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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   30743 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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CNBC is reporting that

Although the final official figures have not been released, it is estimated that the Qatar World Cup will cost around 220 billion to 300 billion dollars. This will also make it the most expensive World Cup ever.

Notably

At this year’s World Cup in Qatar, it’s noteworthy that seven of the eight stadiums have been constructed recently. Only one was renovated. Lusail Stadium alone, located north of Doha, cost $45 billion. Additionally, about 20,000 new hotel rooms have been constructed, as well as new driveways.

The USA's GDP is $20 trillion, so a cost of $220 billion is about 1% of the USA's GDP, which should immediately raise some red flags. Now that something smells fishy, we can look up Qatar's GDP and realize that CNBC is claiming that Qatar has spent at least 120% of their GDP on the World Cup.

Unsurprisingly, we can count on Reuters to set the record straight.

Gas-rich Qatar, in an attempt to emulate the dramatic transformation of Gulf rivals Dubai and Abu Dhabi, has spent at least $229 billion on infrastructure in the 11 years since winning the bid to host the World Cup.

Some Googling also gets us news.sky.com being more explicit

Qatar maintains that, while much of the infrastructure included in the $200bn figure will be used during the tournament, its construction would have taken place regardless of whether the cup was being held there, so it should not be viewed as the total cost.

I think it's fair to say that reporting all infrastructure spending in the last decade as "spending on the World Cup infrastructure" is pants-on-fire misleading, particularly when comparing it to the costs other countries paid.

The New York Times does it with a bit more plausible deniability.

For the country of three million people, the monthlong tournament is the culmination of 12 years of preparation and more than $200 billion in infrastructure spending, subsumed into a grand nation-building project for a state the size of Connecticut surrounded by more powerful neighbors.

Although their tweet is more suspect

Qatar opened its long-awaited World Cup with a 2-0 loss to Ecuador on Sunday, a disappointing start to an event that had required more than a decade of planning; $200 billion in investments; and countless uncomfortable questions about human rights.

But what about that $45 billion stadium (which, incidentally, is greater than Qatar's annual government spending)?

That also seems implausible. No source is cited but, for comparison, Yankee Stadium has 12,000 seats (vs Lusail's 9,000) and cost $2.3 billion (or 5% the alleged cost of Lusail). Also sportingnews.com, while also guilty of running that $220 billion number, helpfully lists the costs of each of the new stadiums and claims Lusail Stadium cost $767 million.

Rough order-of-magnitude verification of numbers is a valuable skill. If I tell you the deepest part of the ocean is 500 miles deep you should really be able to know that I'm wrong (the USA is ~2500 miles wide). You should know if the government spends $1 billion or $50 million on something. Reporting that a country spent $200 billion on a sporting event instantly raise a red flag.

Go play Wits & Wagers.

That also seems implausible. No source is cited but, for comparison, Yankee Stadium has 12,000 seats (vs Lusail's 9,000)

Given that Fenway Park seats something like 35,000 and that the Superdome in New Orleans seats 70,000 and that both of these venues are considered relatively small for their respective sports I find it difficult to believe that a World Cup venue would seat only 9,000. That's less than some high-school stadiums SEC country, and about a 10th of what Aztec Stadium in Mexico City (a prior World Cup venue) seats.

Likewise if we're talking about the Yankee Stadium situated on 161st street in the Bronx, it seats between 45,000 and 60,000 depending on how you count the galleries. So while I agree that "Rough order-of-magnitude verification of numbers is a valuable skill." it's one that you seem to be lacking, and this undermines any other point that you might be trying to make.

Qatar maintains that, while much of the infrastructure included in the $200bn figure will be used during the tournament, its construction would have taken place regardless of whether the cup was being held there, so it should not be viewed as the total cost.

It may or may not be $200 billion but I don't trust Qatar either.

With these incredibly expensive events like the World Cup or Olympics there's usually some line. IIRC Brazil also came up with some story about how they'd reuse the infrastructure and thus it wasn't as expensive as it sounded. From what I recall, that didn't work out too well.

I find it most interesting that Qatar is being treated like Russia in 2018. The west fought a war against Iraq in 1991 to save the Gulf states. If anything the west has ignored the anti-woke nature of the Gulf states and seen it as cool place for finance, tourism and futurism. It seems like the view of these countries have massively swung in a few years to becoming fairly hostile.

Is it their cozying up to China? Is it that these countries are becoming big and influential enough to have too much free will? Is it that the hypocrisy of being liberal in the west yet doing business in Dubai has become too much?

Then you are either with us or against us attitude of elite class westerners is increasingly putting more of the world in the against us category. They aren't going to give half the world the Iran/Russia treatment and if they do the other half of the world is going to do fairly fine under an alternative system.

The western elites are currently mad at the gulf for 1) cozying up to China 2) not playing along at pretending trump is an outcast and 3) using opec to keep oil prices high during the war.

They’re also, of course, siding vocally against western sanctions on Russia.

The other factor is that elite westerners will tolerate non-elite-western values and attitudes when it’s barbarian chieftains, which is how the gulf states were perceived when they were Islamic fundamentalists with oil. But now that their economies have gotten more diverse, and they’ve retained their anti-LGBT attitudes even as they’ve gotten more secular in other ways, it’s different.

The western elites are currently mad at the gulf for

4: Slowing down the financing of terrorism. When Islam was the outgroup for the country, the elites couldn't get enough. Now that they've ceded Big Baddy territory to Russia, they're just uncivilized barbarians again. It's hard to muster support for a grubby dictatorship when they won't even murder your citizens for you.

If you are looking at an American-centric Western view on the two host nations, I think the US team's absence (because they barely failed to qualify) had a profound impact on how most Americans who are not die-hard fans perceived the event (if at all).

It Seems...

Where are you getting your impressions?

I don’t think I’ve seen any glowing coverage of these states since the Burj Khalifa went up. Complaints (with a tinge of respect!) about mega yachts and artificial palm-tree islands, a sentiment that oil wealth is ill-gotten, the odd cry of humanitarian abuses.

Qatar specifically flew under the radar until getting the World Cup, at which point the accusations started flying. They were focused on bribery, not politics or morality, and had plenty of evidence. It wasn’t a great time to work in FIFA’s PR division.

Agreed. Blue tribers clearly do not like the gulf states and think they code as red tribe(devoutly religious, oil money, paranoid blue tribe fantasy of how women are treated).

The west fought a war against Iraq in 1991 to save the Gulf states.

It's a rather big stretch to include any state besides Kuwait in that statement.

You are right. The other gulf states tried to starve Qatar with a blockade not that long ago and it failed largely only thanks to Turkish support. Right afterwards Turkey also set up a large military base in the peninsula, which obviously serves to deter further aggression from the other gulf US-client states.

"Save" might be a bit of an excessive claim, but circa 1991 the local balance of power certainly suggested that Iraq could have made attempts to annex all or part of other adjacent states. Before the Gulf War, Iraq had the world's fourth largest army and relatively modern equipment. That the war would end in a curbstomp in hours was not a foregone conclusion beforehand.

Qatar is a peninsula, Bahrein is an island. Speaking of those two realistically, they are only reachable from Iraq's direction through a seaborne invasion. Did the Iraqis ever have the capability to do that?

Iraq was getting the best of Iran just a few years earlier, but not by enough to prevent them from accepting a ceasefire with little permanent gain, and not by such a large margin that you'd think they were an existential threat to the whole region.

I can't blame anyone for treating them like an existential threat anyway. "Murderous dictator builds rapidly-expanding war machine and uses weak revanchist excuses to start salami-slicing his neighbors" was an uncomfortably familiar story, and "everybody just sits back and hopes that he'll be satisfied after a few slices and stop and reform" was no longer considered to be a safe way to bring it to a conclusion.

Sure, but if Kuwait didn’t have oil- and hadn’t been very firmly willing to play nice with the West about its sale- the reaction wouldn’t have been military intervention, it would’ve been an angsty op Ed in the NYT and a strongly worded letter submitted to the UN, which would then approve it.

It's entirely because they have the World Cup. You don't see anyone really going after the likes of Kuwait or the UAE.

Yes, and because for the past few years FIFA has waded quite heavily into moralizing politics (mostly as a cover for their own corruption). If FIFA had spent the years of the lead-up to Russia endlessly promoting the inviolable sovereignty of nations, people would have been more critical of the location in 2018. Well FIFA has been vocally supportive of LGBT rights leading up to this World Cup. The hypocrisy is so readily apparent that it even offends people who don't normally wade into these kind of culture war issues.

The next World Cup is in Texas, which will likely pass a set of laws against ‘grooming’ by the time it starts, too.

Well FIFA has been vocally supportive of LGBT rights leading up to this World Cup.

Perhaps they've been vocally supportive precisely because they're going to Qatar?

They were criticized for it, obviously. Of course, if they said nothing they'd be criticized too so they took some face-saving measures.

This is essentially the same dynamic going on with the teams that wanted the "OneLove" armband: everyone knew they were complicit and supporting an anti-LGBT regime in practice so, in true performative fashion, they wanted some nice iconography to wash away this sin. But Qatar wouldn't even let them have that.

I mean, this isn't new.

They basically appropriated the theme of love from Christianity, ignoring literally everything else in the faith (including just why love is important*) that is inimical to their worldview

Why wouldn't they do it to Bob Marley too?

* It's not about hedonism or even freedom to choose romantic relationships...

They basically appropriated the theme of love from Christianity

? I'm pretty sure Christianity didn't invent love or ever have any rightful monopoly on it.

Christianity invented very few things, once you actually start digging into it. But it popularized plenty.

Philosophy schools were opposed to the infanticide found in the ancient world, like the Christians. But who would argue that we owe the disgust of this (to the point where the easiest way to lose an abortion debate is to bite the bullet on "why a fetus but not a newborn baby? They're both not particularly sapient...") to some philosophy school and not the Church?

Monogamy might have been a practice somewhere, but it certainly owes a debt to Paul.

The idea of agape, love-as-central is very Christian. A central idea of Christianity is summed up in John 3:16, one of the most famous verses in the Bible, the Gospel in a nutshell: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son": Divine love is made manifest in the incarnation and the death of God to save us from sin, that's how much he allegedly loves everyone.

"God is love", for example, is something I hear a lot in the West. I tend to hear a lot of progressive policies pushed in the name of "Jesus loved everyone" and "love is love" and so on, so they're very aware of the perception.

IIRC Christian philosophers like Swinburne even make arguments defending other central elements of Christianity via the concern for love: e.g. a loving God would be a Trinity since that is a "'perfect love" - a singular God has no mutual love, a dual pair can be selfish since they'll only focus on one another (don't ask me to defend this, I find everything about the Trinity dubious). Suffice it to say, this is the sort of argument that doesn't occur to the other sons of Abraham.

In my religious education -as a Muslim- love was not specifically emphasized as a value uber alles . Similarly, nobody went around arguing for anti-Islamic things because "Mohammed loved everyone" but I notice that progressive Muslims raised in the West often speak in similar tones to the Christians. If Muslims, why not people who aren't recent transplants?

More comments

Do you have any good reads on this?

Reminds me a bit of the reporting about suicides at Foxconn and similar places. It's presented as though it's a major problem, but the suicide rate is lower than in the west. It's just that people in the west tend to not commit suicide at work, nor do they live in employer housing.

Yankee Stadium has 12,000 seats

As perhaps an example of your larger point, this seemed implausibly low to me (it's about 20% smaller than the smallest full-time[1] arena in the NHL, a league with a much smaller following than MLB), so I did a quick Google and turned up a figure of 54,251, about 4.5 times your number. Where are you getting 12,000 from?

[1] I'm excluding the university arena the Arizona Coyotes are temporarily housed in, as that's not meant to be a permanent arrangement.

I’m almost positive that was added in there as bait. I’m pretty sure there are HS football stadiums in Texas that seat 12,000.

Might be a few elementary school stadiums that large too.

"Yankee Stadium has no fewer than 12,000 seats"

Just to pick up on one aspect of this, I completely agree about the importance of having decent Fermi estimation skills, and it’s something you can definitely train. I’m continually amazed at how many people don’t have basic frames of reference for things like populations, money, timescales, distances, etc..

I remember hearing a prominent philosophy academic once say in a talk that “octopuses evolved 500 billion years ago”. I assumed it was a slip of the tongue, but then she gave the same talk a month later and made exactly the same mistake. I assume she read “500 million” somewhere and it got transmuted to “500 billion” in her head, but jeez, you should be instinctively sanity-checking and filtering that stuff in your head (“are octopuses an order of magnitude more ancient than the universe itself?”).

In the interests of fun, here’s one of my favourite (paired sets of) Fermi questions for the sub.

(1) Imagine our sun as the size of a baseball located in New York. Mutatis mutandis, how far away would the nearest star (Proxima Centauri) be?

Answer: about 2000km (approximately the distance from NYC to Oklahoma City).

Reasoning: Proxima Centauri is 40,208,000,000,000 km away. Our sun is 1,392,700 km in diameter, so it would take approximately 28 million suns in a line to reach to Proxima Centauri. A baseball is approximately 7cm in diameter, and 28 million baseballs would stretch approximately 2000 km.

(2) Imagine our galaxy as the size of a dinner plate (again let’s say in NYC). Again mutatis mutandis, how far away would the nearest galaxy (Andromeda) be?

Answer: about 7.5 metres away!

**Reasoning: the Milky Way is approximately 100,000 light years in diameter. Andromeda is approximately 2.5 million light years away, so it would take 25 Milky Ways stacked end to end to reach it. A large dinner plate is approximately 30cm in diameter, so 25 of them stacked end to end would extend 7.5m.

My surprised upshot: compared to interstellar distances, galaxies are unbelievably close to each other!

octopuses evolved 500 billion years ago

According to the 15 seconds I spent on Wikipedia, octopuses evolved 155 million years ago, so you can't even fix it by flipping a bit

My Fermi estimate of (1) before looking at the answer:

  • Proxima Centauri is 4 light years away

  • Speed of light is 300 million meters

  • There are 365 * 24 * 60 * 60 seconds in a year

  • The Earth is roughly 20,000 km thick. idk how big the sun is but maybe 100x bigger (by length) so let's say 1 million km

  • A baseball is roughly 0.1 m

Therefore the scaled-down Proxima Centauri would be a distance away equal to

4 light years * # seconds per year / size of sun * size of baseball / meters per km


= 4 * 365 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 3e8 / 1e9 * 0.1 / 1000

= 3784 kilometers

I didn't do (2) because I didn't see it until after I looked at the answer for (1).

(1)

Earth circumference c. 40,000 km (from original definition of meter).

Sun c. 100x size of Earth -> 4,000,000 km -> 4e9 m.

Guess size of baseball c. 1 foot circumference? 40 cm? 4e-1 m.

Ratio c. 10 orders of magnitude.

Proxima Centauri distance = 4.3 ly.

c. 500,000 minutes per year -> 2e6 light-minutes -> 120e6 or 1.2e8 light seconds.

c c. 300,000 km/s -> 300,000,000 m/s -> 3.6e16 m

Apply ratio -> 3.6e6 m -> 3.6e3 km -> 3600 km -> continent scale

Los Angeles?

(2)

Milky Way diameter c. 100,000 ly

Andromeda distance c. 2,000,000 ly

Ratio c. 20:1

Still in New York.

I'm going to type out my unfiltered thoughtprocess. And not use a calculator or spend more than 30 seconds per problem because that would be against the Spirit of Fermi estimation.

(1) Imagine our sun as the size of a baseball located in New York. Mutatis mutandis, how far away would the nearest star (Proxima Centauri) be?

  • I know that the sun is 150*10^6 km away and the nearest start is 4 lightyears away. So it would be cheating.

  • But fuck that, I know it takes light 8 minutes to reach The Sun and 4 years to reach the nearest star.

  • So 8 minutes to 4 years is one ratio, and baseball and the sun is the other ratio.

  • Wild out of my ass guess would be the ball is outside the atmosphere of earth.

Revelation: Annnddd I was wayyy off. By an order of magnitude.

(2) Imagine our galaxy as the size of a dinner plate (again let’s say in NYC). Again mutatis mutandis, how far away would the nearest galaxy (Andromeda) be?

  • I know Andromeda is 2*10^6 light years away.

  • Repeat the same process as before.

Revelation: Wild overestimate again. Off by many orders of magnitude.

I need to get better at intuiting ratios.

Also, a persons Fermi estimating abilities are a very good indicator of how much they read as a child. Serious.

Many of the intuitions such as astronomic distances, evolutionary timelines, depth of natural features like the oceans are things I learned straight out of my middle school textbooks or Children's encyclopedias.

I know it takes light 8 minutes to reach The Sun and 4 years to reach the nearest star.

Sounds like you are treating the baseball as the size of the earth's orbit around the sun, rather than the size of the sun itself. But that would give you an answer that's too small rather than too big so idk how you got your answer.

So 8 minutes to 4 years is one ratio, and baseball and the sun is the other ratio.

I am confused about your reasoning here...are you calculating (4 years / 8 minutes) * (radius of baseball / radius of sun)? That would give you a unitless value, not a distance. I think you were using the wrong values in your calculation but I can't tell what you were using.

You are right, I goofed by taking the distance from earth to the sun instead of the size of the sun. The answers being even remotely a few orders of magnitude away is a coincidence.

I feel like the magnitudes involved in interstellar and intergalactic distances are so vast that it's not really a mark against your intuition that you find it difficult to wrap your head around. For everyone that isn't an astronomer it's really just trivia anyway.

Whereas people work with and talk about money all the time, so I think people should be expected to have better intuition in that regard.

I didn't realize either how close galaxies are to each other compared to stars within galaxies to each other. I overestimated both, with "Los Angeles" for 1 and "Boston" for 2, but 1 was only off by about a factor of 2, while 2 was off by a factor of at least 10, probably at least 50.

“are octopuses an order of magnitude more ancient than the universe itself?”

Iä! Iä!

“are octopuses an order of magnitude more ancient than the universe itself?”

"Yes. I refuse to elaborate."

The drama of creation, according to the Hawaiian account, is divided into a series of stages, and in the very first of these life springs from the shadowy abyss and dark night... At first the lowly zoophytes and corals come into being, and these are followed by worms and shellfish, each type being declared to conquer and destroy its predecessor, a struggle for existence in which the strongest survive. Parallel with this evolution of animal forms, plant life begins on land and in the sea--at first with the algae, followed by seaweeds and rushes. As type follows type, the accumulating slime of their decay raises the land above the waters, in which, as spectator of all, swims the octopus, the lone survivor from an earlier world.

-- Roland Dixon, Oceanic Mythology, 1916

Turns out, it isn't turtles all the way down, it's octopuses.

I'd say "if you wish to know more, I would refer you to the works of my colleague Abdul Alhazred".

My surprised upshot: compared to interstellar distances, galaxies are unbelievably close to each other!

Is that generalizable, or does it only apply to Andromeda and the Milky Way? Because the latter does not surprise me - anyone remotely interested in astronomy will have heard of the impending collision - but the former does!

It can’t be inferred from the calculation I provided, of course, but apparently the average distance between galaxies is just 1 million light years, making the distance between the Milky Way and Andromeda greater than average! (although we also have the Magellanic Clouds for company, and they are MUCH closer to us)

I was also surprised by your Andromeda galaxy example and had to recheck. Turns out it actually is this big in the sky, I just need to move to a darker location. I then checked if it's only the local cluster (Milky Way, Andromeda and smaller friends) that is so close-packed, but even the next cluster over, M81, is "just" 12 megaly away, much closer to our galaxy than Proxima Centauri is to Sol.

Three hundred megabytes!

Yeah, I realise numbers are often used like that, but it still makes me wince at the sheer magnitude of the error. It’s not a mistake that an even vaguely numerate and scientifically informed person should make. It’s like saying “billions of people died in the Second World War”, or thinking a banana would cost $10.

Shakespeare lived around 1200 or something? Maybe 1930? 1600 BC?

Related to this, I'd often heard the fact that the time between Cleopatra and today is shorter than the time between Cleopatra and the building of the pyramids. I found that surprising at first, but then more recently I learned that Cleopatra was a contemporary of Caesar (i.e., she lived around 0 AD). At which point the fact became obvious to me—the pyramids are 5000 years old, Cleopatra lived 2000 years ago, of course 5000 - 2000 > 2000. My confusion came from "ancient Egypt = 5000 years ago, Cleopatra is ancient Egypt, therefore Cleopatra = 5000 years ago". Not sure if this makes me dumber or less dumb.

There's a status danger of looking like a trivia nerd. Instead, people want to be the visionary, big picture person.

I think there are a few competing memes that result in this.

  1. The superficial status risk to looking like a nerd.

  2. Implicit in the above is that, it's all book smarts with no actual smarts to back it up. Ignorant to the process that one has to be book smart first let that be through reading books or experience before one can actually be smart.

  3. The belief that the "big picture" is a thing of its own and not a collage of various smaller pictures.

I would classify all of the above as infohazards. I can only shudder at the amount of things people didn't learn because they fell for any of the above, and the collective loss as a result of that.

The older I get the more wisdom I see in the old Egyptian character for a large number sometimes presented as one million, it was a guy throwing his hands up as if exclaiming how could there even be this many things. That seems to be about where most non math people just stop worrying about numbers.

Same with the Mandarin word for "a big number" being translated as 10,000 (IIRC it literally means 10,000 in Mandarin).

I guess this is what leads to people thinking $500 million dollars is enough to make every American a millionaire.

Or my favorite recently, that charging every American a $1 per Capita head tax would in any way be a revenue raiser instead of a symbolic gesture.

The look on his face as I sketched out how little and narrow a wealth tax on fortunes above $1bn would be necessary to raise that same amount.

What you are doing is not estimation it is calculation. If you know the facts you need not estimate. The tricky part is if you don't know all of them.

If I ask you: The closest star to the sun is 4 light years away, the whole of milky way is 100000 light years wide, It has 100 billion stars, galaxies tend to cluster in the grand scale of things. Estimate how far Andromeda is. What will be your answer and why?

Of course, the answers I provide here are calculations, and anyone can do that; the challenge I’m posing is for readers to come up with mental estimates which they can check against the calculations to see if they got within an OoM.

No one has any normal references for galaxies and how far/close they are to each other which makes this just a calculation.

I can make references on things associated with daily life or general knowledge. These things don’t fit those areas.

Like most who commented I was very surprised about galaxies being that close. Thanks for the info. But I have no idea how that was supposed to test my estimation skills tbh. It's clearly not common knowledge.

Rough order-of-magnitude verification of numbers is a valuable skill. If I tell you the deepest part of the ocean is 500 miles deep you should really be able to know that I'm wrong (the USA is ~2500 miles wide).

I disagree here. It is actually absolutely counterintuitive how shallow the ocean is compared to the surface. Also the whole how thin the crust of the earth actually is.

Right now I think that people want to shape narrative of dumb rich arabs to punish the Qatar and Fifa for the audacity to not be progressive on the world stage and not even pretending to pay a lip service to western values.

The gulf states has extremely low labor costs. I would be surprised if the whole thing costed more than couple of billion of hard costs.

Them spending that much on infrastructure in the last 12 years is plausible - but they also have a lot of big ticket stuff built. I would say they will try to become something like - a bit more conservative Dubai.

For ocean depth my reference point is knowing a little about oil drilling and how deep that can go. Then guessing that different parts of the ocean do not have more than a 3-4 difference in magnitude.

The gulf states has extremely low labor costs.

But I would also not be surprised if the harsh conditions require significant engineering work and/or complexity that are not present in all comparable projects, which to some extent makes things more expensive.

I disagree here. It is actually absolutely counterintuitive how shallow the ocean is compared to the surface. Also the whole how thin the crust of the earth actually is.

Also, how many people actually randomly know what the width of the USA is? I certainly don't, and tbh I doubt I'll remember it past 10 minutes from now. It simply is a completely useless fact that has no reason to stick in my brain.

It simply is a completely useless fact that has no reason to stick in my brain

Hardly completely useless. Knowing the rough width of the US will augment your ability to make all sorts of potentially useful heuristic judgments about distances, times, areas, and speeds both within and beyond the US. For example, if you know (or ever learn) the duration of a flight from New York to LA, and you know the rough width of the US, then you can make an OoM estimate of the speed of a jet airliner, which could allow you to estimate other flight times for known distances.

Someone may say that they can Google this stuff if you ever need to know it, but that presumes that you’ll always know when it’s a good time to seek it out, and that’s not always the case. More to the point, inert information on Google can’t help build good epistemic filters, nor can it contribute to creative problem-solving. Knowledge of a broad set of useful facts is very important, and should be a lifelong endeavour for those who want to get the most out of their intelligence.

There's the old saw that Americans have no concept of time and Europeans no concept of distance

You've just proved my point. The example you give of a useful scenario is something which would never, ever be useful to me. I stand by my statement that this is a useless fact.

Your insistence that being able to better estimate speeds,distances and times being "useless" reads more as arrogance than sincere disinterest. Because its not really asking much from you, we ask middle schoolers to do this all the time.

Not to mention being able to accurately estimate those things transfer over to estimating money, timescales, populations, etc. A very valuable skill in making sense of the vast amount of numbers all around you and having a well calibrated bullshit detector.

The alternative is literally memorising things that are "useful". Books can be written on why that is stupid.

In fact I would say the whole covid restrictions fiasco was a result of the masses having bad meta-estimation intuition. They got spooked by arbitrarily large numbers of people dying, with no context to what level of death is acceptable or how much death (or lost life years) is caused by lockdowns and money printing.

I never said estimating distances is useless. I said that estimating the distance of the entire country is useless. In 37 years I have never once needed to know that, and I would bet good money that I never will.

So estimating distances in the abstract is not useless but estimating the distance of the US is? I don't understand how this is contradictory. If you know how to estimate distances, you can estimate the distances of anything to anything else.

The base-level skill is what is being discussed, not a gameified application of that skill. "Estimating the distance of the US from coast to coast" is not the skill, estimating distances is.

No, what is discussed is very specifically the width of the US, and whether it's useful to know that. This is not an abstract discussion about estimating distances in general.

It's just order of magnitudes. I don't expect you to know the US is 2500 miles across. I expect you to know it's not 250 or 25,000.

"It took me 5 hours to drive across Iowa at 60 miles per hour, so Iowa is around 300 miles across. There's no way the ocean is deeper than that." Or, if that doesn't satisfy you, "therefore the continental United States is around 3000 miles wide which is roughly the radius of the Earth. There's no way the ocean's deepest point is anywhere close to 10% of the radius of the Earth".

There's no way the ocean's deepest point is anywhere close to 10% of the radius of the Earth

And now explain your reasoning why if we assume that the person slept through natural science classes. Or never finished high school.

When [first-tier world-class sporting event] came to my much less contentious area, all reporting on "its costs" included all infrastructure spending that came anywhere near it.

Including "would have taken place regardless" stuff, which is not even close to a hard line (ie, based on other local infrastructure tendencies before and after it, "was going to happen anyways" can read as "within the next 60 years, maybe")

Ours was much less, but we had much less done than an entire city, an entire expressway system, a brand new airport, a port, etc.

I think your issue here is with a precedent that was set a long time ago, and that this does not seem inconsistent with. Of all the crimes of the media, I'm not going to get too worked up about this.

The real question is who funneled the journalists these numbers. When lots of papers start using the same made-up numbers all at once, it's time to get suspicious.

Jamal Khashoggi, the 'journalist' who got chopped up by Saudi Arabia, was a mouthpiece for Qatar, pushing propaganda against Saudi Arabia in one of America's top papers. So I wouldn't be surprised if this campaign against Qatar is largely driven by Saudi Arabia. If they are willing to chop up a journalist, I'd imagine they are happy to twist facts and feed them to the media. And western media, particularly Americans (imo), seem to be quite lazy. If you just do their work for them, they'll happily publish it, as long as it doesn't go against their personal biases (and if it reinforces those biases, they'll fall over themselves to oblige).

That's why so many news articles are basically a copy & paste of press releases.

I think he was payback for an attempted coup on the prince. Remember about a year before all the VIPs who got rounded up and got a long stay in the Ritz before singing over vast chunks of their wealth to the crown. I suspect he was a common theme in many of the interrogations.

You come at the king, you best not miss, and they missed.

Aren't there only like a couple of "newswire" sources (e.g. AP) from which all journalists get their first facts from?

Also, most stories are cribbed heavily from interested parties' press releases.

Much of media works on narratives. "Wealthy petrostate spends an obscene amount of money on prestige sporting event" is a nice bite-sized one.

If the journalist mentions that the official numbers might be made up, it adds complicated nuance to the story. How expensive is the World Cup really, if you can't trust the numbers? This leaves the reader uncertain and mildly confused instead of thinking they have learned something about the world. Easier for the article to just print whatever BS amount Qatar says and move on; the vast majority of journalists have tight deadlines and wouldn't have time to investigate it anyway.

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