous progress over the last few decades. Modern electronics and computers certainly seem to make physics research of all kinds so much easier. "They" must really feel secure in their absolute superiority to allow such tools in Muggle hands. If I was trying to keep fundamental physics secret, I would certainly not allow society to develop into an information society with more and more physics graduates poking at things.

I can see a state government keeping some particular design a secret (e.g. "You can ignite fusion bombs through fission bombs in precisely that way"), but not the basics ("Fusion exists. The sun is powered by fusion. Some people have been wondering if the power of fusion can somehow be harnessed by mankind.")

I thought I was pretty clear that I’m speculating - not claiming claiming anything. But address some of your points.

  1. Secrets. There is no shortage of people out there giving interviews, claiming to be part of programs, publishing book, patents etc. These people are generally ignored, mocked, or written off as cranks no better than some skitzo in his basement. The political economy of academia makes dissent from the party line unthinkable. And for what? It’s not unreasonable to think that some step function change in our understanding of physics could be legitimate threat to humanity.

  2. Ridicule. The second part of your reply is building a strawman of my alleged claim and then mocking it. At its most basic level, I’m saying that that the USG, having just unlocked nuclear weapons through physics, decided it was best to have a black fundamental physics program and made advances over the last 70 years. It would almost be irresponsible for them to have not done something like this. If I had to guess, I’d guess that they made progress manipulating another fundamental force - gravity. There appears to have been at least a lot of talk about that in public before everything and everyone involved vanished and mainstream physics focused string theory. No time travel or antigrav chairs needed. Just a relatively small group of scientists, in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, already nearly merged into the MIC, deciding that this is the most responsible path for physics.

It seems plausible that the USSR and China came to similar conclusions either independently or loosely connected. We seemed to be able to understand the importance of a hotline or other space research despite hostilities. Given the stakes involved, it doesn’t seem ridiculous to me to think that everyone agrees to not make this public. Of course these other programs would likely be far behind the US. In fact I’ve heard speculation that the US governments abrupt change in UAP policy in the last 10 years could be a result of these other programs having finally caught up with us.

Again. None of this sounds even remotely ridiculous to me. Yet people get their backs up on even the most mild version of this story. Why is that?

As I said, the whole topic is a lot of fun. There is so much interesting stuff out there. And it’s easier than ever to find.

I know the guy who developed the gravity bomb concept. Want a miles-wide chunk of Earth gone? I know which book to point you to.

Oddly and anecdotally, I've seen large, heavy-duty drones flying around my area (Western Maryland) and between Baltimore and Annapolis. This was in the last year. It was shocking and gross, but I also just assumed it was our overlords testing out their latest toys, which isn't such a surprise considering I live on the flight path from DC to Camp David. I don't think it's just peoples' imaginations--these things are out there flying around.

Now, why are they flying around NJ/NY or are those people seeing what I saw? Don't know, don't really care. I consider it another media distraction that I don't have bandwidth for. It's certainly curious? Certainly. Is it important? Maybe, but probably not as important as--say--the escalating war in Ukraine.

FWIW, Walter Kirn, in reference to his government sources, says it's 99% psy-op. His claim is that it's another churn of the news-cycle meant to gin up anxiety and present Trump with another problem his enemies can try to cudgel him with. Not sure I'm on-board with all that, but since I agree with the assessment it's a distraction, it's as good of an explanation as I care to present.

Kirn and Taibbi livestream (Drones are near the middle): https://youtube.com/watch?v=VvYPaEO_4gQ Here's Michael Tracey saying he saw them: https://substack.com/home/post/p-153179566?source=queue

Most likely mass hysteria. Are there any compelling videos that aren't obviously traditional aircraft flying in normal ways/astronomical bodies/hobbyist or commercial drones doing normal hobbyist or commercial drone things?

So why is the House Intel committee receiving a classified briefing on the mass hysteria? Is this standard procedure for mass hysteria?

receiving a classified briefing

The classified briefing could just be "we have no idea what these sightings are." It could be classified even if it is mass hysteria for any number of reasons. Perhaps the briefing reveals something about our radar/intelligence capabilities. Perhaps the military has no idea what these things are and on the off-chance they really are drones from Russia/China/Aliens they don't want to reveal how little we actually know about them. The government routinely investigates a bunch of stupid shit, Stargate Project?

Edit: In effect, I think the likelihood of a classified briefing is essentially equal whether this is real or mass hysteria. To me all it reveals is that there is 1) enough public outcry to demand congress investigate it and 2) this investigation to some extent entails consulting our military intelligence capabilities.

If your agency will give classified briefings in the case there is something shady going on but publicly denounce mass hysteria, then the very fact that they are giving classified briefings would be an information leak. So I would fully expect the CIA to give a highly classified briefing on bigfoot (likely "to our best knowledge, it does not exist") to Congress if they demanded it.

When people start pointing green lasers at commercial airplanes then maybe there is something worthy of a briefing.

Do you genuinely believe that the briefing is about actions that civilians have taken in response to the drones and not about the drones themselves?

Again, I’m not sure if there’s really a precedent for that sort of thing.

I wouldn't discount that possibility. If people are violating Federal laws in hysteria then maybe something needs to be done.

The question I have been asking since this whole "mystery drones" thing started: drones with video cameras aren't all that expensive, and are widely available to be purchased. Has anyone tried sending up a drone of their own to follow the mystery drones and see where they go?

Consumer drones with the best range and battery life ($1000) get you about 15-30mins flight time and 1 mile of distance, commercial drones ($20,000+) driven by cellular LTE modem can fly for an hour on battery and for indefinite ranges if they have wings or are internal-combustion powered. Would be very hard to catch one class of drone with the other.

Another reason they aren't doing that is that flying a drone within city limits in a blue state is almost always illegal and if somebody did do that, they wouldn't want to admit to it. Pretty much the only way people get in trouble with drones is to break the law and post video footage online.

People have been shining lasers at commercial aircraft though, which is super-duper illegal, and while the sorts of weird libertarians(seriously, what is it with libertarians being such normal boring business savvy centrists recently? Bring back the schizoposting bigamist with YouTube videos on how to drill 1/8” holes with equipment convertible to a grow lab) who just blatantly violate regs like that are rare in urban blue states, there should be at least some in the largest metro area in the country.

what is it with libertarians being such normal boring business savvy centrists recently?

Liking smaller government and being concerned about massive domestic surveillance operations should be considered normie Republican positions. Yet somehow that's not how the DC Republican establishment view them.

I'm pretty sure airplanes at EWR (Newark) get lasered on a regular basis; occasionally they bust someone for doing it, but I think they usually prefer to keep it quiet to avoid copycats. It's much more a problem at takeoff and landing, when the plane is close and you can hit the windshield. There probably are people pointing handheld lasers at the "drones", but pointing a laser essentially at the bottom of an airliner 10,000+ feet up doesn't do a thing even if you aim perfectly. Wouldn't be surprised if they are hitting the occasional private pilot.

My sub $1000 drone (DJI Mini 4 Pro) can fly for over half an hour with the default battery (keeping it under the 250g weight limit where other rules kick in) and around 45 minutes with the slightly heavier battery. It has a range of around 20-30 miles if you maintain line-of-sight.

It's actually rather remarkable how cheap some of this stuff has become.

I know the marketing material says 20-30 miles for the radio control link, but if you follow the FAA rules regarding altitude, your video connection will get you between 1-2 miles (with the Mavic 3). The furthest I've ever been with it is 2 miles away while at 400' altitude while standing on my roof, then when I turned it around to fly back, I lost signal and the drone had to use GPS-return-to home until it got back into range. Obviously you could have infinite range if you're flying at 2000' while standing on a mountaintop but I don't think that's very informative to people when they ask what kind of range your drone gets.

How far away have you actually seen the Mini 4 fly? If it's much more than 2 miles I'll go upgrade immediately. I only have a Mavic 3 and DJI-FPV (O3 video transmission protocol) and not a Mavic/Mini 4 (O4), but it seems unlikely that the new revision would be that much better.

How far away have you actually seen the Mini 4 fly

The mini doesn't fly as far as the air or pro. My own tests in perfect environments get it about 2 miles easily, but RF interference degrades it significantly. Normally at around 0.5m

2.4ghz for the Mavic 3 gets you about 2 miles, 5.8ghz mode in a low-RF saturation environment can push up to 5, 10 with a patch antenna.

All of this ignores 4G/5G teleoperation kits that can be mounted onto even Mavic Pros now, which do exist and can be controlled via a sim card, or full autonomous drones. Range is definitely not the limiting factor for these drone sightings.

The boring answer for the drone sightings is likely mass hysteria and false attribution, since small aircraft are not noticed by people most of the time and when they are now being paid attention to they seem so different from the big liners that they cause confusion. Drone shutting down airports like what happened at Gatwick a few years ago started with dickheads flying a drone for that sweet shot, then general incompetence during the monitoring phase. A common problem is observation drones used by one agency without notifying other agencies, causing other agencies to scramble their own observation drones etc etc etc.

Most LEO have DJI aeroscopes in their inventories, which can track all DJI models up to 2022 that were in the air, and a fair few newer models using legacy firmware. By now someone would have figured if it was a rogue DJI drone in the air. If the flight lights can be seen its a low altitude drone. Its most likely some trolls fucking about and piling on for shits and giggles.

But its much better if its ayys looking for their dropped nuclear fuel. Lets hope the greys land and demand to see the manager here.

Drone shutting down airports like what happened at Gatwick a few years ago started with dickheads flying a drone for that sweet shot

There is to this day no evidence there was any drone at Gatwick that did not belong to law enforcement.

I'm told the DJIs are quite hackable; if you're flying out of visual range you're already breaking the regs, what's a few more? But I don't think altitude should be a big issue; even if you're at half the legal altitude, distance to horizon is 17 miles.

I have the mini 2! Love it, best camera I own. But I can't fly it very high where I live due to FAA regulations. I've taken it to other places, like a beach in Florida--or even England-- and it soars. The "military" drones I saw in MD were easily 4-6X in size, painted drab colors and flying formation. They were also only about 3-4 stories up so very easy to see. Not sure this is what people are seeing in NJ though. As I said in a different comment, I live around all kinds of National military crap, so you just sort of get used to seeing weird stuff. (This is also where Mothman, Snallygaster, Jersey Devil and the Blair Witch originate, so maybe just a crazy place).

The Blair Witch Project was set in Western Maryland and filmed in Montgomery County, Maryland. New Jersey had nothing to do with it.

Let’s talk about East vs West, the narrative of the “inevitable rise of China,” and some of the historical reasons why the West is currently ascendant. Pasting a post from SQS by @RandomRanger:

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Rigid and inflexible governance practices, worsened by a lack of competition. Consider the Seaban where the Ming relocated whole villages away from the sea to combat piracy. That's a bizarre thing to do, rulers usually like having trade. But the Ming were so strong they didn't care, they had no peer competitors and so little need to search for revenue. The consequences for this stupid crap didn't hit them immediately. The Qing didn't raise taxes for about a century or two because they wanted to be benevolent, so the footprint of the state was very light compared to Europe. The population ballooned and they had the same number of officials, it was a mess. Proto-industrialization was accelerated by the military-industrial complex, China wasn't usually under threat... They could afford to do all this suboptimal governance that would get them annexed if they were in Europe. In Europe, states had to search for qualitative military advantages in metallurgy and shipbuilding, they had to squeeze out as much tax revenue as they could from people. Europeans weren't interested in ritualized trade missions where they gave out more than they received to 'tributary states', they wanted profits. The Chinese state didn't care so much about profit, they assumed they were the richest and the best from the start.

China built a huge fleet and explored all around the Indian Ocean, terrifying all the natives. But they felt like there was no use for it, they had plenty of money already. And the steppe nomads were acting up again, so they scrapped it and refocused. They thought they were on top of the world, so resisted catch-up industrialization for some time in the 19th century on the basis that they already had everything they needed.

Many megadeaths later, the lesson sank in. Today they push out official party doctrine books about how important scientific and industrial development is, overcorrecting if anything: https://www.strategictranslation.org/articles/general-laws-of-the-rise-of-great-powers

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Do we see China reversing these tendencies? How will a Trump presidency change things?

What does the future of Taiwan and AI, chips, etc look like at the moment? Is Deepseek really as good as they say?

China's One Child Policy is the worst, most destructive government (social) policy in history and clearly shows the danger of Malthusian thought put into practice. The effects of the One Child Policy have been ruinous for China, not just for economic reasons (including dependency ratio), but for so may other reasons, including indirectly causing China's gender imbalance, decline of relationships and family, and the social malaise and stagnation that occurs when the elderly outnumber the youth, a highly unnatural and disordered state of affairs.

I strongly believe that despite all the both morally and economically awful things the CCP has done, it is the One Child Policy and the One Child Policy essentially alone that stopped the 'rise of China'. If it were not for the One Child Policy, China would be the clear number one superpower now, rather that floundering behind (despite all its own faults) the surprisingly resilient US. Or at the very least, China would still be ascendant rather than the rapid descent that is waiting for China around the corner.

While it's true that China would be experiencing some effects of the demographic transition today regardless of the One Child Policy, and that these problems are not unique to China, as in both the West and China's developed Asian neighbours, the One Child Policy accelerated China's demographic transition to such a degree that China's demographics are comparable to RoK, Japan and Taiwan, despite those countries having a 20-40 year head start on the demographic transition caused by economic development, depending on how you count it. China's current fertility rate (approx. 1.1) is worse than Japan's (approx. 1.2), similar to Taiwan, and slightly better than RoK (approx. 0.75). And this is without considering the reliability of China's numbers, given that the CCP has a tendency to "mistakely" inflate their population numbers, the situation may well be much worse than is reported.

Unfortunately, despite all evidence pointing to Malthusian thought being completely and utterly wrong (as well as deeply immoral, in my judgement), it is still heavily influential in both academic and popular though, if bolstered by a pervasive anti-natalist, anti-humanist Zeitgeist. I know I might be preaching to the converted here, but the fertility/demographic crisis is the most significant civilisational crisis, and the mainstream political class and intelligentsia are only just beginning to grasp the enormous problem that we are facing. But I doubt they will face much success in addressing it, as any solution to the problem will necessarily require a repudiation of the modernist individualism which the global political class and intelligentsia currently exist in.

My theory is that Taiwan needs a miracle to survive if the Chinese go in.

Before WW2, Japan had been planning for war with America for many years. The plan was to lure the US fleet out into Japanese waters, slowly eating away at them with submarines and land-based bomber attacks before a decisive battle where Japan would hold the upper hand. Then the US started building an absolutely gigantic fleet set for 1942, blocked Japanese oil imports and the Japanese realized they were doomed unless they got in a huge first strike, so they switched to the Pearl Harbour strategy. The initial Japanese execution was excellent but the US eventually overwhelmed them with tonnage and weight of numbers (plus some qualitative superiority too by the end).

Japan fixated around the wrong things. Why would the American fleet deploy to quickly reinforce the Philippines and accept these risks? Why would the US give up after one decisive battle? 'Who has the better battleship' wasn't that important to the outcome, it was mostly about size.

Nearly all discussion of a Taiwan war revolves around the amphibious campaign, measured in days and weeks. But wars between serious powers usually last for years. Ukraine has lasted for years, it's a war of attrition. We should think about attrition and mass rather than a single decisive battle.

Taiwan is uniquely vulnerable to attrition. It's an island with virtually no domestic energy production, no fertilizer production and maybe 20-30% food self-sufficiency. China may not be able to successfully invade. Amphibious campaigns are hard. But all they need to do is bomb Taiwanese ports to prevent resupply. Taiwan will be forced to capitulate. You can't run a country with no food and no power. China won't get the fabs (the US will blow them up if it looked likely) but they will get the island and the people. The island is an important base, it's important politically and the people are the real reason behind TSMC's success. And all China needs to do to win this slow victory is fire off enough missiles at Taiwan's ports to break through any defence, they need only to avoid complete US victory in Chinese home waters.

Considering China's gigantic industrial capacity, they should easily be capable of darkening the skies of East Asia with missiles and drones. They're the biggest shipbuilder in the world, the biggest producer of drones and test more missiles than anyone else. China has built up huge reserves of fuel and food, they start much closer to self-sufficiency and enjoy overland trade routes, they're far better prepared for blockade than Taiwan.

China would of course prefer a knockout victory where their marines raise the flag over Taipei, they would prefer not to need to impose rationing or conduct a large-scale industrial mobilization. But if a quick victory doesn't seem practical, like the US in 1941, they'll double down and rely on industrial mass to win. They'll do what Putin did but x20, due to their size. That's the scenario we need to avoid.

Palantir's recent ad where they show a bunch of drones blowing up a presumably Chinese fleet at the push of a button is the crux of the problem. The US and gang doesn't just need to do this, we need to do this and prevent it being done to a bunch of big, slow freighters: https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/1868633675190939839

But wars between serious powers usually last for years. Ukraine has lasted for years, it's a war of attrition.

Ukraine has lasted for years because Ukraine doesn't have nukes and doesn't have any way of getting rid of Russia's nukes, thus preventing false alarms leading to Russian launch (and because there is still significant deterrence against Russia using nukes proactively).

Direct war between the USA and PRC is completely different. You'll be lucky if it lasts six months without nuclear exchange.

Admittedly, this still means most Taiwanese die because Taipei/Tainan eat Chinese nukes, but you're assuming your way out of reality thinking that a Taiwan war would last for years.

Why would China nuke Taiwan? From their perspective it would be nuking their own people.

I don't pretend to be an expert on foreign policy in general or China-Taiwan relations in particular, so maybe I'm wrong, but that sounds unlikely to me.

What scenario are you thinking of? US bombers attack Chinese missile launchers (assuming they're conventional) but they're actually nuclear/dual-purpose and it's interpreted as a disarming strike? Incredibly brave US submarine somehow infiltrates the sea of Bohai and sinks a Chinese missile sub, prompting worries about the stability of their arsenal? China wouldn't start such a big war unless they think they have a secure nuclear arsenal. The US nuclear arsenal is very secure.

And neither side has deployed many tactical nukes, unlike in the Cold War. Modern smart weapons are very potent and forces tend to be dispersed, the value of tactical nukes is not as high as it used to be.

And it doesn't seem wise for either party to escalate consciously, why would they? If they suffer a reverse, wait and try again. If China is losing, they'll probably try to extend/expand the war and their mobilization rather than go nuclear. They don't particularly want to irradiate and incinerate their own rogue province.

Does the US care that much about Taiwan? They won't even make an explicit security guarantee for Taiwan, let alone extend their nuclear umbrella so far.

US doesn't go nuclear over taiwan which means china doesn't go nuclear over taiwan. They're not treaty allies.

The Cuban Missile Crisis lasted what, two weeks? We had one accidental launch of nuclear bombers (the Duluth bear fiasco) and had a 2/3 majority onboard a Soviet submarine for "launch nuclear torpedo" (needed unanimous). Procedures have improved somewhat, but also that wasn't even a shooting war.

Sooner or later, there'll be a false alarm that gets treated as real. The chance per day is low, but it adds up.

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Turn off your autocorrect!

lol, rip me. Fixing it now.

In order to get a horizontal line (HTML element <hr/>), you need to type three hyphens ("---"), not a bunch of em dashes ("———").

Yeah I know but my phone autocorrected and I’m too lazy to change it atm

Canada's finance minister quits over Trump tariff dispute with Trudeau

Canada's Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland has resigned from her post, citing disagreements with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on how to respond to incoming President Donald Trump's threat of tariffs. In her publicly-shared resignation letter, Freeland said Canada needs to keep its "fiscal powder dry" to deal with the threat of sweeping tariffs from US President-elect Donald Trump.

She added this means "eschewing costly political gimmicks" that Canada cannot afford. Trump has promised to impose a levy of 25% on imported Canadian goods, which economists have warned would significantly hurt Canada's economy. Referencing the tariffs, Freeland called them a "threat" that needs to be taken "extremely seriously".

She and Trudeau were reportedly also in disagreement over a series of recently-proposed policies by the prime minister designed to address the country's cost-of-living crisis. Among them is a cheque of C$250 that the government wanted to send to every Canadian earning less than C$150,000 annually. These cheques were expected to cost the federal government a total of C$4.68bn. Another is a temporary tax break on essential items during the holidays which is anticipated to cost C$1.6bn in lost tax revenue. Freeland's office had reportedly been concerned about the price of these two policies, saying they are economically unwise at a time when the country's deficit is growing.

Seems like Trudeau is floundering for some ways to keep his job and his head economist didn't approve. I'm not sure why Trump wants to mega tax Canada but it certainly can't have helped. This may end up bringing down the Trudeau government.

Canada maintains tariffs on dairy goods ranging from 241% for liquid milk to 298% for butter.

What is good for the Canadian goose is good for the Canadian gander. I don't want to implement tariffs against Canada. How about they drop their senselessly high tariffs on some American goods before complaining about hypothetical future American tariffs?

I would be hesitant to overexplain this as some grand global struggle; I think this is 90% personality politics and the rest is just the cherry on the top. Trudeau seems to be a very bad man-manager: he's had Freeland, as his #2, eat shit for him on a number of different files. For the past two weeks his office has been leaking stories to various newspapers undermining her. He told her on Friday via zoom that she was going to be replaced as Finance Minister, but oh, before you go, on Monday can you deliver our fall economic statement (that we've delayed for two months)? Oh yes, it shows we have a $60+ billion deficit and we've totally blown past the "fiscal guardrails" we had promised. But once that's done and you've humiliated yourself for me one more time we'll shuffle you to a less-visible cabinet position and maybe you won't lose your seat in the next election in what is supposed to be a safe Liberal seat.

Freeland predictably told him to go fuck yourself. Her public letter announcing her resignation (while also admitting she was getting fired) was pretty scathing as far as these things go. To do it on the day you were supposed to give the long-delayed economic update for the country was as pretty direct a knife to the guts as you can do as Finance Minister. I don't think Trudeau will make it to February.

I'm somewhat surprised they wouldn't wait for Trump to actually show he can do something, instead of reacting on his babble.

In any case, I very much hope this heavy handed approach backfires in the case of Europe. As things stand, helping to maintain US hegemony looks like certain pain, dubious gain. It's perverse how little the US is willing to offer, given their advantages and prosperity. Ideally the Chinese would come up with a straightforwardly superior counteroffer that gives Europe time to restructure while on the side-lines of the broader conflict.

I'm somewhat surprised they wouldn't wait for Trump to actually show he can do something, instead of reacting on his babble.

I'm surprised that you are surprised.

The parts of Canada from which Trudeau (and his voter base) come all define themselves in relation to the US (generally in Blue Tribe-inspired ways). The more on the "Left" you are, the more concerned with the US you are.

The rest of Canada is not like that, but because this is not a government that gives a damn about what the rest of Canada thinks about literally anything whatsoever (the Liberal government functions in a post-national Imperial fashion), you won't see that in the official response.

Even if such a counteroffer were made, would European politicians be willing or able to accept it? My sense is that at least in Germany, print media is uniformly transatlanticist in outlook, and so to accept a Chinese offer over US objections would put you at the receiving end of a protracted storm of bad press. Few politicians inside the mainstream Overton window could weather this, since the sort of blanket press skepticism that would be required for an individual voter to dismiss a consensus of reporting from all the papers has itself been completely contained by association with out-of-window parties and movements.

Thats certainly the impression, but it has to come from somewhere, right? You dont keep ruling an area indefinitely without doing any work.

would European politicians be willing or able to accept it

It is, unfortunately, much easier to argue the opposite, as you do. And past the atlanticist status quo and soft power, there are tools like natgas supply blackmail, devastating sanctions lifetable when negotiations with the Authoritarians are broken off, outright assassinations.

On the other side, I can't really think of anything other than business community revolt, establishment self preservation attempt after economic hardship translates to electoral sweep for the "far" right, uncharacteristically well executed Chinese influence campaign, some significant US blunder or distraction.

Great men of history urgently needed.

"I'm not sure why Trump wants to mega tax Canada but it certainly can't have helped."

Probably a bluff? If not, I would think it will be very politically unpopular in the US and there would be blowback.

Yeah. Trump's MO is usually to say exaggerated things and demand the moon to start from a strong negotiating position and then either get concessions and compromises for the things he actually wants, or at least have someone to point the finger at when he and his supporters don't get what they want.

My guess is this is mostly just because Trudeau is left-aligned so Trump wants to make him beg and plead to please not do this and then Trump will not do this (because he was never really intending to) but either get some sort of concessions out of it or just make himself look strong and Trudeau look weak.

I wonder to what extent Trump's win will inspire regime change in western Allies.

The panic in Canada, Mexico, and Europe over Trump's tariff proposals has revealed how weak these countries are in relation to the U.S. It's basically a meme at this point. "While you were relaxing in cafes and expanding pension benefits, we were mastering the blade LLM. And now you have the audacity to come to US for help!?"

Why should the Trump administration open U.S. markets to regimes who fought his election, in some cases quite directly?

They backed the wrong horse, and now its time to pay the piper. Trump's tariff threats are pretty savvy, and I think he will be able to extract valuable concessions on migration and defense. But better yet would be if these countries join the movement themselves, align their policies with the (IMO more forward thinking) American policies, and get better treatment as a result.

The panic in Canada, Mexico, and Europe over Trump's tariff proposals

My impression is that this 'panic' is considerably overstated, triumphalism and wishful thinking that translates into deranged twitter takes about Trump charming entire rooms of pliant European elites. Reminds me a little of the "we're the good guys again!" atmosphere among American plebs and elites both after the war in Ukraine began.

the movement

What movement? Trump heads no movement (no global one anyway), he has no ideology other than narcissism and vague sentimentalism about the past. He has no coherent ideal or theory about how the world system ought to work in the way that Wilson, FDR, H.W. Bush or Churchill did, certainly none that can be reconciled with his actions - or inaction - as President first time round.

But better yet would be if these countries join the movement themselves, align their policies with the (IMO more forward thinking) American policies

I assume you mean heavy tariffs against china in a futile bid to turn back the time and reindustrialize. I don't understand how diminishing trade between US and allies is supposed to convince them to end their trade with china. When one supermarket's closed, you go to the next one.

If you don't understand, it would probably help to work on the metaphor.

A tariff barrier is not a closing of a supermarket, not least because tariff barriers already exist between American allies. That is what the EU common market is- a trade barrier between the European group of allies and their other allies, including the Americans, the Brits, and so on.

Even more relevantly, a threat of tariff barriers is not a closing of a supermarket either, particularly when everyone (should) understand that the threat is conditional on [insert trade / political concession here]. The conditionality is critical because it can be used to create and either-or dilemma of which supermarket the consumer goes to, as opposed to the consumer has no choice.

The rise of deglobalization and the multipolar world order is not a close off of markets entirely, but a process of choosing / forcing choices of which markets to associate with. Globalization may have been a 'choose any supermarket you want' dynamic, but deglobalization is a mutually exclusive membership program, where association with one supermarket will lead to increasing limits with the other.

The issue for some countries, of course, is that the two supermarkets are not anywhere near to competitive in attractiveness. The European Family, for example, is not going to fine any meaningful offers from ChinaMart on in the 'expeditionary armies to fight in your defense' market, particularly when ChinaMart is close business partners with 'WeSwearWeWon'tBlackmailYou' Russian Discount Gas, which is currently in a special hostile takeover operation against the cousin down the street.

It’s a supermarket simultaneously raising its prices while rolling out an anti-competitive new policy where you can’t buy there if you also buy from the competitor. It assumes that the supermarket has infinite leverage, that it is so unilaterally indispensable that the customer has no choice. This kind of blackmail works until it doesn’t, like russia banking on europe’s gas dependency.

Psychologically, people prefer a less competitive supermarket to being coerced in that way. I think you overestimate your leverage, and how “rational” your customers are. I’m way more pro-american than average, and even I think US allies should tell trump to take a walk.

It’s a supermarket simultaneously raising its prices while rolling out an anti-competitive new policy where you can’t buy there if you also buy from the competitor.

It's not an anti-competitive new policy. It's an old already practiced by the parties which are facing reciprococity, which they themselves justified in the past on the basis of competition. Note, again, the common market trade barrier.

This is one of the issues with the supermarket analogy. Both parties are 'supermarkets', and the trade barriers have already been in play.

It assumes that the supermarket has infinite leverage, that it is so unilaterally indispensable that the customer has no choice. This kind of blackmail works until it doesn’t, like russia banking on europe’s gas dependency.

There is no assumption that there is infinite leverage, only that there is drastically uneven leverage. This uneveness exists- the US and China are not substitute providers for Europe's priorities, and thus Europe cannot credibly claim to go to a different provider for what Europe seek from the US.

This another of the reasons the supermarket analogy is a bad analogy. Supermarkets provide analogous goods and services- however, the US and China do not.

Psychologically, people prefer a less competitive supermarket to being coerced in that way. I think you overestimate your leverage, and how “rational” your customers are. I’m way more pro-american than average, and even I think US allies should tell trump to take a walk.

You seem to be conflating characterization with advocacy, as well as psychology for policy position.

Unfortunately, you cannot tell a security provider to 'take a walk' from not fighting on your side, because your consent is not required for them to not fight for you. Similarly, you cannot tell someone to 'take a walk' from no longer providing a service to you- the breakdown of the relationship is the BATNA, not the continuation of the status quo.

This is a third reason why the supermarket is a bad metaphor- it reverses the agency in the relationship. The US is not a supermarket trying to persuade a European customer to come in but which the European has plentiful alternatives- the US is the only viable service provider that the European customer is trying to convince to stay when the new boss believes it's a bad business relationship. If the European consumer believes the new price is not worth paying, that's not a victory over the no-longer-provider, that is the provider leaving an unprofitable relationship.

Who knows how "rational" Europe is in this scenario but the US has a lot of leverage. In a world where

  1. Europe goes to China, and
  2. The United States withdraws its military umbrella from Europe

Europe is now

  1. At the mercy of Russia from a conventional land invasion (it's unlikely Russia tries to, say, take over Italy but coercion against e.g. Estonia is on the table, I think)
  2. At the mercy of China if China ever decides to do coercive diplomacy
  3. At the mercy of the US – not only could the US cut European shipping in any war with Europe, it would cut European shipping in a war with China – so Europe's entire pivot to China is gambling not only that the United States doesn't become hostile, but also that the US and China never go at it.

The only way for Europe to collectively mitigate these problems is to build a large military, quickly, or to develop European autarchy, relieving the need to trade with China (or possibly both!) But Europe hasn't demonstrated the ability to do that. Building a conventional navy is extremely expensive and the requisite nuclear capability is fraught (I can absolutely see Russia attacking Poland if they try to develop nuclear weapons). And this is assuming Europe can pull this off in perfect harmony instead of getting locked in another European arms race or getting dominated by the only European power with nuclear weapons (France – I doubt England splits from the US and I'm counting Russia as its own thing.)

I dunno the exact numbers involved so who knows how the math plays out. But to me it seems like the supermarket has a lot of leverage.

At the mercy of China if China ever decides to do coercive diplomacy

The relative cost of this goes down the more nakedly transactional the US gets in US-European relations. If your choices are to get bent over a barrel now by the US or maybe get bent over by a barrel later by China, cutting a deal with China is going to start looking a great deal more appealing.

A large part of US power is that it doesn't demand very much of its allies (occasional Article 5 moment aside); the more the US tries to treat its allies like vassals or tributaries, the weaker that soft power grows. And if you're stuck dealing with a transactional superpower, you might as well go with the one offering money instead of demanding it.

At the mercy of the US – not only could the US cut European shipping in any war with Europe

Give me your scenario for a US-EU war.

If your choices are to get bent over a barrel now by the US or maybe get bent over by a barrel later by China, cutting a deal with China is going to start looking a great deal more appealing. A large part of US power is that it doesn't demand very much of its allies (occasional Article 5 moment aside)

Yes, I agree with this. I just think that trading with China is more expensive than it seems up front because it raises a lot of vulnerabilities that need to be mitigated against (or Europe can ignore them and then risk the outcome). But who knows, maybe it's best to run the risk and not mitigate in the long run since you can ramp up profits in the short term!

Give me your scenario for a US-EU war.

Well, my point here is more that if the US and EU (broadly) aren't allies, the EU would need to plan for a potential conflict with the US, otherwise they are at the mercy of US coercive diplomacy. (I'll just add that the EU pivot to China is me accepting Tree's scenario - I'm not sure how likely this is.) I don't foresee a near-term US-EU war (in part because I am not sure "the EU" will end up being unified enough to be a military alliance) but I don't think adopting a policy of non-defense is the wisest long-run strategy - even if the United States doesn't take advantage of it, others might. I will add that at least one German defense commenter I've read has spoken about the need for Europe to secure itself against the US militarily - I am not certain if that's remotely within the Overton window, possibly it's just literally one guy. But it's an interesting perspective to read.

But, hedging aside, scenarios are fun, so, a hypothetical:

The year is 2039. It's been a bad decade for American relations with Europe, between the President's 2026 revelation that FVEYS had been aware of Ukraine's plans to sabotage Nord Stream, the 2027 "annexation" of Greenland - accomplished without Danish consent via a referendum in Greenland - and the 2029 Sino-American war, which ended as abruptly as it began when the United States retaliated against a devastating Chinese conventional first strike on its naval and air assets by using nuclear weapons against the Chinese amphibious fleet in harbor.

It's also been a bad decade for Europe generally. Since their pivot to China, they've been subject to escalating tariffs from the United States. Their new chief trade partner is still finding unexploded mines in its coastal areas, and has been spending money on domestic disaster clean up - as devastating as the US nuclear weapons strikes were, the fallout from Taiwan's missile attack on the Three Gorges Dam was more devastating, even if it was not radioactive. And Russia, still licking its wounds, has not been inclined to forgive or forget the EU's support for Ukraine - which still weighs down Europe considerably, as Russia's destruction of its energy infrastructure has resulted in Ukraine drawing power from the European grid, starving it of resources.

Perhaps it is to distract from the economic malaise and renewed impetus for Catalan secession that Spain has been pushing the issue of Gibraltar harder than usual, and in 2039 a long-awaited referendum takes place. To everyone's surprise, Gibraltar votes - narrowly - to assert its sovereign right to leave English governance, opening the door to its long-awaited return to Spanish territory. However, England refuses to recognize the referendum, citing alleged voter irregularities, possible Russian interference, and the facial implausibility of the results given past elections, and moves to reinforce Gibraltar with additional troops. The EU makes various official statements, resolutions, and pronouncements that England is to respect the will of its voters.

When England refuses to respond to Brussels, the Spanish military overruns Gibraltar's tripline defense force. England responds with airstrikes from its naval task force, only to lose her only operational aircraft carrier to a Spanish submarine. Deprived of air cover for a surface fleet, England plans to conduct a far blockade of the Strait with nuclear submarines and, to facilitate this, launches cruise missile strikes on Spanish maritime patrol aircraft. Spanish intelligence assesses that US recon assets were involved in facilitating the strike, and retaliates by announcing the Strait of Gibraltar is closed to US traffic, contrary to international law.

The United States, which has already provided material aid to England during the conflict, declares a state of war exists between the United States and Spain (again!). With US naval assets depleted due to the war with China, Congress issues letters of marque and reprisal, authorizing the search and seizure of any ship that is or may be carrying military or dual-purpose goods to Spain.

In practice, this is nearly any ship with a European destination, and US venture capitalists have a very broad definition of what constitutes "dual-purpose goods" and "Spanish destination." It's not long before all of continental Europe of smarting under the humiliation of having their ships boarded and cargoes seized by American privateers, who within six months are operating effectively in both the Arabian Sea and the Atlantic. With Spanish naval assets tied up in a game of cat-and-mouse with British nuclear submarines, Europe must decide whether to continue enduring the consequences, or commit its naval assets to breaking the Anglo-American stranglehold and restoring its freedom of navigation.

(Do I think any of the above is likely? Not particularly. But it was fun to write up! I'd be interested to hear your scenario.)

That was a fun read!

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The relative cost of this goes down the more nakedly transactional the US gets in US-European relations. If your choices are to get bent over a barrel now by the US or maybe get bent over by a barrel later by China, cutting a deal with China is going to start looking a great deal more appealing.

You reversed the incentive structure of cutting a deal.

The issue with this framing is that in the non-hypothetical the EU is already getting bent over a barrel by China. This is most notable in the field of green technology (solar panels, EVs, etc.), where for a lot of notable (and sometimes ethically questionable) reasons the Chinese state owned / backed enterprises have cornered the European markets in fields that the Europeans a decade or so thought they would dominate. Moreover, the expectation of China as a forever growth market has given way to the general recognition of PRC mercantilist strategy of IP theft and domestic protectionism, which limits than reverses chinese market share of industrial production, i.e. the great big German hope.

There are other fields and contexts as well, but the construct of a guaranteed versus uncertain screwing has since been passed by the paradigm that Europe is already getting screwed by the one that is presented as the hypothetical lesser risk.

As such, this framing should be reversed for understanding the actor perspectives. There is no choice about Europe being bent over a barrel now- it's already happening- but it's already happening with the Chinese, whereas the potential US risk may be mitigated by cutting a deal.

A large part of US power is that it doesn't demand very much of its allies (occasional Article 5 moment aside); the more the US tries to treat its allies like vassals or tributaries, the weaker that soft power grows. And if you're stuck dealing with a transactional superpower, you might as well go with the one offering money instead of demanding it.

This confuses money flows between various actors, which undermine the monetary argument.

The 2022 China-EU trade balance was roughly 390 billion Euros in China's favor. The 2022 US-EU trade balance was about 130 billion in the EU's favor. Europe is already dealing with a transactional power, and paying quite a bit for the privilege.

The issue with your framing is that you neglect a third and more relevant patron-client relationship: the protectorate. In a protectorate relationship, the patron party subsidizes the client rather than extracts the resources. In the US-European context, this subsidy has been through granting the Europeans favorable access to US markets without reciprocity for US firms to access European markets since the early Cold War.

While in economic terms there is no meaningful difference between raising taxes or decreasing subsidies, in diplomatic terms there is a difference between demanding money and offering less of it.

The US military umbrella, while nice, is unnecessary against russia’s second rate military (insert joke about joining the ukrainian military umbrella instead).

so Europe's entire pivot to China is gambling not only that the United States doesn't become hostile, but also that the US and China never go at it.

If the US and China go at it, it would be far better for us to sit on the sidelines than to be stuck in the US supermarket. The manager’s already raising prices in peacetime, we’d better get out before he turns desperate and asks us to pay in blood.

What is the threat of ‘the US becoming hostile’? Is the US going to double the tariffs to punish us from walking away because of the tariffs? Or is the threat war, blockade, invasion? If so , then the normal human pride reaction would be to militarize, get more nukes, and cooperate with US enemies, not accept US blackmail.

But neither I nor the rest of europe appears to believe that is a real threat – what you interpret as an inability to build a large army, I view as unwillingness because of a perceived lack of need: see minimal percent of GDP invested in the military, lack of nukes despite know-how.

Tacitus famously said that the Secret of the Empire was that an emperor did not have to be made at Rome . In other words, that the senate’s power was a sham and the ‘first senator among equals’ was in reality a military dictator.

Is the US secretly a military dictator, even though we peripherals pretend it’s a business partner, or worse, a friend? To me the strongest argument against is that allied US countries who could retaliate militarily after a US invasion (France, UK) have no meaningfully different politics and geopolitics compared to countries who couldn’t (Germany, Spain, Italy, Japan, etc). If anything, western nuclear powers seem even more eager to support the US, which is the opposite of what you would expect from 'hard' power relations.

If the US and China go at it, it would be far better for us to sit on the sidelines than to be stuck in the US supermarket. The manager’s already raising prices in peacetime, we’d better get out before he turns desperate and asks us to pay in blood.

Why is the manager being desperate if he no longer subsidizes your purchases?

Again, bad market metaphors are bad metaphors, but the US economic relationship with Europe- the 'supermarket'- is not a net moneymaker for the US. The trade balance between the US and EU is, and has for decades been, in Europe's favor, in part because of trade barriers such as the European common market wall.

If you want to make a marketplace metaphor, this is the market selling to the consumers at a loss. There can be benefits for the US side of the of the trade (advantage to the specific industries benefiting more), there can be non-monetary gains from providing subdisized services, but if you want to model the relationship as a commercial transaction (shopper and supermarket), the supermarket stops losing money the sooner it gets out of the business of subsidizing goods.

This is a mercantilist perspectives that get involved in arguments of why mercantilism isn't a good strategy for countries even if it makes sense for businesses, and service-vs-good economy differences, but the business case for the US-European relationship is not 'the Europeans bring in more commercial profits than costs.'

But neither I nor the rest of europe appears to believe that is a real threat – what you interpret as an inability to build a large army, I view as unwillingness because of a perceived lack of need: see minimal percent of GDP invested in the military, lack of nukes despite know-how.

You are not in conflict with Donald Trump when you say you do not believe that there is no real threat, you are in agreement. What you consider blackmail is just the natural extension of that consensus.

The American-European economic relationship for the better part of the last century has been an extension of the Cold War American-European strategic alliance. But instead of the classic hegemon relationship of military protection in exchange for preferential market access for the hegemon (hegemon provides client protection in exchange for money), the Cold War alliance was the inverse- the Americans gave the Europeans preferential market access in exchange for strategic deference. This started with the Marshal Plan, continued with things like the trilateral agreements for getting the Japanese and Koreans during their recognistruction phases, and continued in various forms elsewhere.

If the Europeans are uninterested, unable, and/or otherwise unwilling to provide strategic deference- particularly due to a lack of mutual need- there is no strategic basis for continuing to pay for the strategic relationship.

The result of this what you call 'blackmail'- threatening to no longer pay (via ending preferential trade access that were the forms of payment) for services no longer rendered (strategic deference and military partnership).

OK, so the main disagreement is that I think trade balance is irrelevant . Trade isn’t a zero sum game where the US sells ‘at loss’ because they have a trade deficit. It’s kind of the opposite really, given that trade surplus countries are accused of ‘dumping’ manufactured goods like electric cars or planes they supposedly produce at a loss.

The excellent american economic health has gone hand in hand with trade deficits, to the point that many have suspected that americans get free stuff while the rest of the world gets worthless dollars. I’m not saying it’s causal, just that trump’s domestic story of exploited americans might not play as well elsewhere, when he’s negotiating supermarket prices. Non-americans have their own exploitation story, and at least they're, you know, poorer.

Because I see trade as mutually beneficial, you can understand why trump’s threats look more like ‘blackmail’ to me , and I understand why to you or trump it’s just ‘putting pressure’.

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The US military umbrella, while nice, is unnecessary against russia’s second rate military (insert joke about joining the ukrainian military umbrella instead).

First off, Russia is currently eating Europe's largest military land power for lunch. When they finish digesting, they will be bigger and stronger than they are now, both by virtue of having acquired a larger military and by virtue of gaining invaluable combat experience, including against Europe's most modern weapons systems. (This isn't a fringe view! This is the US/NATO military assessment of the situation!) Meanwhile, Europe (which nearly ran out of munitions in 2011 fighting a minor war of choice against Libya and had to be bailed out by the United States) is militarily weaker now than it was before the conflict, in no small part due to having donated large numbers of its weapons systems to Ukraine.

Secondly - if the US pulls out of NATO/Europe, it should not be taken for granted that "Europe" will act as a collective. That's the risk, I think - not Russia deciding it wants to fight a unified Europe, but rather Russia engaging in coercive diplomacy against e.g. Estonia and Germany, France and Spain deciding they don't care.

If the US and China go at it, it would be far better for us to sit on the sidelines than to be stuck in the US supermarket.

If Europe is China's trading partner, and the US and China go at it, the US may close shipping lanes to China, either by a blockade or just incidentally through e.g. mining Chinese waters. (India may try this as well in a conflict, but I think they have less capability to do so). The reverse is unlikely - China probably wouldn't try to threaten Atlantic shipping. The likely threat, I think, isn't Europe getting drawn into a war so much as their chief trading partner no longer being able to trade.

What is the threat of ‘the US becoming hostile’?

Over the long run of state relations, there is always the threat of nation-states becoming hostile to each other if they do not share interests. Personally, I think that American planners recognize a unified Europe (and China) as the only likely competitors to their dominance over the long course of history. If Europe begins to act in a unified fashion, we should expect the United States to react accordingly. (This will be by UK-style "offshore balancing" rather than "declaring war on the continent.") In fact, I would argue that the United States has already acted in this fashion.

then the normal human pride reaction would be to militarize, get more nukes, and cooperate with US enemies

Does Europe [broadly] have a normal human pride reaction? For instance, in 2014, Russia threatened to cut off gas supplies to Europe. Instead of remilitarizing, Germany...doubled down on energy deals with Russia. (This was not in alignment with US interests or desires at all, in case you're under the idea that Germany is in lockstep with the States.)

I view as unwillingness because of a perceived lack of need: see minimal percent of GDP invested in the military, lack of nukes despite know-how.

I agree there is - or was - a perceived lack of need, prior to 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea. And, a mere 9 years later, Germany has finally hit their NATO 2% defense spending target. Look, I'm not saying it's impossible for Europe to reindustrialize and remilitarize in the long run. But I am saying that they haven't demonstrated the ability to do so. I think it's reasonable to assume that it will be a difficult and expensive task.

Is the US secretly a military dictator, even though we peripherals pretend it’s a business partner, or worse, a friend?

I don't think it's necessarily wise or helpful to reduce complex geopolitics to simplistic roles like "friend" "military dictator" "business partner" etc. This is particularly true when US policies are not towards Europe as a whole (although I've spoken reductively at this level) but are towards each of the separate European states, and its relations with states such as England are different to its relations with states such as France or Germany. In fact, I think a lot of the US relationship with Europe after World War Two is best explained by understanding England's strategy and foreign policy. England has, with some degree of success, managed to get the United States to embrace England's goals as its own - this is most obvious when it comes to things like "entering World Wars on England's side" and somewhat more subtle when it comes to the goals of e.g. NATO. Which were - as per the words of its first Secretary General, an Englishman - “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” Does that make the US a military dictator? Friend? Business partner? Maybe a bit of all three. Maybe it depends a bit on where and when you sit.

Personally, I think that American planners recognize a unified Europe (and China) as the only likely competitors to their dominance over the long course of history.

Over the very long course of history, the Russian empire has the ability to be a competitor for the United States. It happens to be an incompetent corrupt oligarchy which doesn’t care about economic growth. But there are possible-if-not-plausible futures where a Russian empire is a superpower again.

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Building a conventional navy is extremely expensive and the requisite nuclear capability is fraught (I can absolutely see Russia attacking Poland if they try to develop nuclear weapons).

Building submersible suicide drones is extremely cheap though.

How do cheap submersible suicide drones solve any of the problems I outlined?

You don't need conventional navy if you sink everything that moves.

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Sabotaging the ability of large nations to sabotage the shipping of small ones, I guess. Worst case I suppose shopping by sea becomes generally suicidal for everyone.

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AFAICT Trudeau has so mismanaged Canada that populist gimmicks(and Canada may be poorer than the US, but C$250 is not going to win that many hearts and minds) can't really do more damage in the time he has left. More than likely Freeland is jumping off a sinking ship.

can't really do more damage in the time he has left

Yes, but the damage is the point. More damage means more for the opposition to clean up, and the less they can actually get done by the time the Eastern Big City party's time comes round again.

It's rational for him, therefore, to fuck up everything in the only way he knows how, in the same way an angry cable guy cuts the cables off so far down in the box that they need to be replaced or spliced- a bad-faith attempt to cost the next company time and money. Which is important in a "well, the other guys couldn't fix the intentional sabotage, so why not vote for the saboteurs?" context, which politics is.

temporary tax break on essential items during the holidays

These ideas sound right out of the UK in the 50s and 60s: micromanagment flailing from one crisis to the next while the economy goes to pieces. But what possible reason does Canada have for doing so poorly? They didn't lose an empire or cripple themselves in a world war!

I'm starting to think Trump wants a go at Canada because his real estate shark senses are telling him there's cheap blood in the water.

Hey neighbor, I heard you were having trouble making payments on your home, so I went to the bank and arranged a Christmas miracle. And well... You have five minutes to get out of my new house. I'm such a nice guy I'll even lend you $3.50 for a bus to the homeless shelter.

But what possible reason does Canada have for doing so poorly?

Of the many things people have said about Trudeau, no one has ever called him competent.

For the unfamiliar, it's a temporary suspension of the Federal sales tax on this subset of items.

It came into effect three weeks after the initial announcement, and will end two months later. Retailers are responsible for categorizing children's LEGO (intended for those under 14) separately from adult LEGO (intended for those 14+) because only the first is tax-exempt. Or they could choose not to participate, in which case they would collect and remit the tax, and the customer could file to have the GST they paid on exempt items refunded (like anyone is going to do that).

It's a horrible amount of effort and confusion for a tiny amount of tax cuts.

Downtown Edmonton's Liberal MP has put up posters advertising the GST holiday. Not billboards, posters - right next to ones advertising tattoo parlours, car enthusiast clubs, and metal shows. I've never seen a major party do that before, it strikes me as desperate.

Amid cuts to basic research, New Zealand scraps all support for social sciences:

This week, in an announcement that stunned New Zealand’s research community, the country’s center-right coalition government said it would divert half of the NZ$75 million Marsden Fund, the nation’s sole funding source for fundamental science, to “research with economic benefits.” Moreover, the fund would no longer support any social sciences and humanities research, and the expert panels considering these proposals would be disbanded. [emphasis mine]

In announcing the change, Minister of Science, Innovation and Technology Judith Collins said the fund should focus on “core science” that supports economic growth and “a science sector that drives high-tech, high-productivity, high-value businesses and jobs.”

Frankly, they're going in the wrong direction. A great deal of technology developed over the last 30 years (social media, generative AI, frankly the internet itself) is either neutral/mixed at best or actively harmful at worst. If anything we need to be putting the brakes on "high-tech, high-productivity" jobs. Diverting funds to university social science departments would be a good way of slowing things down, at least. Despite my substantial disagreements with the wokeists, I'm willing to fund them if they can act as a counterbalance to a complete takeover by utilitarian techbroism.

I don't trust big tech to honestly evaluate the impacts and effects of their own products. We need a neutral, or even outright adversarial, independent body to investigate issues like say, the effects of social media on teenage mental health, and the university seems as good a place to do it as any (it might be objected that such research falls under the heading of "psychology" or maybe even "economics" rather than "social sciences" - but I doubt that the people in favor of these cuts would be particularly friendly to psychology or economics departments).

There are certain legitimate and even pressing research topics (e.g. psychological differences between racial groups, impact of racial diversity on workplaces, etc) that fall under the heading of "social sciences", but which are unfortunately impossible to investigate honestly in today's climate of ideological capture. The ideal solution to this would be to simply reform social sciences departments and make them open to honest inquiry again, rather than destroying them altogether.

Social sciences are, in principle, obviously worth funding. Philosophy (Nietzsche was actually a professor of philology), archeology, digging texts out of archives and writing history rank the highest for me, but there's valuable work in a lot of fields. A lot of the best work in economics has directly affected the way we organize the economy and the way businesses do business.

90% of publicly funded 'social science' is not that. It's hundreds of millions of words of repetitive, uninspired analysis of history or literature, like the work of that Ally Louks who blew up on twitter. The thing wrong with her, contra all of RW twitter, isn't that she's too woke or too communist or anything. Michel Foucault was woke for his time, but is obviously worth reading, and thousands of leftist academics have written things worth reading across many different fields. Her work, and 90% of modern humanities academic work, just isn't. And not in the "only 10 experts could appreciate or even understand it" sense, like in research math, but in the sense that there's no interesting content in it at all. There are a hundred thousand academics at various colleges and universities who either aren't smart enough or aren't independent-minded enough to develop good taste about what to research, and are paid (although not paid very much) to write ... really anything, so long as it's topical and isn't too embarassing, and can get published in a junk journal or turned into a book chapter or something.

Now the most valuable work is very valuable, and if you had to choose all or nothing (which you don't!), the best history and economics is still worth funding the garbage. (The money isn't counterfactually going to whatever you think is valuable, it's probably going to more welfare.) Or that's what I'd say in America, but New Zealand probably has a lot less than 5% of the global top 5%, so whatever.

The obvious answer would be to cut 90% of it and only keep the high quality stuff, but the entire problem is that there's no reasonable metric to measure how impactful research actually is without waiting 200 years. And all the ones that people have hacked together are gamed so the useless stuff is actually on top rather than on the bottom.

Going for economic value isn't the worst you could do really. Universities went to shit when States figured out they were important and tried to keep them afloat with free money. What really needs to happen is that universities have skin in the game again and actually have to maintain relevance instead of coasting on their established reputation. Only the fear of death can push institutions to shrink instead of grow. And sometimes not even that.

Disagree. You can't precisely measure quality, but smart generalists can separate bad articles like "How Young People Portrayed Their Experiences in Therapeutic Residential Care in Portugal: A Mixed Methods Study" and "Missandei deserves better": A case study on loving Blackness through critical fan fiction" from the kinds of humanities academic work you might want published. One can tell the difference between 'this might be valuable' and 'this definitely isn't'. The problem is the people funding this stuff aren't doing that.

You can't do this at scale because power can't be destroyed.

The day you pick someone to do this is the day that person goes on the road to the corruption that led us here.

Academia was once run by people who were good at detecting bullshit. And then people got free money for producing garbage that follows the theme set by the State.

Remove the free money and stop using the results of academia to prop up the running class. No less than that will fix it.

I don't have a strong feeling about the social sciences, but NZ is in for a nasty surprise if they think the type of research done in "core science" departments these days is economically useful. Some of the engineering departments are in better shape, but people in the "core sciences" tend to work on flavor of the month stuff that grant agencies think are good (which is often very far from economic usefulness) and then publish large numbers of garbage papers on the subject to inflate their citation counts. It's not clear to me how funding this is any better than the social sciences -- if anything it might be worse because it takes up time, effort, and money from people who might otherwise be doing something useful.

A lot of these departments, even the ones that arent explicitly engineering, do work for industry as a sort of "expensive instruments for rent".

At least the research done in the harder sciences is based on the scientific method and is factual. That alone makes it at least worth doing. I’m sure it’s at least possible to further direct the funds towards useful research rather than fluff, but even fluff has a use case if it’s based on facts rather than being crafted just-so stories about mermaids in literature or the entire fields of gender studies and race studies.

I disagree, mostly because the social “sciences” are more or less pseudoscience at this point. Very little science in done in those fields and what little is done rarely replicates. And of course there are topics that nobody will touch because it’s heresy and might lead to a career exterminatus. The entire system is too corrupt to give anything useful, and as such shouldn’t be funded by the government. Neurological science is the better way to get at the human mind, not woo. To fund social “science” is to pay a guy n a lab coat to find a way to give cathedral propaganda the veneer of science.

If the government is to fund science, it must fund real science. Physics, astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, biology, medicine, etc. are real sciences that use the scientific method to determine what reality is. They don’t start from their agenda and work to sane wash it.

I’m not sure that social sciences were ever dispassionate inquiry to begin with. I’m pretty sure that very few in those fields have ever done real science and wouldn’t know where to begin. As such I’m inclined to burn it down and ignore it until it can be rebuilt in the mold of harder sciences where the goal is to find truth and to test ideas rigorously. As they sit now, I don’t think they’re so much signal as anti signal— having someone cite sociology or psychology makes me less inclined to believe the claim than one made by anyone else.

Psychology is absolutely "real science", at least potentially. That these fields are filled with 110-IQ women with left-wing biases, who wish not to arrive at any conclusions which contradicts modern morality or politics, is an unfortunate fact unrelated to the potential of psychology as a field.

I oppose the idea that all "real science" is objective, since this fuels fields which are inhuman and which promote the inhuman as better than what's human. I'll even claim that most of the modern worlds problems is caused by designing society in a "rational" way which is actually incompatible with human nature. We also tend to compare what's "rational, logical or scientific" to ourselves, and arrive at the conclusion that human beings are flawed and wrong, and that they should change to become more rational, logical and scientific. This is a fallacy in that it tells the territory to approximate the map, rather than building maps which seek to approximate the territory.

The Tao Te Ching is still ahead of the consensus of today in multiple areas. "The prince" likely still holds up today (admittedly I haven't read this one). Buddhist meditation and enlightenment still hold research value today. And this is just older Psychology. There's also value in religion, values, wisdom, culture, rituals, etc.

No science, mathematics, nor logic can deal well with these areas at all. They're mere tools. You need to put humanity in the center in order to benefit humanity.

I almost agree with "The social science is so corrupt that it's almost worthless", but that's the fault of academia, politics and well, corruption. Self-help books are still popular today despite them not being hard science, and the lies society create about gender and sexuality has spawned "red pill" groups online which are closer to the truth than the consensus (thought they aren't perfect). In fact, I love psychology because it can explain why this problem happened in the first place (denial/repression of unpleasant parts of reality)

By the way, you don't need the scientific method to approximate truth in the first place. We're starting to forget this as the scientific method is so popular.

I oppose the idea that all "real science" is objective, since this fuels fields which are inhuman and which promote the inhuman as better than what's human. I'll even claim that most of the modern worlds problems is caused by designing society in a "rational" way which is actually incompatible with human nature.

I think the problem here is that since science has historically provided many obviously good things, a lot of people think that the word 'science' just means 'good things', so if you say that something is not science, to a lot of people it sounds like you are saying that it is not good. However, you don't need science to decide that you want your society to have public parks, sports stadiums, museums or hospitals. This is also probably the issue with social sciences. As long as people can claim that what social sciences are doing is science, it will sound to a lot of people that what they are doing is good. If you start asking what is it actually good for, people might stop to think and realize that the answer is "not much".

I’m not suggesting there’s no wisdom in these sources, but I don’t think they should be regarded as factual until actually verified. There’s a lot of wisdom in older practices, I’ll agree with that. But I think funding such a thing through government grants to a university to produce papers that will be treated as factual creates a problem as, again, social sciences as they occur in university are not dispassionate inquiries into the reality of how human beings behave or think or the like. It’s agenda driven, and more often than not the studies are poorly done leading to a crisis of replication.

And furthermore, just because something is popular doesn’t mean it actually works, it doesn’t mean it’s actually true. Outside of CBT, DBT, and modern Stoic approaches to solving problems in your life, most of it frankly is nonsense. It tells people basically what they want to hear — that they’re already awesome, and that if they just reach for whatever they’re wanting, the universe will give the success. Selling people something that they want to be true and that life is easy and they’re destined to succeed is an easy way to print money. However, just as an observation, the number of self-help books a person owns seems inversely proportional to the person’s mental health. It doesn’t seem to actually wrk. In many cases, talk therapy seems to be no better than a long talk with anyone else. I’ll admit to not keeping up with Redpilll, though I think I’m personally politically Yarvin-pilled. I think it similar, though Yarvin Pilling is much more about political science and political philosophy than psychology.

I think some wisdom is of the type which can't be verified. I can rewrite sections of the Tao Te Ching such that it says a lot of things that we consider impressive today. For instance "acting without interest" is wise in that it avoids Goodhart's law and "One who loves the self as the world can be entrusted with the world" makes sense from the point of alignment, at least in humans (recreating human love in AIs might prove difficult, after all).

I agree that agenda driven universities can't be trusted with ancient wisdom. The only reason they can be trusted with math is that the rules are verifiable and because they're symbols which cannot be connected to anything that people have strong feelings about.

Selling people something that they want to be true

This seems to be modern self-help and not something that I brought up. But you're not exactly wrong, for there's a line in the alchemist which says something like "When you want something enough, the whole universe conspires in helping you attain it". But I don't think these statements are supposed to be true. Like "Believe in yourself", it's telling people to have a bias which, on average, works out better than not having said bias. Our belief influences our reality, even though they do not influence objective reality. So quotes like "Whether you think you can or not, you're right" are some degree of true. But most people have a hard time believing in themselves, so they just say "the universe" or ask "god" in their prayers, for they can still believe in something greater than themselves. These things are not intuitive at all unless you're told them.

But newer self-help books are made to make money, and therefore to make you feel good and to feel like you like the book that you paid money for. The claims of these books aren't impossible to achieve, but one does not get there without actual effort, be it conscious or unconscious (tricking your brain into heading towards your goal through visualization techniques and such)

the number of self-help books a person owns seems inversely proportional to the person’s mental health

I don't think that's a fair argument, though it's true. I even like the snakiness. But you could also argue that the more medicine somebody has in their home, the less healthy they tend to be. This does not dismiss the value of medicine, right?

By "Red pill" I was most referring to the dating aspects. Men get burned when they follow advice that they're given, especially by girls. Red pill takes are more honest about human nature and about what girls want. But the best dating books focus on "inner game" which is another way of saying "self-improvement", so for a largely unregultated response to men being mislead by society (and women) there's surprisingly little negativity. Of course, there's still some spiteful incels and superficial pick-up artists, but I find that they're a minority.

Yarvin is said to be part of the "Intellectual dark web", and while this is a very loosely defined cluster, I find that anything from there is like a breath of fresh air, no matter the subject in question or the speaker. By the way, since most of what I dislike is modern, I simply just consume older material. I regard the Erhard Seminars Training (1971-1984) books and Og Mandinos "The university of success" (1980) as high quality. Newer self-help is too kind for me, I want to be called out like when I'm reading thelastpsychiatrist

I oppose the idea that all "real science" is objective, since this fuels fields which are inhuman and which promote the inhuman as better than what's human.

Your complaint seems orthogonal to whether we define science as only including the objective. I personally think that the true issue is not how we define science, but the almost-religious fervor people have for science. I quite agree that science is not some final arbiter of truth, and that many important things are completely outside the purview of science. I also think it's fair to say that anything which is not objective isn't real science, though. The two aren't in conflict.

I agree, I dislike the statement "anything not objective is not real science" only because it's used to dismiss anything outside of science as "pseudo-science" or "woo", which is to overestimate the utility of science and to create a false dichotomy. Perhaps it's laziness on my part, one just puts themselves in a difficult position if they attempt defending or even explaining the value of unscientific knowledge

Neurological science is the better way to get at the human mind, not woo.

Hoo boy, do I have some bad news for you.

Molecular biology works fine for messing around with neurons in a tissue culture dish, but it provides remarkably little insight into a complex system like the brain. It's good for saying if I knock this gene out we lose action potentials, therefore this gene is at least required for that process (how it fits in with the 1000s of other genes involved in that process? Often much less clear).

Anytime you zoom out to a broader systems-level view, or anytime you disconnect your work from some ground truth we're inevitably left with woo. If it weren't for clinical trials enforcing some measure of 'woo' colliding with reality, probably the entirety of the life sciences wouldn't be that far off from phrenology-level fMRI experiments.

Anyways. Sure, the social sciences are a waste of time from a scientific standpoint. I'd argue they have other uses, but that's a bit beside my point - the majority of research in the life sciences as a whole is largely subjective bullshit. It's always a shock to fresh students coming in how arbitrary and ineffective a lot of what we do is when they're used to textbooks having all the answers and making science out to be some dispassionate, objective endeavor.

Maybe we have different definitions of social sciences. I don't think that history, for example, is a waste of time from a scientific standpoint. You can't do experiments with history, but you can certainly use logic to figure out that some theories about what happened in the past are more likely to be accurate than others, you can search for additional primary evidence, and so on.

History, economics, and political science are real sciences even if they are not as rigorous as physics and it is difficult or impossible to run experiments in them. Sure, there is a lot of ideological bullshit in all three of those fields, but there is also a lot of rational analysis. The typical kind of academic history writing that I have seen isn't some barely disguised attempt to push a political ideology, it is more like a lawyer's arguments in a legal case that revolves around whether something happened on a certain date. It is true that there are taboos that prevent some topics from being widely brought up, but that does not mean that these entire fields are worthless.

Anything that has to include the word “science” in its name is not a science

Materials science

"Computer science"?

Famously neither a science, nor about computers.

Correct. Computer science is strictly speaking a branch of mathematics.

i like this paper (Computer Science: Not about Computers, Not Science) https://www2.lawrence.edu/fast/krebsbak/Research/Publications/pdf/fecs15.pdf

Huh. Never thought I would see my alma mater in the wild. The world is small, I guess.

Underlying our approach to this subject is our conviction that "computer science" is not a science and that its significance has little to do with computers. The computer revolution is a revolution in the way we think and in the way we express what we think. The essence of this change is the emergence of what might best be called procedural epistemology—the study of the structure of knowledge from an imperative point of view, as opposed to the more declarative point of view taken by classical mathematical subjects. Mathematics provides a framework for dealing precisely with notions of "what is". Computation provides a framework for dealing precisely with notions of "how to".

Harold "Hal" Abelson, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

Or then there's this piece (from one B. Jacobs) back in 2005: ""Computer Science" is Not Science and "Software Engineering" is Not Engineering"

If the software discipline is "science", then the scientific process should be available to settle arguments. But it seems to fail. Some suggest that instead it is "engineering", not "science". But engineering is nothing more than applied science. For example, in engineering, bridge designs are tested against reality in the longer run. Even in the short run, bridge models can be tested in environments that simulate reality. Simulations are a short-cut to reality, but still bound to reality if we want them to be useful. If a bridge eventually fails, and the failure is not a construction or materials flaw, then what is left is the engineering of the bridge to blame. An engineer's model must be tightly bound to the laws of physics and chemistry. The engineer is married to the laws whether he/she wants to be or not.

But we don't have this in software designs for the most part. We have the requirements, such as what the input and output looks like and the run-time constraints which dictate the maximum time a given operation is allowed to take. But there is much in-between these that is elusive to objective metrics.

…

So, if physical engineering is really science ("applied science" to be more exact), but software design does not follow the same pattern, then what is software design? Perhaps it is math. Math is not inherently bound to the physical world. Some do contentiously argue that it is bound because it may not necessarily be valid in hypothetical or real alternative universe(s) that have rules stranger than we can envision, but for practical purposes we can generally consider it independent of the known laws of physics, nature, biology, etc.

I thought it was common knowledge that computer science is a branch of mathematics. As a computer science major this wasn't really controversial. Although a find that definition of engineering lacking. Engineers build things and study how best to build things, software engineering fits this mold pretty centrally.

Math is where the inverse of "the" logarithm function is eˣ, computer science is where it's 2ˣ, engineering and science are where it's 10ˣ.

More seriously, your definition of engineering is way better than theirs. Half of engineering is figuring out where it is and isn't safe to not bound your model to the laws of physics and chemistry too tightly. E.g. atoms are a pretty big deal, but if your elasticity model is atomistic and you're building something that's not nanometer-scale then you're doing it wrong.

Social science has never produced good results, afaik. The soft sciences have pretty much always had low replication rates and a general lack of rigor. Things like IQ are more statistics than psychology; even very well established psychological concepts have been falsified.

Seriously there’s any number of pseudoscientific fields which maintain identical or even better rigor than psychology- to say nothing of grievance studies- to show that psychic powers are real and aliens are kidnapping people regularly and ley lines and astrology are part of medical treatment. I would suggest, if the government needs to fund research which isn’t hard science, that it funds aliens and Bigfoot instead of the trollop it currently does- this will at least be interesting to read.

Trollop? like, a prostitute? I don't get it.

I think it's troll op as in troll operation (soft sciences are one big troll op), similar to your typical rdrama stunts.

I'm going to guess they meant tripe but were auto-corrected.

The ideal solution to this would be to simply reform social sciences departments and make them open to honest inquiry again, rather than destroying them altogether.

I guess this is a question for anyone on The Motte familiar with such things. What is the current state of university reform? Are any universities in the western world simultaneously non-woke and somewhat respected? BYU maybe? I know there are various micro "based" colleges like New Saint Andrews but my impression is these are tremendously expensive for a completely disrespected degree. Are there even any of these types that aren't explicitly religious?

I'm not sure if I'm qualified to answer as I'm not familiar, but I'd say that being "Respected" is about social ranking, and that leaning "woke" is basically about valuing social reality higher than actual reality. The very way that "woke" operates is by attacking the reputation of the un-woke and making them out to be immoral. Notice this is about how "good" something is, and barely about how "true" it is. In other words, people who care more about truth than signaling and social hierarchies tend to be closer to the truth, but less respected by society. Here, I belive that the assumption "Respected = Good" is dangerous and misleading, since you'd be buying into political manipulation of reality (that sounds a bit dramatic, but I'm not sure how else to phrase it)

By definition, "non-woke" and "respected" seem separate

I don't know about "based" in the sense users here use the term, but there are some notoriously conservative/un-woke schools out there. UNC, Florida State, Georgia Tech, Mississippi State, Texas A&M, Stanford, St Johns, Claremont McKenna, all come to mind.

Stanford

Uh, how exactly is Stanford un-woke? They have the full slate of grievance studies departments, plus a DEI commissariate installed in all the real departments (read: the School of Engineering, basically) providing mandatory political reeducation and enforcing the party line. Perhaps they’re un-woke in comparison to their rivals across the Bay, but the same could be said of virtually every university in the Western world.

You're not going to find a school in the state of California that doesn't have the"the full slate of grievance studies" and a "DEI commissariate"

Stanford is on the list for the same reason Claremont is. They're notoriously conservative relative to thier bretheren, get ranked highly on free speech by FIRE and other such groups, and project an all around ruthless disposition towards disruption.

get ranked highly on free speech by FIRE

According to the FIRE 2025 ranking (page number 44), Stanford University is 218., while Claremont McKenna College is 6. best out of 251 universities evaluated. These two institutions could hardly be more different, with regard to how FIRE regards them.

That's news to me. I remember them being ranked much higher than that and catching a lot of hate from the media for cracking down on disruptive activists back in 2020 but i also haven't paying close attention the last couple years.

Shit happens i guess.

If you check out Stanford's rankings, it's an odd mix. High "openness" ranking combined with bottom of the barrel "disruptive conduct" after a bunch of attacks on meetings.

Looking at the incident reports, Stanford was prosecuting students through an anonymous "protected identity harm reporting system" for being photographed reading Mein Kampf. Of course, this seems pretty typical for colleges these days

UNC is not un-woke, lol.

University of North Carolina?

UNC is pretty woke, they were one of the colleges that got sue for DEI-flavored affirmative action along with Harvard.

https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/students-for-fair-admissions-inc-v-university-of-north-carolina/

I don't think that Certiorari proves as much as you think.

SFFA argues that UNC is discriminating against SouthEast Asians by privileging minorities born within the state over minorities born outside the state (not many SE-Asians in NC). I feel thats a bit different in kind, and the court seems to have agreed by splitting the case, and ultimately ruling against Harvard but in favor of UNC.

There are some fairly highly ranked red state public schools that are probably less-left-leaning than most given the leverage state elected officials have over the institutions: Texas and Florida have both explicitly banned school-sponsored DEI initiatives. At least Texas A&M has a bit of a reputation for conservativism, and at least in the past when I've talked to lefties from Colorado they treat Colorado Springs as a very red part of the state because of the Air Force Academy there, but that may be a bit out of date at that point.

I'd bet any heavily-Greek school is "conservative" in at least a change-averse, slightly-social-conservative fashion that might not map to politica, but I don't have direct experience there. And this isn't to say that these schools are necessarily right-of-center, but more right-leaning than most universities.

University of Texas is not a conservative school, but it’s very willing to tolerate conservatism compared to similarly-liberal schools for straight forwards reasons that benefit itself(enjoying very high rankings and donations in Law and geology, most prominently). Notre Dame has been trending more conservative and was never as liberal you’d have expected, and it’s very highly ranked. Texas A&M is known for conservatism and tbf, it has creationists as a percent of faculty equivalent to BYU, which is indicative of at least allowing a certain type of conservatism.

The Science post screwed up the link to the announcement, here's one that works. Despite Science's spin, the overall reporting is accurate. Let me de-spin it a bit, with quotes from the original announcement:

“The Government has been clear in its mandate to rebuild our economy. We are focused on a system that supports growth, and a science sector that drives high-tech, high-productivity, high-value businesses and jobs,” [says the Minister of Science, Innovation and Technology]. “I have updated the Marsden Fund Investment Plan and Terms of Reference to ensure that future funding is going to science that helps to meet this goal.”

An elected government chooses a popular priority--economic growth--and a ministry aligns with that priority.

The new Terms of Reference outline that approximately 50 per cent of funds will go towards supporting proposals with economic benefits to New Zealand. “The Marsden Fund will continue to support blue-skies research, the type that advances new ideas and encourages innovation and creativity and where the benefit may not be immediately apparent. ..."

So the applications to this fund should either make a reasonable case that they will benefit NZ economically, or that they have some potential to lead to that. That's in line with the priority the elected government has established for itself (economic growth).

“The focus of the Fund will shift to core science, with the humanities and social sciences panels disbanded and no longer supported. ..."

I can see why humanities and social scientists would be upset: nobody likes to have their source of funding taken away. I have but two questions: (1) do they disagree with the current elected government prioritizing economic growth, or (2) do they argue that the humanities and social science projects funded by this fund lead to economic growth as well as the core science projects?

If the disagreement is with the first question, then the response is: elections have consequences. New Zealand economy is doing poorly, people are worried, they elect a government with a mandate to grow the economy. While other goals have value, they have lost priority.

Is there any argument on the second front? The Science article hints at the possibility:

The cuts and priority changes suggest officials don’t realize commercially viable research is often underpinned by discoveries in fundamental science, says Nicola Gaston, co-director of the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology at the University of Auckland.

... but there is absolutely no follow-up or development of this argument. In fact, it's clear that "fundamental science" of the kind that an Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology is likely to do indeed will continue to be funded, and likely at a higher rate than before now that the funds are not going towards social science / humanities. Unless, despite the name, that institute is pursuing non-core, non-fundamental-science projects (e..g, "How would an advance in nanotech affect [$historically-disadvantaged-minority]?" or "Indigenous knowledge of microchips").

That brief hint of a beginning of an argument is followed by a conflation of economics and social cohesion, and then by how this will impact Maori-led research. So bupkis.

Your argument is at least more developed: you think that growing the economy through pursuing advances in science and tech leads to decrease in well-being of the population. I wonder, though: New Zealanders adopt science and tech products made elsewhere, and (let's take your claim at face value for the moment) suffer the social consequences anyway. Isn't that strictly worse than having NZ companies develop the product domestically, and at least capturing the economic benefits of the product?

you think that growing the economy through pursuing advances in science and tech leads to decrease in well-being of the population

My more direct fear is that critical reflection on questions such as: what is "well-being"? to what extent is "well-being" worth pursuing? does it make sense to have a single unified metric of "well-being"? - will cease. Such reflection is naturally at home in humanities departments.

You can argue that we don't need state funding to think about such questions. But a culture that sees no value in the humanities in general is unlikely to find value in these questions in particular.

I greatly distrust a humanities department's answers to such questions. To the point where I doubt their answers are even net-positive for society.

What was the last big win for this state-sponsored critical reflection?

There's been a lot of interesting work on illusionism about consciousness in recent years. I don't agree with illusionism, but defenders of the position have made strides in showing how such a seemingly implausible position can actually be coherent, and they've helped clarify exactly what's at stake in debates over materialism.

Definitely not the one idea I'd expect to see grow in strength from my admittedly cursory undergrad study, and definitely much later than any example I could think of.

Thanks!

I was gonna read the philosophical paper and scoff at its navel-grazing, but turns out it's quite interesting and got me thinking about applications of its ideas to AI.

To argue his thesis (that just cause you "obviously" feel stuff (generalized Moore argument) doesn't necessarily mean that you actually subjectively experience it in the moment), he distinguishes between the subjective experience (phenomenal), the behavioral aspects associated with the experience (functional), and the value we assign to the experience (normative).

I don't know what it's like to be you (or anybody other than myself). So even if the generalized Moore argument feels compelling to me when applied to myself (I feel stuff, so obviously I have phenomenal experiences), it takes a generalizational leap for me to also apply it to you (I am human, and others are human, so their experiences are probably like mine). That's even though I have lots of evidence that other people don't feel like me, and don't experience the world like I do. Still, it's safer to err on treating everyone like Player Characters in their own right and assume that they also feel stuff (phenomenal), because otherwise they'll think badly of me (normative) and gang up against me (functional).

But what about AI? It's not going to think badly of me and gang up on me if I treat it like it doesn't have feelings. I can adjust levels of politeness in my prompts if I think it will make a difference in the output (functional), and disregard the normative notions of proper communication.

(Of course, the same idea applied to animals. Well, I wasn't going to donate to PETA anyway.)

Come to think of it, I have heard versions of these ideas before... in Theravada Buddhism. Does it count as being "state-sponsored" if the founder was a prince?

I agree that such critical reflection is important, I disagree that government funding is either necessary or sufficient to promote such reflection. If anything, it seems to me that government funding is more likely to corrupt either the critical or the reflective part of it. Such corruption can happen by the State funding its apologists. See, for example, just about anything officially published in the USSR on the well-being of soviet people.

Such corruption can also happen by elite-group capture, which is what is happening now. While I don't know how specifically the Marsden Fund was administered, but I know how other such funds work, and I don't expect anything different here. If they give grants in [$academic field] for [$purpose], they get some prominent people in [$academic field] (as prominent as they can get, at least) to evaluate applications for their worthiness in [$academic field] and their adherence to [$purpose]. So in fact all such Funds purposely start out as elite-group capture: who else would you ask to evaluate a chemistry proposal but chemists? And that's fine, so long as you can trust [$academic field] to fruitfully pursue [$purpose]. But once the field gets an influx of members who are diverting the field from [$purpose], and they rise to prominence within the field, then they will become the evaluators who determine where funding goes, and it will go away from [$purpose].

At that point, if you care about [$purpose], start by turning off the funding spigot.

critical reflection on questions such as: what is "well-being"? ... will cease

No it won't. We reflect on that question right here on the Motte. And, of course, these conversations happen every day within families, friend groups, and churches. We don't need credentialed elites to tell us the answers to these questions.

But even so, these credential elites are doing an awful job measuring and promoting human well-being. The current dominant ideology inside academia promotes a nihilistic view of the world and stokes social division. Even worse, it often places objective truth-seeking below appeals to authority. That's how you get stuff like "indigenous ways of knowing" being taught in NZ schools as an alternative to science.

The sooner we free ourselves from this corrupt priestly class, the better.

We reflect on that question right here on the Motte

On the Motte, and many similar sites, materialistic view of life are starting to dominate. I've been told many times now on similar websites that well-being is improving "because the GDP is increasing". They believe that an increase in wealth is a direct increase in well-being, and that the two are basically the same thing. They then use this as an argument for "progress" and to dismiss any values, customs and ideals of the past.

I think this is a direct consequence of being an intellectual and liking nerdy things like mathematics. You start thinking "logically" and "scientifically", and eventually you become materialistic as you confuse the map and territory (theory and reality). For instance by thinking that the truth values of logic ('true' and 'false') has anything to do with truth (meaning as 'existing in reality').

The sooner we free ourselves from this corrupt priestly class, the better.

I agree with this, but it's difficult to be an intelligent person interested in things like well-being, without encountering material which has been poisoned by the priestly class or somebody who is influenced by them, and if one practices actual psychology, they will find not only the truth but they will also understand why some people avoid the truth. If you have recommendations of works written by highly intelligent people who dare to think for themselves (they can be arrogant, a little bit of mania usually only makes for better writing), I'm all ears!

We don't need credentialed elites to tell us the answers to these questions.

So, shifting the focus to philosophy specifically, since that's where I'm more knowledgeable.

A couple points do have to be conceded. Philosophy is simply easier (in certain ways) than STEM subjects, and you can have cogent thoughts about philosophical questions with much less training than you can about scientific questions. It's not uncommon for bright undergraduates to anticipate the major positions and lines of arguments when they're first presented with a philosophical problem.

It also has to be pointed out that the modern research university, and with it the concept of the "academic philosopher", is itself a somewhat recent historical invention. Although institutions of higher learning in some form date back to antiquity, not every canonical philosopher has had institutional support - Spinoza was a lens crafter, Kierkegaard was independently wealthy, Nietzsche held a PhD in an unrelated field and did most of his writing after he left the university. So we know that good work can happen even in the absence of universities.

Nonetheless, in my experience the difference in the quality of thought and breadth of knowledge when you compare credentialed professionals to enthusiastic amateurs is striking. The credentialed professionals are simply better - which makes sense, because if you pay someone to do something for 40+ hours a week every week for years, you'd expect them to get good at it. If you value these questions as highly as I do, and you value high-quality work on these questions, then there is a tangible ROI in paying people to work on this stuff full time.

I love TheMotte dearly, and obviously you can tell from my prolific posting history that I derive a great deal of value from this forum, but I don't come here expecting to be exposed to completely radical new ideas. Which is to be expected; we're just like, a bunch of dudes, there are no requisite technical/academic qualifications for posting here. Most of the things I've encountered in my life that really blew my mind and changed the way I think either came from credentialed sources, or they came from sources that credentialed people recognized as being worthy of attention.

The current dominant ideology inside academia promotes a nihilistic view of the world

It depends on who you're talking about? I suppose the anti-natalists and transhumanists could be plausibly accused of being nihilist, so if that's part of the "dominant ideology" then sure. Wokeists and Marxists in the general case though are definitely not nihilists. You can disagree with them and call them evil, but they're not nihilists. They think that what they're doing is extremely meaningful

If you value these questions as highly as I do, and you value high-quality work on these questions, then there is a tangible ROI in paying people to work on this stuff full time.

Only if the incentives of that work align with not only producing high-quality work on these questions, but also effectively disseminating the results. Current incentives in academia do not.

Yes, some academics still produce great work (aimed at others in their sub-field). The work of disseminating their result even among their sub-field peers is a challenge due of the deluge of poor-quality stuff that everyone (including them) puts out to inflate their publication record.

I have been in enough hiring and promotion committees to witness first-hand that most committee members (a) will count the number of publications, taking into account the frequency and recency of them, and the quality of the journals based on SJR metrics, and (b) will not even bother reading any of the works if the applicant is even in a slightly different sub-field, but instead rely on the blurbs in reference letters / external reviewers, which (b1) tend to be way too nice and uncritical, and (b2) tend to do about as good a job conveying the actual qualifications of the candidate in their field as we professors do when we write a letter of recommendation for a student's grad school application.

(And gods-forbid that the candidate tries something interdisciplinary and we couldn't find a reviewer with decent knowledge of both fields. Or collaborates with someone outside their field. In math at least, that tends to look like this: the mathematician use some low-level mathematics to make a reasonable model in the context provided by other collaborators; if the reviewer is a mathematician without much knowledge of the other field, the reviewer isolates the mathematical model, realizes that it's pretty low-level math, and reports that in the review. The hard part of the collaboration is the endless back-and-forth with the non-mathematicians to get them to elucidate what, specifically, they want to model, and to commit to particular measurements and parameters. None of that work comes through in the review of the final polished publication, and is certainly not apparent to any pure mathematician.)

As a result, those who rise in an academic field must go through several such filters: at least one successful tenure-track hire; successful tenure review; successful full-professor review, and any reviews in-between. The process selects for those who stay firmly in the confines of their sub-field, making numerous and safe publications. By the time one gets through these filters, one might as well stay in that lane where it's safe and comfortable, and where one has already achieved some level of prominence and prestige.

At that point one becomes the cog that perpetuates the system: one gets swamped by requests for reviews (manuscripts submitted to a journal that published your work; external review of a tenure / promotion candidate; letters of recommendation for junior colleague; letters of recommendation for students). That's a shit-ton of work, and one feels obliged to take on some of it (to keep ones connections), so one develops streamline methods for quickly writing those reviews. Which results in more bland, overly-positive-while-saying-little-of-substance reviews that others then rely on for admittance/publication/hiring/tenure/promotion. And because they know (and you know) the worth of those reviews, everyone falls back on something concrete like the JSR metrics, which feeds the Goodhart's law and further dilutes the few high-quality works that do indeed get produced and published.

So no, the current academic system's incentives do not align with producing a few but high-quality explorations into important questions.

Nonetheless, in my experience the difference in the quality of thought and breadth of knowledge when you compare credentialed professionals to enthusiastic amateurs is striking.

Big doubt.

This is going to be somewhat complicated by the fact that the fields I followed are different from yours, but if economics, psychology, or social science are any indication, the quality of thought and breadth of knowledge don't amount to much. Don't get me wrong, I know what you're referring to, and I agree it exists, but it seems to boil down to a difference in form rather than substance, and the form of showing off your "quality of thought" and breadth of knowledge is mostly used to deflect from obvious questions.

Philosophy is simply easier (in certain ways) than STEM subjects, and you can have cogent thoughts about philosophical questions with much less training than you can about scientific questions.

I wouldn't undersell philosophy as a discipline. In some ways, it is the ultimate discipline. Social science is just applied Biology which is just applied Chemistry... Physics... Math... Philosophy. When you start examining the ultimate questions it gets quite philosophical.

Nonetheless, in my experience the difference in the quality of thought and breadth of knowledge when you compare credentialed professionals to enthusiastic amateurs is striking. The credentialed professionals are simply better - which makes sense, because if you pay someone to do something for 40+ hours a week every week for years, you'd expect them to get good at it. If you value these questions as highly as I do, and you value high-quality work on these questions, then there is a tangible ROI in paying people to work on this stuff full time.

But here's the thing. As a discipline so untethered by constraints, it's difficult to be "good" at philosophy. Breadth matters more than depth. And, when it comes to breadth, someone like Scott, Cremieux, or even a top 4chan autist is going to have far more of it than a philosophy professor at Oxford. The modern information network has created polymath monsters of the sort which Thomas Jefferson could never imagine.

but I don't come here expecting to be exposed to completely radical new ideas. Which is to be expected; we're just like, a bunch of dudes, there are no requisite technical/academic qualifications for posting here. Most of the things I've encountered in my life that really blew my mind and changed the way I think either came from credentialed sources, or they came from sources that credentialed people recognized as being worthy of attention.

This surprises me entirely. Academia is so stilted that it rarely produces novel thought at all. Who are these radical new idea-smiths, sharpened by years of formal training?

As a discipline so untethered by constraints

It... depends on what you mean by that. In some sense, yeah, philosophy is more radically free of constraints than any other discipline, in the sense that any foundational premise or assumption is always fair game for critique. If you're a physicist and you think Einstein was wrong, you're a crank. If you're a mathematician and you want to be an ultrafinitist then at best you're engaged in a non-standard project that has little relevance to the work of mainstream professional mathematicians (and at worst you're a crank). But in philosophy, if you want to argue that philosophy itself is dumb and not worth doing and is incapable of generating truth or knowledge (as, arguably, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein held at times), then you're not a crank. You're just doing philosophy, and philosophers will praise you as an insightful and original thinker if you're capable of supporting your position.

But in another sense, it's just as constrained as any other discipline. With few exceptions, the vast majority of Western philosophers past and present have taken themselves to be addressing questions that had correct and incorrect answers, and their goal was to arrive at correct answers and support their positions with arguments and evidence (yes, even the "postmodernists" - the "relativism" of Foucault and Derrida was greatly exaggerated through misreadings of their work).

And, when it comes to breadth, someone like Scott, Cremieux, or even a top 4chan autist is going to have far more of it than a philosophy professor at Oxford.

My use of the word "breadth" may have been misleading there. I meant "breadth" insofar as you can bring a wide range of relevant knowledge and references to bear on a specific question or problem you're addressing. Not in the sense of, you can give me hot takes on a lot of different topics that may or may not be related to your specialty.

To give a concrete example, the work of Ted Sider and Trenton Merricks addresses, in far more meticulous and thorough detail, the problems that Scott outlined in The Categories Were Made For Man.

The modern information network has created polymath monsters

"Polymaths" almost always grossly overestimate their competence.

Academia is so stilted that it rarely produces novel thought at all. Who are these radical new idea-smiths, sharpened by years of formal training?

I linked the work of François Kammerer regarding illusionism about consciousness elsewhere in the thread. It's not uncommon for people in internet debates to express skepticism about the hard problem of consciousness, but they tend to be unfamiliar with the existing academic work on the problem, and frankly they usually don't understand what the problem is even about in the first place. Contemporary defenders of illusionism both understand the problem, and they appreciate the severe uphill challenge that illusionism faces, but they still defend the position, which is interesting if nothing else.

Todd McGowan's work on reinterpreting Lacanian psychoanalysis in light of his Zizekian reading of Hegel (part 1 of a brief overview and part 2) made Lacan's work a lot more interesting and accessible than Lacan himself did, and it had a significant and enduring impact on the way I interpret my own actions and the actions of other people.

Chris Cutrone managed to convince me that the Marxist tradition was more intellectually interesting than I previously assumed.

Does New Zealand have a comparative advantage in such questions? Or is it better off trying to materially improve the lives of its citizens and leave those questions for others?

Despite my substantial disagreements with the wokeists, I'm willing to fund them if they can act as a counterbalance to a complete takeover by utilitarian techbroism.

Are they effective as a counterbalance, though? I'm yet to see a "utilitarian techbroist" excess that the SJ movement could not be made to acquiesce to in return for assurances that it will be wielded in the interest of their political goals, and in fact what seems to happen is that every time such assurances are made (ex: any social media opinion-management tech) the would-be counterbalance becomes another hard obstacle to overcome if you want to put brakes on the technology (ex: the "freeze peach" meme, fielded by SJ in defense of Big Tech getting to do what they wanted to do anyway).

In general, it seems pretty counterproductive to hope for an incumbent ideological movement to rein in an incumbent technological one. As long as the concerns of temporal and spiritual power are orthogonal, they are naturally complementary to each other; what you are proposing is akin to wanting to check a medieval absolute monarchy by investing in the priesthood.

You're putting way too much thought into it. Social sciences are neither social nor sciences, they are sinecures for left-wing nutbags and anyone who funds it is funding their own opposition. It's politically ridiculous to spend tax money on hyper-partisan fake fields that died in the Replication Crisis, but no one has noticed.

Defund all this shit. You'd be shocked how little of the university system you need to train the very few jobs that might actually require a college degree. It's all a bloated jobs program for shitbird lefties who never want to leave the classroom, and a class barrier for the ruling elite. For the working class, it's debt slavery as the price of admission to the middle class.

Social sciences vary widely by the degree to which they are affected by ideology. History, for example, is a pretty rigorous field. Economics and political science both have important real insights. There is no such thing as a social science, or perhaps a science in general, that is completely free of ideology, but the idea that all social sciences are just sinecures for left-wing nutbags is simply factually inaccurate.

Let's test the theory by taking away the sinecures.

Please make your points without the gratuitous insults.

The most amazing thing about it, was that after the universities were filled to the brim with so many fake degrees, they couldn't employ them anymore, suddenly every company began funding DEI departments. I still can't believe what a coup of a grift that was. And decades of saying "They're just college kids, they'll grow out of it when they get in the real world" was proven wrong to disastrous consequences. Nearly every entertainment property? Ruined. Institutional competence/faith in institutions? Ruined. It's so bad, our President Elect was convicted of 34 felonies, and our nation collectively went "We all know that shit ain't real" and elected him President anyways.

The disillusionment is also just half the issue. The people who haven't become disillusioned may also be suffering direct damage from absorbing whatever fashionable stuff is coming out of academia.

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?

The replication crisis, while bad in itself,

The replication crisis (e.g., in psychology) is very good for the field and for humanity: it more accurately reflects the true state of the field, compared to what we thought. The theory of replication is why psychology bills itself a science; the root problem was that replication wasn't done in practice. If every new result required two replications before being tentatively accepted as possibly describing something real, then psychology wouldn't have a replication crisis, it would just have replication, as a science should.

(On the contrary, beware any field that claims the status of science and either doesn't have the practice of replication baked in, or isn't having a replication crisis. I am looking at you, Sociology. Away to the humanities with you.)

The statistic to I like to keep in mind is: 6%. That's the proportion of all proposed medical treatments that start the FDA stage-I trials that successfully make it past stage-III to FDA approval. It takes serious financial backing to start stage-I (which is when one tests the treatment on a handful of healthy adults to check for adverse effects), so only the most promising treatments that have solid theory for why they should work, and which have been extensively tested in the lab and (if appropriate) on animals, even start the FDA medical approval process.

So I recon that the strongest academic theories in psychology are maybe epistemologically on par with the pre-FDA-stage-I medical theories. If someone were to actually put serious money in backing as rigorous a test for an application of such a theory as the one required by the FDA, then I expect that only 6% would make it.

It's bad but those people are doing science and are subject to review so we are least have some idea when they stray. In theory.

How many people pick up "truthy" ideas from these courses and then just disappear from the perspective of the academy when they graduate and carry those ideas into daily life? How do you count those people or subject their views to some sort of objective discipline?

The really scary part is we only know about "replication crisis" because there are still old-timers left around who remember how science should have been done. Once they retire, the academia - at least the western one, I have no idea what is happening in China or India - will have bullshitters occupy all the levels and there would be nobody to teach any other way or to object to what is going on. And the public will be under the impression this is how it's done, there's no other way, you have to just trust the experts and if they are wrong sometimes (like almost all the times) it's just how the life is. And even if you feel like something wrong is going on, you won't have any means to express it or formulate it as a consistent critique, unless you go back 150 years and start recovering the science from there (provided the pre-woke sources won't be destroyed or bowdlerized to avoid offense by then).

I don’t think this is true. When I was in academia, most of the replication crisis conversations were being had by the new PhDs. Partly because they had a vested interest in demolishing their elders’ work, yes, but also because they had chosen to become scientists and didn’t like the possibility of being pseudo-scientists instead, whereas their elders were largely comfortable with the status quo.

Ever heard the expression that an empire can only last 300 years?

Enlightenment thought is an empire. Western scientific rational modes of thinking. It only became dominant at some point in the 1700’s and it’s starting to fade.

Deferring to elders who are very knowledgeable in things that got made up at some point is the historical norm. That’s how ‘western medicine’ used to work. That’s how Chinese examinations used to work. Etc, etc.

An empire only lasts for 300 years.

300 years seems to be too low. Romans need to be given at least 500 if we don't count the republican times, and if we do, then we need to add another 100-150 years. And that's not counting Eastern Roman empire which survived till the Renaissance times.

Rome was 3 empires. Principate, dominate, and middle republic, with a christianized late Roman Empire inheriting decline from the dominate. And Byzantium was a continuation of the late (Christian)Roman empire only for the first few centuries; medieval Byzantium called itself Roman but was essentially a new empire(or rather, succession of empires).

The same thing happened in China, with a succession of empires from the same civilization which are clearly more different from each other than mere dynastic differences.

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Rome and Byzantium both lasted more than 300 years.

And the Assyrians. And the HRH. And the Ethiopian empire. And the Carthaginian empire. And...

The ideal solution to this would be to simply reform social sciences departments and make them open to honest inquiry again, rather than destroying them altogether.

I'm not sure how this would be possible. The departments are all staffed by True Believers and I would expect not much to really change. The past 40 years of "research" in the field has been concentrated on Critical Theory as a way of advancing their field. Without using that as a crutch, I'm not really sure what even is left. All that would be left is demographic studies that is more statistics than anything, and I don't think you need an department to do that.

Even from an ideological perspective, I'm not sure the field makes sense. What is the point of "Women's Studies" when one can't even pin down what a "woman" is, for instance?

Even more broadly, the underpinnings of Critical Theory assumes that various groups are homogenous and can be talked about in aggregate. This might make sense in large populations. However, much of the *-studies fields then perverts this concept into looking at individuals and tries to apply the same analysis techniques without the law of large numbers coming to its aid. It's a house of cards that is built on something I don't think is even rational to start with. You are left with "research" that is unprovable, unfalsifiable, and based mostly on feels.

What is the point of "Women's Studies" when one can't even pin down what a "woman" is, for instance?

The second half of this sentence is unnecessary.

Like most ‘studies’ fields, women’s studies was founded to advance a particular ideology(second wave feminism). ‘What is the point of this field’ is thus an inherently relevant question in a way that it isn’t for, say, physics or demography.

I agree with that. I suppose my snark got out of hand.

Similar arguments can be said for other fields of academia as well. Take theoretical physics, for instance. You have an entire field of research like string theory, which makes few predictions and offers no ways of testing validity. The few predictions they've made have all been proven categorically wrong once we acquired more data. Underlying these styles of "study" seems to be looking for pretty math without considering reality. We're five decades in and nothing of value has come of it. This is similar to folks "studying" multiverses or what happened before the Big Bang.

They've fallen into the same trap as the social studies programs: doing something because it feels good, not because it's productive.

If some of these things were taken out as a degree and perhaps packaged up in a class in the philosophy department, I think people would be a lot happier.

I'm not talking about not doing research and science for the sake of it. But it's important not to mix up things that are real vs. philosophical discussions. Philosophical discussions should certainly happen! Hell, that's most of the reason for this site's existence.

Of course, there are also things like esoteric maths (number theory, graph theory, etc.). They tend not to be very "real," but they do have applicability in things like cryptography, computer science, or related fields. Graduates with those degrees can typically find jobs FWIW.

It's pretty telling that in the hard sciences, string theory is always the go-to example, while there are any number of choices elsewhere in academia. So, fine, we shut down string theory along with the other stuff. Although if string theory has really made predictions that were wrong, it's not so bad as that; it should still be shut down, but only for being wrong, not unrigorous.

Sure, string theory is kind of a gimme.

Other things that I would include for being either dumb or dangerous:

  • Cosmological theories that cannot be tested
  • Pathogenic gain-of-function research
  • All of the *-studies fields where there is a focus on theoretical abstraction that doesn't mesh with reality (and usually is pushing a pre-determined angle to push an ideology anyway)
  • Many of the departments focusing on behavioral studies and psychology that are simply publishing gibberish

I would also take a hard look at the publish-or-perish mindset of academia that is leading to the reproducibility crisis in journal submissions across the board.

The last bullet above is a part of this, and I want to elaborate further. This is one of the things where "studies" are being cranked out that don't advance, and in fact pollute and damage the fields. A good example would be Jonathan Pruitt's publications on spider behavior. It also begs the question that even if the spider behavior studies were valid, what useful information would we glean? Similarly, pulled from recent news, why would anyone spend a million dollars on studying if cocaine makes Japanese quail more sexually active?

This doesn't even touch the insane level of administration positions found in academia, which should also be trimmed, but that's not the focus of this thread.

(If you want to watch a longer YouTube about the spider issue, I highly recommend Angela Collier's telling of the tale: https://youtube.com/watch?v=qlas3TOi_CQ. She's a physicist and a great (IMO) storyteller and educator.)

Similarly, pulled from recent news, why would anyone spend a million dollars on studying if cocaine makes Japanese quail more sexually active?

Because both quail and quail eggs are delicious. Farmers raising quail for food, or quail hens for eggs, are definitely interested in what makes quail more sexually active, especially if it can be made economically viable to incorporate into feed.

Cosmological theories that cannot be tested

Yes, but many cosmological theories can and have been tested.

Pathogenic gain-of-function research

Gave us the Ebola vaccine

Gave us the Ebola vaccine

I have been able to find things saying that we now have a couple of Ebola vaccines but nothing for a lay audience about their method of development. Do you have a link for this?

It also begs the question that even if the spider behavior studies were valid, what useful information would we glean? Similarly, pulled from recent news, why would anyone spend a million dollars on studying if cocaine makes Japanese quail more sexually active?

Conversely why shouldn't someone with a million dollars fund research into whether cocaine makes Japanese quail more sexually active? How can we know what we will learn from quail or spider behaviour if we don't research it?

I think this new plan in New Zealand is a good idea - we shouldn't get rid of those studies, we should just stop funding them. If they can secure private funding they should be able to study whatever they like.

Absolutely! Anyone can spend their money however they please, and no one has a say in that matter. If I want to fund a study on if meth makes earthworms horny, I should 100% have that right. But insisting that the taxpayer spend that money (in whatever country) is bordering on insane, in my opinion.

Frankly, they're going in the wrong direction. A great deal of technology developed over the last 30 years (social media, generative AI, frankly the internet itself) is either neutral/mixed at best or actively harmful at worst. If anything we need to be putting the brakes on "high-tech, high-productivity" jobs. Diverting funds to university social science departments would be a good way of slowing things down, at least. Despite my substantial disagreements with the wokeists, I'm willing to fund them if they can act as a counterbalance to a complete takeover by utilitarian techbroism.

I'd love to see the look on my younger self's face as I agree with this sentiment, but I think you're on to something. Still, I think this is bad politics. The last 8 years has clearly shown there is no fundamental conflict between Big Tech and the Woke. The woke are more than happy to use Big Tech's capabilities to track and censor dissent from it's ideology, and Big Tech is more than happy to provide it. I agree that utilitarian techbroism needs to be countered, but that can only be done by sponsoring groups that are actually opposed to utilitarianism and tech-accelerationism, not just another outgrowth of modernism.

Internet is enormously beneficial to people solving technical problems.

Asked someone I know who worked as a software developer before and after internet. She thinks it's at least an order of magnitude difference in efficiency/ output.

Look, I'm a Luddite, it's not that I don't see the increases in efficiency, it's that I question whether they're good for us in the long term.

Having lived through the same period and worked in the same field, I agree the Internet was a game changer in many ways. There's a world of difference between looking up info in a book, like a barbarian, and just checking Stack Overflow. But I also see the effect it had on me - for example I notice I'm way more frustrated when I have to read a longer explanation, and don't just get served the goddamn code snippet. I also wonder what effect the rise of video tutorials / documentation is going to have on people. I find it frustrating, but just from how common it is, I guess a lot of people have to like it, and I wonder if it doesn't mess with people's heads in a similar way that Stack Overflow messed with mine.

there is no fundamental conflict between Big Tech and the Woke.

Yeah. If I had written a longer post I would have gone into more nuance, but, the relationship between big tech and woke is very complex. One of my principle criticisms (but certainly not the only one) of big tech is, indeed, their complicity as a vehicle for the dissemination of wokeness.

Unfortunately we do have to be constrained by reality to some extent in terms of political strategizing. I’d like to just say “I’ll support the Good People, where the Good People are the ones who would just do whatever I would do if I was the God King”. But there’s no guarantee that there will be any organized constituency that matches those exact values. So we have to make do with what we have.

All I'm saying is that your plan to counter Big Tech may just end up giving the Woke (even more) control over it.

There's an interesting question about what "fundamental science" research (is not practical or applied research) really is in social science, and how/why any country might fund it.

$NZ 75M presumably would fund a lot of work in social science, since research is less reliant on equipment than in harder sciences.

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