Agent 3203.7: Guest post by Eliezer Yudkowsky
In his day, Agent 3203.7 had stopped people from trying to kill Adolf Hitler, Richard Nixon, and even, in the case of one unusually thoughtful assassin, Henry David Thoreau. But this was a new one on him.
“So…” drawled the seventh version of Agent 3203. His prosthetic hand crushed the simple 21st-century gun into fused metal and dropped it. “You traveled to the past in order to kill… of all people… Donald Trump. Care to explain why?”
The time-traveller’s eyes looked wild. Crazed. Nothing unusual. “How can you ask me that? You’re a time-traveler too! You know what he does!”
That was a surprising level of ignorance even for a 21st-century jumper. “Different timelines, kid. Some are pretty obscure. What the heck did Trump do in yours that’s worth taking your one shot at time travel to assassinate him of all people?”
“He’s destroying my world!”
Agent 3203.7 took a good look at where Donald Trump was pridefully addressing the unveiling of the Trump Taj Mahal in New Jersey, then took another good look at the errant time-traveler. “Destroying it how, exactly? Did Trump turn mad scientist in your timeline?”
“He’s President of the United States!”
Agent 3203.7 took another long stare at his new prisoner. He was apparently serious. “How did Trump become President in your timeline? Strangely advanced technology, subliminal messaging?”
“He was elected in the usual way,” the prisoner said bitterly.
Agent 3203.7 shook his head in amazement. Talk about shooting the messenger. “Kid, I doubt Trump was your timeline’s main problem.”
(thanks to Eliezer for giving me permission to reprint here)
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Comment #1 September 21st, 2020 at 12:01 am
Sooo, what do you think of Trump’s latest efforts at bringing at least some measure of peace to the Middle East. It certainly seems wiser than giving the Iranian regime mountains of cash to spend on terrorism, while not stopping their nuclear ambitions. At this point Trump probably deserves about six consecutive Nobel peace prizes, which would take him into his 2nd term (counting the current one as the 0th, as the Dems and all their friends have robbed him of much of this term).
Comment #2 September 21st, 2020 at 2:24 am
To your parable Scott, as an observer from far away, the present polarising era in America has been reassuring in that it has become clear that somewhat less than half of americans equate the notion of justice with their own level of material comfort, that hadn’t always been obvious 🙂
Comment #3 September 21st, 2020 at 3:33 am
“Different timelines, kid. Some are pretty obscure. What the heck did Hitler do in yours that’s worth taking your one shot at time travel to assassinate him of all people?”
“He’s destroying my world!”
Agent 3203.4 took a good look at where Adolf Hitler was pridefully revealing the plan to make a “Volkswagen” available to all citizens, then took another good look at the errant time-traveler. “Destroying it how, exactly? Did Hitler turn mad scientist in your timeline?”
“He’s the Chancellor of Germany!”
Agent 3203.4 took another long stare at his new prisoner. He was apparently serious. “How did Hitler become Chancellor in your timeline? Strangely advanced technology, subliminal messaging?”
“He was elected in the usual way,” the prisoner said bitterly. (*)
Agent 3203.4 shook his head in amazement. Talk about shooting the messenger. “Kid, I doubt Hitler was your timeline’s main problem.”
(*: Yes, I’m aware Hitlers’ path to chancellor was not exactly usual, but it didn’t seem very alarming to most of opinion-makers and havers at the time. And why would I let minor factual issues get in the way of a good story?)
Comment #4 September 21st, 2020 at 3:38 am
Yep, just as Putin may have carried Trump juuust over the finish line in ’16, but really the underlying problem is that Putin or no Putin, tens of millions of people vote for the guy.
As an aside: his latest rallies are astoundingly crazy/racist/disturbing. What happens if he’s reelected (or more generally stays in power) is anyone’s guess.
Comment #5 September 21st, 2020 at 3:47 am
Re: Allemaraiccire
I was personally pretty surprised; I lost a bunch of brier points on Good Judgement Open (a forecasting tournament) when Bahrain recognized Israel.
Comment #6 September 21st, 2020 at 3:53 am
Allemaraiccire #1: I agree. In fact, for having favored the development of world peace and all the sciences in general, Trump should be awarded all the Nobel Prices at once. Also they should lift the 2 term limit just so he can get re-elected over and over. Maybe just have one election that plebicisits him as President for Life? Also they should do some census that doesn’t count illegal immigrants, felons and generally undesirable people so all those Democrat states don’t get that much weight in the Electoral college. Maybe we could orchestrate some kind of plan for those undesirables, like an ultimate resolution or something.
Comment #7 September 21st, 2020 at 5:24 am
Very nice, especially the point at the end. The beginning was not promising, but I guess Stalin and Mao were not really problematic enough.
Comment #8 September 21st, 2020 at 6:21 am
Allemaraiccire #1: In Scott’s world, such things must be decided rationally and with regard to international norms, not by bilateral actions of undemocratic powers.
He will therefore wait, seeing whether it will last, and in the meantime stress the rights of the Palestinian people.
Eventually he will have no choice but to acquiesce, alas without him or his preferred political party having contributed to the improved situation, and he will claim it is not because of Trump (or Kushner) but in spite of him, because what good can such an abomination of a human being possibly contribute, thereby demonstrating once again that he understands only half of reality.
Comment #9 September 21st, 2020 at 7:11 am
Allemaraiccire #1 : You’re obviously being sarcastic and joking…right?
Comment #10 September 21st, 2020 at 7:31 am
Out of curiosity, where was this reprinted from? A cursory search on the major search engines for “Agent 3203.7” doesn’t show up anything except this post, but I’d love to read more, if more exists.
Comment #11 September 21st, 2020 at 9:15 am
Trump is a perfect baby created by FoxNews, Facebook, and Twitter. Somehow he instinctively knows how mass communication works. Twitter and Facebook are perfect tools for propaganda. There are no similar tools for collaborative democracy or decision making (yet). Until that changes, there is only one direction.
Donald J. Trump is testing the limits of H. L. Mencken’s theory of underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. So far no limits have been found.
Mencken:
The above is satire, but I believe there is truth in it. I think the refusal to treat the masses in democracy as emotional and irrational idiots is a mistake. Increasing the level of discussion and fighting for political power are two different fights. All we know about successful propaganda and successful propagandists is that they always dumb it down.
German guy named Adolf knew propaganda (1925):
He goes on criticizing German war propaganda being too intelligent.
Everything said about the subject 100 years ago is true today. I hate to agree with him, but people come to power because they do something that works.
Comment #12 September 21st, 2020 at 9:32 am
Allemaraiccire #1: I’m glad Israel is moving toward normal relations at least with the smaller Arab petro-states. I hope it continues and lasts. Israeli friends told me they thought this reflects a realignment of the Middle East that has little to do with Trump (who will take credit for anything). I don’t know if they’re right. Even if it were Trump’s sole doing, though, not only would I not award six Nobel Peace Prizes for it, I’d consider it an almost comically paltry little trophy to place on the scale against a mountain of horribleness.
Comment #13 September 21st, 2020 at 9:34 am
S #10:
Out of curiosity, where was this reprinted from?
Facebook.
Comment #14 September 21st, 2020 at 10:58 am
I was wondering how long it would take for TDS sufferers to finally push the idea (as subtly as they can) that POTUS ought to be assassinated…
Comment #15 September 21st, 2020 at 11:08 am
The obsession of Trump and his supporters with the Nobel Peace Prize reveals that they value prestige and virtue signalling over anything else. It would be truly hilarious to watch their reaction if the prize is awarded to Biden next year, preferably without any valid justification (pretty much what they did with Obama).
Comment #16 September 21st, 2020 at 12:05 pm
I’ve long thought that most politicians are actually pretty stupid, have no agenda or even when they do have an agenda, have no foresight or any clue about the consequences of their actions. It seems like it takes more of an acting and talking and body language and charisma to be a successful politician, than intelligence or understanding. As a result, most politicians don’t really know many things they should know, and just have advisors behind the scenes telling them nearly everything they should do, and these advisors really run the things in practice, which really makes you question the point of democracy in the first place.
As a result of this corrupt structure, it is increasingly advantageous for politicians to never share their raw opinions and thoughts on nearly everything without the team of advisors behind them dictating the response. The result is obvious: politicians lie all the time, never state their real intentions and break their promises every time.
Then comes Trump. He’s honest in the sense that he says what he means, even when it’s dumb. He doesn’t have a team of advisors behind him filtering his stupidity from the world. But the key thing that his voters understand, and it’s what makes them vote for him despite his stupid ideas, is that you can be sure that he’s saying what he means. You know exactly what are his ideas, even if they are as dumb as injecting bleach. His promises might be stupid like building a wall in Mexico, but you can be damn sure he’ll actually try to keep them because they weren’t said in order to manipulate you to vote for him – he actually believes them. He might tell you what seem to be lies about how good he is doing, but you can be sure he believes those lies himself because of his narcissistic and egocentric world view.
So in some sense, Trump is more honest than other politicians. It also makes you wonder how dumb would all the other politicians turn out to be if you would know their true raw unfiltered opinions. I think it could certainly explain the dumbness of many policies you see. I think the worst problem is in financial management, where every politician can promise the world and deliver on nothing, and it is actively encouraged by the media instead of promoting sensible tradeoffs discussions.
I also think that Trump is a step in the right direction, if the true appeal of him is realized. If the goal is to have competent leaders, the first step is to encourage the leaders to actually give their honest unfiltered unadvised opinion, even at the costs of making a stupid comment here and there, or god forbid – backtrack on their opinion or being uncertain. Only then can you find the leaders with actual vision and intelligence.
Minewhile Biden is literally everything wrong with the current structure. You don’t even know what’s his stance on anything, behind all the advisors, and you know for certain it wouldn’t matter because it’s his advisors that will run everything. Bernie is another example of someone with a complete vision and plan, that means what he says. But seems like the democrats prefer their corrupt structure over everything else. God forbid you elect a leader which isn’t controlled by unelected lobbied advisors.
Comment #17 September 21st, 2020 at 12:44 pm
Should we congratulate Trump on recent happenings in the Middle East? He would claim it as a victory regardless of his administration’s actual involvement. Since he lies constantly, it is hard to take him at his word now. Also, it has nothing much to do with solving the Palestinian problem, the Syrian problem, etc. so it is not at all “Peace in the Middle East”. No Nobel for Trump.
Comment #18 September 21st, 2020 at 1:19 pm
Eliezer has written a lot of short fiction. I don’t know if there’s a comprehensive list anywhere. Here’s some of his more major longer work: https://yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/
Of course people are talking about assassinating Trump. We’re Americans, aren’t we? That doesn’t mean he will actually get assassinated.
Comment #19 September 21st, 2020 at 2:34 pm
John Oliver made a joke about this in February 2016.
Comment #20 September 21st, 2020 at 2:53 pm
anonymous #16
For all the horrible campaign promises he made originally (build the wall, etc), there were two that gave me some hope: to rebuild American infrastructure, and to end the forever wars and dismantle the military-industrial complex. These both turned out to be lies.
Obviously the infrastructure lie was never anything considered seriously. It was just some slop to be fed to “white working class” voters who felt “left behind”. More infrastructure, more manufacturing, great! They ate the slop right up. But none of it materialized. Instead, we got tax cuts for the super wealthy, and that’s it. He doesn’t even talk about infrastructure anymore, probably because those same “white working class” voters are getting their fill on identity politics and no longer have much concern for their own material circumstances.
He still pays lip service to the lie about dismantling the MIC, but absolutely no progress has been made, and none will be. American troops are in Syria “guarding” oil fields, and lots of fancy weapons are getting sold all over the place. The recent “peace deal” was nothing more than the UAE — an autocratic slave state currently waging war in both Yemen and Libya — agreeing to some diplomatic formalities in exchange for access to F-35s. So much peace, nobody has ever seen peace like this! (Incidentally, is it in Israel’s long-term security interests for the UAE to have F-35s of their own? Who cares, the rapture is coming anyway!)
Comment #21 September 21st, 2020 at 3:17 pm
Nick #20
https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2020/07/unconventional-tactic-becomes-congresss-go-weapon-against-troop-withdrawal/166880/
Comment #22 September 21st, 2020 at 4:07 pm
Comment #23 September 21st, 2020 at 5:20 pm
Just rereading “The True Believer” by Hoffer. It explains what is happening well. Sadly the Democrats may not catch on in time.
Comment #24 September 21st, 2020 at 5:35 pm
PhilJ #23: Supposing the Democrats caught on, what action would be indicated?
Comment #25 September 21st, 2020 at 10:13 pm
“The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.” — Mencken
Comment #26 September 22nd, 2020 at 12:48 am
Nick #20
“Who cares, the rapture is coming anyway!”
I think you’ll have more success luring this crowd with a slightly different message, something along the lines,
“Who cares, the singularity is coming anyway!”
I am just saying!
Comment #27 September 22nd, 2020 at 3:03 am
@Andronymous: yes, that’s the standard argument against killing Hitler; that Germany was already crazy and whatever anti-semitic dictator they picked instead might have been more competent.
Not sure I 100% buy it, Hitler had some impact, but Weimar Germany did legitimately have problems that manifested in the Nazis!
Comment #28 September 22nd, 2020 at 10:30 am
Mugasofer #27
That thing about constantly bringing up the “Weimar Republic” (aka the “German Reich”) as an analogy to the US is flawed in many ways.
That so-called Republic started proper from 1918, coming from the type of old-fashioned monarchy that plunged the world into WW1, and lasted a mere 15 years.
And given it had to deal with the fallout of losing WW1 (e.g. the Treaty of Versailles) it was really doomed from the start.
Few people know that Germany was still dealing with the reparations of WW1 until very recently:
“To help make reparations payments, Germany took out various loans during the 1920s. In 1933, following the cancellation of reparations, the new German Chancellor Adolf Hitler cancelled all payments. In June 1953, an agreement was reached on this existing debt with West Germany. Germany agreed to repay 50 per cent of the loan amounts that had been defaulted on in the 1920s, but deferred some of the debt until West and East Germany were unified. In 1995, following reunification, Germany began making the final payments towards the loans. A final installment of US$94 million was made on 3 October 2010, settling German loan debts in regard to reparations.”
Comment #29 September 22nd, 2020 at 5:11 pm
Scott #24
Hoffer proposes that a believers belief can only be changed by converting to another belief. Reason and logic will never do it. The Democrats should take the principals of mass belief and use them to convert trumpets. Admittedly, I haven’t explained all the details as it would take a book.
Comment #30 September 22nd, 2020 at 8:05 pm
“Kid, I doubt Trump was your timeline’s main problem.”
“Tell me about it! The people in my timeline openly defy the mass media. I’m surrounded by wrongthink all the time, it’s a nightmare. I’m actually part of the ruling class btw, posing as a grassroots operative.”
“Hmm OK, let’s speak frankly then. Isn’t the point of democracy to let the media program the masses of people who prefer not to think for themselves to elect the preferred candidate of the eternal elite ruling class?”
“Right! They were told clearly not to vote for Trump but they did it anyway. Stupid people who I was happy to manipulate, but now I am mad at them because they won’t do what they’re told. All because no one locked down the internet tightly enough, so those bitter incel nerds shared influential memes about the media’s lies and the masses lost trust in our carefully curated narratives. Once they stopped listening to the media scripts – some of them even started thinking critically about everything we tell them – that ruined everything.”
“Have you tried torturing them with an indefinite, ill-justified house arrest and disruption of society?”
“Yeah, we tried that – back in 2018 we had 150k deaths caused by “respiratory illness”, but that wasn’t scary and hardly made a blip in the public consciousness. So in 2020 we threw everything we had at scaremongering about a new viral illness called covid. We were only able to associate it with 200k deaths, but the people in this timeline still have terrible number sense, so we made that sound scary and unprecedented to justify re-writing the societal contract. Haha, we even told them to worship nurses and doctors, who killed 250k – 500k people in 2018 with their medical mistakes.”
“Oh good, I’m glad you guys are still having some fun in that timeline. Did you humiliate them into wearing underwear on their faces too? Oh and as a tip, I recommend viral tests that also show positive for several strains of the common cold, that will help boost your numbers.”
“We’ve got most of them wearing the underwear, and we’re reporting false positives everyday! We’re following all the standard strategies, the problem is that some substantial portion of the masses are too aware. We’ve tried censoring media defiance on every online platform, and we’ve trained many people to ostracize family members or longtime friends who show the slightest sign of defying the mass media. But no matter what we do, these people who think for themselves won’t capitulate.”
“See that’s your real issue, this is where you time travelers get it wrong. You fall into thinking that war hinges on a single person, event, leader, dispute, etc. But the great wars in modern history were all precipitated by an overpopulation of fighting age males. History has shown that you must provide some outlet for these people and their violent energy. And which demographic of your population is leading the charge to defy the media?”
“We call them the alt-right; mostly white, mostly male, 18-35 years old…..
I think I see your point.”
Comment #31 September 23rd, 2020 at 10:35 am
Either you should blame it all on the initial conditions of the universe, and, given that the evolution of the universe is deterministic, there’s really nothing you can do about it… but, hey, keep trying! You never know how things will turn out! (that trying was also written since the big bang).
Or you just happen to be in one of the more deplorable branches of the multiverse. And the solution is then simple: just blow your brains out.
Comment #32 September 23rd, 2020 at 11:25 am
“Please operate on this huge cancerous tumor!”
“It’s clear this is just a metastasized tumor. Kid, I doubt that particular tumor is your main problem.”
“So…you won’t operate on the tumor?”
“That’s right. If something isn’t the main problem then it therefore isn’t a problem at all and should not be dealt with!”
Comment #33 September 23rd, 2020 at 2:30 pm
“Then comes Trump. He’s honest in the sense that he says what he means, even when it’s dumb.”
Such, as dead soldiers from WWII were just a bunch of losers, not worth commemorating if its raining out. Oh wait, the advisors he doesn’t have managed to keep that one quiet until it leaked recently.
Okay, such as coronavirus was just another form of flu and would be be over in a few weeks. But wait, isn’t he on tape with Woodard saying that was just a lie he told to keep people happy with his “administration”?
I had to look up TDS (from a different comment). Trump is just one of many sociopaths who float to the top of organizations by any means necessary. I remember people saying Saddam Hussein had to be removed from power because he was a sociopath. I replied that there were plenty of sociopaths to be removed from power here without going halfway around the world–probably several per block on Wall Street. What deranges me is how many people Trump can fool into believing him, and how they look at a relatively normal by comparison politician like Biden (by far not my first choice which was Warren) and conclude he is the worser choice. I mean, it would be nice to have some pride in and hope for my species, but you guys make it impossible. (Assuming you’re not bots, but you can’t all be.)
Comment #34 September 23rd, 2020 at 2:42 pm
P.S., Of course the point of the post is that killing a single sociopath is useless, the true believers will just find somebody else just as bad to worship; but instead of looking in the mirror the true believers look for a way to distort the meaning: “The liberals are subtly trying to advocate killing Trump!” (Yes, it’s probably just a trollbot, but how does that make it any better?)
Comment #35 September 23rd, 2020 at 6:29 pm
@Elizabeth#30- That medical errors kill hundreds of thousands of people a year is a myth:
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/are-medical-errors-really-the-third-most-common-cause-of-death-in-the-u-s-2019-edition/
Comment #36 September 24th, 2020 at 2:18 am
#2 Fred: You accuse the host (and implicitly many others on this blog) to “push the idea that the POTUS ought to be assassinated”
Yet you don’t recognize that your argument is based on a fallacy. If you were less biased, you would have recognized that the point of the fable is exactly the ***opposite*** of what you allege: the POTUS ought NOT to be assassinated because doing so would not resolve the “main problem”. As evidenced by the punchline, the fable is not about assassinating Trump, it is about how masses of people seduced by demagoguery can “destroy” a world we might cherish.
The specific fallacy you committed was to ignore the punchline in order to ascribe to the fable a self-serving conclusion in accordance with your preconceptions, which seem to be, more or less, “anyone who criticizes the current POTUS has TDS.”
Talk about suffering from a derangement syndrome!
Comment #37 September 24th, 2020 at 2:21 am
My previous comment was directed at #14 (sorry, Bertie)
Comment #38 September 24th, 2020 at 6:53 am
Elizabeth #30 What do you mean by “defying the mass media”? The mass media in the Western world are pretty diverse with a pretty diverse range of opinions and you can’t really defy all of it particularly as it will sometimes mean you are standing in the way of the truth. If you are a freethinker you would take a free press more seriously as I’m sure you would were you to lose it.
Comment #39 September 24th, 2020 at 7:14 am
fred #31:
I find your comment in poor taste and quite uncalled for, even as a joke; although it demonstrates adequately the absurdity and uselessness of purely rational reasoning.
Instead I would like to suggest that we embrace our humanity, all of it.
Comment #40 September 24th, 2020 at 7:32 am
lewikee #32:
The last sentence in your comment contains a non sequitur that destroys whatever rhetorical point you were trying to make. (Also, “not operating” != “not dealing with it”.)
Comment #41 September 24th, 2020 at 9:27 am
John Stricker #32:
The last sentence is a non sequitur only insofar as the original post makes no point. OK so, there is a systematic problem. So what? That has no bearing on whether a specific problem within that context needs to be addressed.
(Don’t act like you don’t understand the purpose of “operating” in the allegory. That nitpick is indicative of bad faith)
Comment #42 September 24th, 2020 at 11:00 am
@#11(Nick Nolan) : The Austrians are successful in convincing the world, that
Beethoven is Austrian and Hitler is German.(Billy Wilder)
Comment #43 September 24th, 2020 at 12:28 pm
This post brings up a good, if obvious, point. On the other hand, it is over the edge. You might consider adjusting some settings in your “Not a good idea” subroutine.
Comment #44 September 24th, 2020 at 2:01 pm
lewikee #41:
To what “original post” are you referring?
I suggest you reread my comment, since you missed at least one important if subtle point.
Also, precise phrasing is not the same as nitpicking, and my intentions are certainly not in bad faith (your attempts of mindreading notwithstanding).
Like I said, your allegory is a rhetorical dud. Perhaps choose a better one next time.
Comment #45 September 24th, 2020 at 4:03 pm
armin #38
Lol, nope, I actually referred to the “punchline” in that part that you removed when you tried and failed to quote me:
“push the idea (as subtly as they can) that POTUS ought to be assassinated…”
Comment #46 September 24th, 2020 at 4:06 pm
John Striker #40
Thank you for telling us what’s funny and acceptable and what’s not.
The world needs more people like you!
Comment #47 September 24th, 2020 at 4:18 pm
To everyone not convinced by the power of parentheses:
Trump is not (only) a racist.
Comment #48 September 24th, 2020 at 6:51 pm
@David #38: I wouldn’t characterize our mainstream media as “diverse”, but you’re right that they are not monolithic. When I referred to the entire mainstream media advising the masses not to vote for Trump, I was referring back to the beginning of his candidacy, before he won the Republican primary. You may or may not remember that the Republican establishment rallied behind several other candidates before all hope of beating Trump was lost. One of the things that Trump voters like most about him is that he won despite the media fighting against him every step of the way; he is a candidate who is emphatically not approved / preferred by the eternal partyless wealthy elite class. Although he wasn’t initially approved, that class eventually made the best of it and bought him (Adelson, etc), so in the end they allowed him to stay in office. Who knows what would happen if an unapproved candidate slipped through the cracks like that, and then didn’t sell out.
@Michael #35: I appreciate this article, and thanks to number sense we can see it makes a reasonable point. Indeed the John Hopkins study I pulled my numbers from, which your article is written to do damage control on, seems to be in error as your article claims.
In a way my point still stands: the respectable sounding institution made this claim about 250k-450k deaths in 2018, and no one panicked or suggested restructuring society. So my point about the out-of-proportion response to covid still stands, in a way.
What we’ve done here is a great example of critical thinking, applying number sense, comparing a claim about accidental medical deaths to the total number of hospital deaths, and using that to reject a peer-reviewed publication that asserted a number of accidental deaths that is absurd when scrutinized.
This kind of critical thinking should be applied to every claim in both science and journalism. David says I should appreciate the free press; I do appreciate the free press and when they show me videos or audio recordings I listen to them. But when they don’t show me the evidence I strongly distrust them, in fact I anti-trust them (if they claim an incident happened a certain way and don’t show a video, I assume the opposite of what they said is more likely to have happened). I recommend this strategy to all, the media is just as anti-credible as Trump, you can learn a lot by negating what they say.
Comment #49 September 24th, 2020 at 8:30 pm
#45 Fred.
No.
Concluding that X ought not be done is not “as subtly as [one] can” suggesting that X ought to be done.
Please let that sink in, Fred.
By your cherry-picking fallacy standards the mere mention of possibilities for consideration which are then refuted by the conclusion is enough to justify the opposite of the conclusion.
By your standard, if I say “Could the moon be made of cheese? No.” I am subtly suggesting that the moon could be made of cheese.
You are cherry picking in order to satisfy your cognitive bias, which seems to be in service of supporting the belief, more or less, that “anyone who criticizes the POTUS suffers from TDS”.
You should re-examine your belief.
Comment #50 September 24th, 2020 at 8:41 pm
fred #46: You are welcome, and absolutely ;-D !
Comment #51 September 24th, 2020 at 9:09 pm
#45 Fred.
No.
Concluding that X ought not be done is not “as subtly as [one] can” suggesting that X ought to be done.
Please let that sink in, Fred.
By your cherry-picking fallacy standards the mere mention of possibilities for consideration which are then refuted by the conclusion is enough to justify the opposite of the conclusion.
By your standard, if I say “Could the moon be made of cheese? No.” I am subtly suggesting that the moon could be made of cheese.
By you standard, if I say “Ought Eugenics be re-introduced? No” I am suggesting “as subtly as I can”, that Eugenics ought to be re-introduced.
You are cherry picking in order to satisfy your cognitive bias, which seems to be in service of supporting the belief, more or less, that “anyone who criticizes the POTUS suffers from TDS”.
You should re-examine your belief.
Comment #52 September 24th, 2020 at 10:24 pm
Elizabeth #48,
The mainstream media is plenty “diverse”. The issue is that many decades of hundreds of millions spent by the likes of the Koch brothers have pushed the national dialogue far to the right.
Comment #53 September 25th, 2020 at 7:53 am
armin #49
“anyone who criticizes the POTUS suffers from TDS”.
Lol, I never even wrote that!
This is quite different from:
“anyone calling for the assassination of POTUS suffers from TDS”.
Comment #54 September 25th, 2020 at 8:26 am
This struck me as obviously wrong, but I finally remembered which fallacy this is: The Fallacy of Relative Privation
Comment #55 September 25th, 2020 at 8:36 am
(the “you” below doesn’t refer to anyone in particular)
Also I don’t know why it took 4 years for some people to realize that Trump was a symptom and not some sort of self-contained vortex of causality that just popped into existence in American politics.
But the same trivial observation can be done about anything… everything is a symptom of something else. You walk back the causality chain and you end up at the initial conditions of the Big Bang.
I’m supposed to be blown away by the depth of insight of “oh, but he’s just a symptom!”?
It’s totally uninteresting without actually trying to talk about what should be addressed.
Is it all a rhetorical exercise to put the assassination of POTUS on the table and then virtue signal you’re above it?
For sure it’s easier than to trying to find a solution to the real issue:
the total shit show the republic has become thanks to the monopoly the two parties share on the political system.
They’ve totally hijacked the system, to the point they made everyone assume their very existence is as sacred as the constitution.
They’re fooling us all by turning the dramatics dial all the way to 11, when if fact they’re both on it together.
It’s their games that landed us in the current situation of extreme divide.
It’s in the parties’ interest to just nuke the center and force everyone to adopt one extreme or the other, and freak out about it.
The vast majority of the voters doesn’t want to be driven to civil war.
The two-party control is so absolute that they even managed to absorb Trump into it… imagine in what sort of trouble they would have been in if Trump had created a third independent party… (of course that will never happen).
So the two real issues are:
1) the constitution should be strengthened in light of all the abuse that have been going on, for years. Corruption should be driven out (i.e. money from corporations buying politics).
2) the two parties should be neutered, and it should be easier to come up with alternatives. This would then force parties to make concessions to win majorities, putting reasonable center views (the vast majority) back in charge.
Comment #56 September 25th, 2020 at 12:48 pm
Pardon, both you and Elizier are far wiser and cleverer than me. What is your goal in re-publishing this piece Scott? Now does not seem to be a good time to be down playing the problem of the president, but you two have much clearer view of the future and the past than I.
Comment #57 September 25th, 2020 at 1:56 pm
Indeed Trump is not the only problem. On September 25th, Senator Lindsey Graham said:
“I promise you as a Republican, if the Supreme Court decides that Joe Biden wins, I will accept the result. The court will decide, and if Republicans lose, we’ll accept the result.”
Comment #58 September 25th, 2020 at 5:36 pm
Brilliant.
Comment #59 September 25th, 2020 at 6:39 pm
Chris #56: I didn’t see Eliezer as “downplaying the problem of the president” at all. On the contrary, the story seems to take it as obvious and established that the president is now an existential threat to civilization, and then (as is my impulse as well) look past immediate events to reflect on how this dark-comedy, dystopian nightmare could possibly have become the world’s actual reality.
Comment #60 September 25th, 2020 at 9:03 pm
Why do you think Trump can still win?
Comment #61 September 25th, 2020 at 9:11 pm
. #60:
Why do you think Trump can still win?
– FiveThirtyEight gives him a 23% chance (recall they gave him about a 1/3 chance the last time).
– Biden needs to win the popular vote by at least 3% just to have even odds in the Electoral College—and that’s without tampering!
– The Trumpists are already planning to reject unfavorable results, reject mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day, and get friendly state legislatures to set aside results and appoint their own slates of electors. (Source: read the friggin’ headline news.)
– Trump has more than a month to do more shenanigans, including announcing a covid vaccine and mailing checks to seniors.
– If it goes to the Supreme Court, we can expect them to back Trump 5-4 or 6-3.
Comment #62 September 26th, 2020 at 1:27 am
Scott #61,
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-election-forecast/
538 gave Trump a 28.6% chance of winning and his chances were never worse than 12% (and reached 50% at one point). It was other forecasters who gave Clinton an overwhelming chance of winning the election.
Comment #63 September 26th, 2020 at 5:35 am
#49Fred: “anyone who criticizes the POTUS suffers from TDS”.
Lol, I never even wrote that!
This is quite different from:
“anyone calling for the assassination of POTUS suffers from TDS”.
I agree. And you obviously think that Scott (and by implication, many others on this blog) belong to the latter. I responded to your original comment because you arrived at this conclusion by means of fallacious reasoning.
You cherry-picked the post in order to make your point. After reading the following question in your #55, I think I understand why you do not seem to be particularly bothered by having committed a fallacy:
“Is it all a rhetorical exercise to put the assassination of POTUS on the table and then virtue signal you’re above it?”
So, your analysis seems to be not at the level of logic and semantics, but pragmatics. Alright, let’s go there.
The first thing to keep in mind is that, even if we may feel that we do, we cannot read the minds of other people. That means, before we infer from the context what they are “really” saying, we should place safeguards, lest we let our biases control our conclusions. This is especially important in political/religious discussions. A couple simple safeguards you could have employed are:
1. Asking Scott what he meant by republishing the passage, like #56 did, examining his answer and factoring that in your conclusion.
2. Employing the principle of charity, interpreting Scott’s post in the best possible light, and using that as your starting assumption to test whether your interpretation is true or not.
You did neither. Instead, you went straight to:
“I was wondering how long it would take for TDS sufferers to finally push the idea (as subtly as they can) that POTUS ought to be assassinated…”
What that tells me is that it is you who is “virtue-signalling”.
It is you who is trying show that you are doing the patriotic thing by pointing out calls for assassination of the POTUS by Trump-deranged individuals, even though you did not do the work needed to check whether that is actually true.
It is you who is trying to demonstrate his cool head in a blog full of crazies with murder on their mind (Note: you never wrote that, it’s called hyperbole), all the while your reasoning is fallacious and your inferences are in bad faith.
One last thing: neither TDS nor “virtue-signalling” is a thing as such. They are right-wing propaganda devices used to manipulate people so that they feel certain in their conclusions (or, more accurately: conclusions fed to them by the right) even if the means by which the conclusions were arrived at are highly dubious. Case in point.
Comment #64 September 26th, 2020 at 10:40 am
John Baez #57:
How is this a problem?! Sounds good to me!
Or do you mean because of the politization of the Supreme Court? I recall someone saying that “Elections have consequences”.
Meanwhile Trump has the entire political world talking about peaceful transitions of power, and a number of disturbing not-so-new news from around the time of the 2016 elections come to the surface…
Comment #65 September 26th, 2020 at 2:30 pm
Much of Yudkowsky’s writing leaves me with an empty “is that it?” feeling. In this case the moral of the story is Trump is a symptom not a cause, and I don’t get what the time traveller parable is supposed to add. Pascal’s mugging is another example, is invoking Pascal’s name supposed to give more weight to an illustration of people’s attitudes to risk? It’s fine as an argument about AI value but far out “Pascal’s mugging” sounds pretentious.
Comment #66 September 26th, 2020 at 4:22 pm
Elizabeth #48
On the “Covid vs medical mistakes”
Medical mistakes, even if they were a huge risk, are not spreading. They do not adapt to infect more people, and one mistake hurting you probably wont lead to mistakes hurting your friends. Much like driving accidents, I think it’s rational to accept these as a cost of scale and convenience. We should fix them as much as possible, but there’s no emergency.
Covid, on the other hand, has only hit around ~20% of the US population and is looking for more. There are some 150k more deaths waiting if we all open back up asap, this with optimistic assumptions. Further, there’s evidence of reinfections, and that reinfections need not be less deadly.
Comment #67 September 26th, 2020 at 6:02 pm
John Stricker #64:
“The court will decide.” Not “the vote will decide.”
Comment #68 September 27th, 2020 at 12:22 pm
John Baez #67:
Well, if the election is contested and there is litigation, then the vote presumably didn´t decide, and the matter will go to court. That is what Graham is talking about.
Or perhaps you have a better suggestion?
Comment #69 September 27th, 2020 at 12:27 pm
@Art #48: You raise a good point, perhaps indirectly: the disproportionate response to COVID is happening because it is a new cause of death that people haven’t accepted yet. They are mostly stuck on the first stage of grief, which is denial. They let themselves believe that the restrictions will make a big difference because they aren’t ready to accept that we are powerless against this new cause of death (and that isn’t the end of the world).
In contrast, car accidents aren’t a growing problem because the problem was already allowed to fester and saturate to a maximum, to the point at which those deaths (and more importantly the millions of permanent disabling injuries) are accepted. The moderate success of seatbelts made people feel empowered to reduce the problem, which eventually helped lead to acceptance.
The fact that so many people are stuck in the denial phase sincerely blows the covid thing wide open for me. This isn’t the first time I’ve gotten out of alignment with the zeitgeist by proceeding through grief too quickly; the same thing happened in 2016 when I went from supporting Hillary on election day to understanding Trump’s win by later that week. A progression that many intelligent people did not make in 4 years (my more recent support of Trump is something else, it only began back in May when the democrats and the media lost their minds completely).
Now I am hopeful; people haven’t permanently lost their minds, they are just incredibly slow to evolve into acceptance. Instead of attacking these people I should switch to pity, and distract myself while waiting for them to evolve to the only tenable long-term position, which is acceptance. Maybe this mental-toddler populace really does just need a grandfatherly figure as president in order to progress along in their stages of grief; that’s the closest I’ve felt so far to considering a vote for Biden.
Comment #70 September 28th, 2020 at 1:00 am
Elizabeth:
You are operating on the assumption that covid’s current death toll is the worst effect of covid and that the rest are either negligible or easily ignored. Of course, such a discourse ignores the “long haulers” and the collective lost productivity of that group over what may be months or years, and also the increasingly likely occurence that covid is in fact a vascular and not a pulmonary disease which may lead to long term heart problems even in the “asymptomatic”. And also, you know, the fact that covid is not a fact of life but one that can be stopped with common sense precautions as it has in Taiwan and New Zealand and Hong Kong.
And as for the comments about Trump’s six nobel peace prizes: Israel and the states which now recognise it have long had under the table agreements to address the threat of Iran, Trump essentially bribed them into recognising it formally. The fact that money and gear do not fundamentally address the tensions in the region is, of course, a post-Trump concern and therefore a non-issue (Ignoring the deeper fundamental problems always works out splendidly, just like his previous successes with North Korea! Its not like longstanding international conflicts needs slow, long term reconciliation and diplomacy or anything)
Comment #71 September 28th, 2020 at 10:44 am
Elizabeth #69
“They are mostly stuck on the first stage of grief, which is denial. They let themselves believe that the restrictions will make a big difference because they aren’t ready to accept that we are powerless against this new cause of death (and that isn’t the end of the world).”
A huge slice of the population is pretty ignorant when it comes to deaths from car crashes, deaths from cancer, deaths from heart disease, deaths from diabetes, …
The world population is 7.8 billions, the average life expectancy is 72 years, so every year there’s over 100 million deaths and births.
We all die one day from one thing or another, but what matters is how many of these deaths are too early and could be avoided at a *reasonable cost* to society.
The news media plays a huge role in the perception of all this.
For example, the news only report once in a blue moon on driving fatalities, only when something spectacular has happened (“SUV falls off bridge, killing all 6 passengers!”), given the general public a false sense that those things are pretty rare. But there were 38,800 road fatalities in the US in 2019. And the majority of those deaths are in the active/younger portion of the population (compared to covid19 which mostly affects the elderly with pre-conditions). Also, that’s just the deaths, 4.4 million Americans were injured on the roads in 2019.
Similarly, the “bad” flu season of 2017-2018 killed nearly 100,000 Americans, yet it didn’t register because it just wasn’t something exciting to report about.
Another example was during the covid crisis in NY, Cuomo would say things like “today we had 56 deaths from covid, which is a clear improvement, but even one death from covid is one death too many, and we won’t stop until this goes to zero”.
Well, a death from a car crash is also one death too many, but society is okay with having 38,800 deaths per year, meaning reducing it isn’t worth the additional cost (not always a tangible direct cost, like the cost of reducing the speed limit everywhere to 10 miles per hour).
When it comes to covid specifically, the science says that it’s probably a virus humanity will have to learn to live with, forever, like other coronaviruses (the common flu).
So in the medium/long term eventually everyone will catch it (I personally don’t know anyone who managed to never catch the flu).
Perpetual lockdown isn’t a long term solution, and vaccines probably won’t totally eradicate it either, just like for the regular flu. Talking about vaccines, one potential downside is that it could select for a much deadlier strain of the virus (just like it happens for antibiotics and germs, or chemotherapy/immunotherapy and cancer).
The reasonable thing to do right now is still to try to avoid huge spikes as much as possible, in order to limit the load on hospitals.
Sadly the news media is really good at instilling fear into everyone, without giving a proper perspective in terms of number.
What you won’t see is the news media (or even the healthcare system) focus on teaching general prevention, like how to be a healthier person and build a stronger immune system.
You also see supposedly very “smart” individuals (esp in the academia) who are totally incapable of making the most basic changes in their own life to improve/fix their own health, it’s just easier for them to relinquish personal responsibility, constantly freak out about the latest thing the news media is feeding them, and then blame the government for not magically fixing everything.
Comment #72 September 28th, 2020 at 11:48 am
#48 Elizabeth:
“This kind of critical thinking should be applied to every claim in both science and journalism. ”
I would go even further: in the current information milieu, critical thinking is essential to every aspect of life.
” But when they don’t show me the evidence I strongly distrust them, in fact I anti-trust them (if they claim an incident happened a certain way and don’t show a video, I assume the opposite of what they said is more likely to have happened). I recommend this strategy to all, the media is just as anti-credible as Trump, you can learn a lot by negating what they say.”
This is not an example of critical thinking, but seems to be a variant of circumstantial ad hominem in which an argument is not just rejected based on its source but its opposite is assumed. It is in general not a good way of evaluating information.
If a source makes a claim but provides no evidence, the critical thinking approach is to be skeptical: reserve judgment until more evidence in favor of or against the claim can be gathered.
To be sure, there is a bit of a grey area here: if a source has a consistent history of claiming the opposite of what is actually the case, then that itself can be interpreted as inductive evidence based on which to justify “anti-trusting”. But in general, “anti-trusting” introduces a bias in one’s cognitive processes that mirrors trusting based on insufficient evidence.
It would be interesting to me to find out how you arrived at the notion that “anti-trusting”, at least as as general way of consuming mass media, is a good idea. Was it because someone recommended it, or because you perceive mass media to lie on a consistent basis, or some other reason?
Comment #73 September 28th, 2020 at 2:21 pm
@Vaarsuvius: I understand the concerns about unfortunate fates that do not coincide with death, like possible long-term chronic illnesses such as fatigue, brain fog, loss of smell and taste, and pulmonary issues. I was worried about all of that back in January too. The idea that a virus lives on forever in one’s system is not new, infections like herpes, or more seriously malaria, can lie dormant for years before being reactivated by circumstances that are little understood. The good news about covid is that the data so far indicates that no such severe fates are especially common. I have seen some anecdotal news stories about minor celebrities pretending to be long-haulers for attention on social media, but if it was a real issue with data to back it up then the news would be hammering that point. If a double digit % of people with COVID lost more than a month of productivity I would consider that compelling, but I know of no such data. Instead the overwhelming majority of infections are asymptomatic, so you can’t tell you even have it without a test, let alone having a long haul of problems.
@Fred: I fully agree. Thank you for articulating all these points about people having poor number sense when it comes to understanding the death statistics that we already accept as normal, and comparing these to the numbers they hear about covid. The masses of people can hardly compare the magnitude of two numbers, but if they hear about some number of covid deaths everyday it becomes an enormous problem in their minds.
One window on the inability of the masses to discern orders of magnitude are the multiple times that Joe Biden has gotten confused and claimed that covid has killed more than 100 million people. These are the the sorts of people who think “a thousand, a million, come on man, whatever same thing”, or just generally can’t keep orders of magnitude straight in their minds. That such people get anywhere near running the country is a total failure of society.
>What you won’t see is the news media (or even the healthcare system) focus on teaching general prevention, like how to be a healthier person and build a stronger immune system.
Exactly. Vitamin C and D, Zinc, exercise, healthy sleep and nutrition, will all do more to prevent covid than face cloths ever will. The CDC is now flip-flopping this week on whether aerosols are even a significant vector of transmission, thereby admitting that the face cloths have been a superstition since the beginning.
@Armin: thanks, the short answer is that I agree with you and I was just trying a bit of humor in the discussion of “anti-credible.” Neither Trump nor the media are perfectly anti-credible, and critical thinking is always valid and necessary.
But to share a sense in which I really do treat the media as anti-credible, I only do this to form an initial opinion on stories that will not affect my life either way. The best recent examples are the stories about BLM criminals. They almost always follow the exact same pattern. The media breaks the story using a high school prom photo of the criminal, claiming he was totally innocent and gunned down for no reason at all. Just pure systematic racism. Then over weeks or months we see autopsy reports and unedited body cam footage that show the other side of the story, and in fact the guy was being a criminal and provoking the police. So now when a BLM story breaks, I just assume the guy was being a criminal and provoking the police until proven otherwise by some evidence.
>Was it because someone recommended it, or because you perceive mass media to lie on a consistent basis, or some other reason?
I first heard the notion of “anti-credibility” applied to Trump as a joke, and I liked it as a bit of math humor. I do perceive the mass media to constantly lie. They lied about progressive candidates throughout the democratic primary, and have been lying for the past 6 months about covid and BLM. I don’t mean to pick on BLM for no reason, I have a lot of experience with disadvantaged communities and criminals within them, and I have some empathy and pity for how their lives turn out that way. But for whatever reason I don’t fully understand, BLM and the rise of fake news have been intertwined in the past decade. Here is a long form documentary that is a good first exposure of the phenomenon for people who still believe in the integrity of the mass media: https://www.thetrayvonhoax.com
Comment #74 September 28th, 2020 at 5:39 pm
Elizabeth #73
“One window on the inability of the masses to discern orders of magnitude are the multiple times that Joe Biden has gotten confused and claimed that covid has killed more than 100 million people. These are the the sorts of people who think “a thousand, a million, come on man, whatever same thing”, or just generally can’t keep orders of magnitude straight in their minds. That such people get anywhere near running the country is a total failure of society. “
And you’re not even exaggerating:
Comment #75 September 28th, 2020 at 6:49 pm
#73 Elizabeth
I had never heard of this documentary before. Doing a little search indicates that it appears to be discussed exclusively on right-wing media. Apparently, the hoax in the title refers to an allegation that the the Attorney for the Martin family substituted a different woman for his actual girlfriend and that this person, the star witness, perjured herself in the course of the trial.
I have not seen the documentary, but I know that it is not difficult at all to manipulate people with motion pictures. Also, the director of the movie, Joel Gilbert, has a history of making documentaries with far out claims: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm3041537/
including one which alleges that Obama’s father was an American Journalist, poet and Labor activist, and not a Kenyan:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2379807/
one that claims Paul McCartney was killed in the 1960s and replaced by a double:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2379807/
and one that claims Elvis Presley is still alive (as of the making of the of the doc in 2012):
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2124782/?ref_=tt_sims_tt
Moreover, whereas the latter two works were originally marketed as serious documentaries, a few years later he revised their marketing as “Mockumentaries”. The following article contains of photo of the pre-“Mockumentary” Sleeve of the McCartney movie:
https://skepticalinquirer.org/newsletter/paul-mccartney-really-is-not-dead/
The director’s attempts to erase traces of his previous way of marketing his documentaries calls his integrity into question.
All this aside, it is in principle still possible that a nutty conspiracy theorist/bullshitter stumbles upon the truth, so rather than dismissing the Trayvon Martin “Hoax”, I will remain skeptical (unfortunately, too many people conflate skepticism with outright dismissal). Apparently, George Zimmerman commenced a 100 Million dollar Lawsuit last year based on this documentary and its accompanying book, so if there is any truth to the allegation, it will hopefully come out. I would certainly have much more confidence in a courtroom verdict than a documentary by a director with questionable ideas and ethics.
Coming back to your comment, what you recommend as ” a good first exposure of the phenomenon for people who still believe in the integrity of the mass media” is, to put it mildly, flimsy.
This exchange actually reminds me of an experience I had earlier this year and which I found quite disturbing:
I went to Denver for the APS March meeting. I found out it got cancelled after I got there, so I had some unplanned vacation time and decided to go sightseeing. I came across this performance venue (“Your Mother’s House”) which featured a poetry slam and open-mic night. While there, I decided to use the open mic to give an impromptu talk about how to protect oneself from being manipulated by the avalanche of misinformation/disinformation/BS which in this age is coming at us furiously from all sides. I have for the last few years developed a strong interest in and studied this topic, so it was not difficult at all for me to do this.
Some of the things I covered were how a practical notion of “truth” is much more useful than a metaphysical one, both because the latter can devolve into gateway to becoming manipulated (for example, the “red pill” is not a metaphor for how things really are, it is a metaphor for what a particular group of people wants you to believe how things really are) and because the practical notion puts the focus on you to do the kinds of things which someone who seeks the truth must do. These include formulating and committing to an ethical standard which gives a higher priority to being honest with oneself than to adhering to one’s preferred beliefs when the two conflict, committing to learning how to apply critical thinking skills, including understanding fallacies, faulty statistical or probabilistic arguments, and cognitive biases, applying the skills learned, and continuing the cycle of learning and application.
My talk was, to my pleasant surprise, really well received. I remember feeling gratified to have perhaps taken a small step in helping others be less likely victims of manipulation and bullshit. Then one of the audience members approached me and asked me about a person who had published books on some unorthodox archaeological ideas. It was Graham Hancock, a British Journalist and Purveyor of pseudoscientific theories.
The audience member had obviously listened to what I had said. He understood the points I had made. Yet, he turned around and promptly used these points in the service of defending Hancock. Somehow this guy had gotten in his head that Hancock was more credible than mainstream archaeologists and my efforts in the talk to get people closer to proper reasoning had only seemed to convince him more of his beliefs.
From this disturbing experience, I realized that it is not anywhere near enough for a person to appreciate the importance of critical thinking; it is not even enough to know how to apply critical thinking skills; there has to be an ethical and epistemological foundation in which this practice is properly anchored. In the political sphere, there are several “public intellectuals” who lack such a foundation, and this reveals itself by the fact that they continually abuse the tools of critical thinking to produce sophistry and bullshit. I believe most people are not even aware of these “hidden” dimensions to our beliefs, and, in my opinion, a lack of awareness of this helps make us easy prey for those that try to manipulate us even if we acquire some critical thinking skills.
Comment #76 September 29th, 2020 at 12:26 am
Elizabeth:
It is not hard to see why BLM is often sensationalised. It is emotionally charged (people are dying OR violent radicals are on the rise), in its popular conception largely anecdotal, and touches on one of America’s longest standing raw nerves.
The tragedy is not the anecdotes (otherwise the solution would be to just kick out the “bad apples”), but the systemic rates that data has borne out. Black people interact with police more often, are pulled over more often, and then die more often. The systemic injustice that leads to them being predominantly poor and segregated exacerbates and partially causes the issue, as do stereotypical beliefs about their strength and violent nature. All this you can ascertain from statistical evidence without looking at a single mass media report at all.
Comment #77 September 29th, 2020 at 3:27 am
And, as a further note:
Normal masks are excellent- at stopping your aeserols from reaching others. They’re ok the other way round, but not a guarantee (especially if you touch your mask). Thus, a mask-permeated society does stop covid, in the opposite way you expect.
Also, it’s funny how for someone who puts such great stock in their critical thinking abilities (and who “anti-trusts” mainstream media as a badge of honour), you would look past the blatant meddling by Trump in the CDC against masks and mass testing leading to doctored data (!!!!) and use their forced ambivalent stance as a sign of your “non-sheeple” thinking.
Comment #78 September 29th, 2020 at 9:09 am
Elizabeth, fred, you’re all treating covid as just another cause of death, you seem to just disregard that covid-19 is actually orders of magnitude bigger health threat than existing mortalities such as car accidents.
Car accidents are 30,000 per year, and covid-19 already reached 200,000 despite all the mitigations efforts. It’s at least 9 times more deadly, and the year didn’t even end yet, and if there weren’t widespread lockdowns it would have been even worse.
I can go on and explain the problems of overloaded hospitals, and long term damage, but I bet you heard it already. Unfortunately, it is actually you who are in denial. You’re the ones denying the reality that there is a virus that is a significant threat to everyone’s health.
Suggesting that humanity will have to live with covid-19 forever is pure speculation. There are going to be vaccines, and other pandemics have died out even without vaccines in the past, including a coronavirus pandemic in the end of the 1800s which eventually mutated into one of the common colds and doesn’t kill people anymore.
Comment #79 September 29th, 2020 at 1:32 pm
On an unrelated topic, Scott, I am curious if your study of forcing is changing your attitude toward anything in mathematics. In math as done by real mathematicians or real computer scientists in the real world, of course not everything is fully formalized in practice (I have heard that an ambitious goal is within 10 years to be able to at least formalize the main theorem statements of papers in certain subfields!), and to some extent the advantage of knowing the formal side is knowing when to avoid it. For example, there are all kinds of pathological functions in analysis or paradoxes in naive set theory, but one often has a sense that once you understand those issues they won’t arise unless you are deliberately looking for them. So it is common practice to, for example, work in naive set theory without worrying much about these problems. So, does studying forcing (or logic more broadly) changing your attitude at all?
Comment #80 September 29th, 2020 at 3:43 pm
Anon #78
“Car accidents are 30,000 per year, and covid-19 already reached 200,000 despite all the mitigations efforts. It’s at least 9 times more deadly, and the year didn’t even end yet, and if there weren’t widespread lockdowns it would have been even worse.”
But you’re ignoring one of my main points.
When we want to compare the “deadliness” of two diseases, we have to consider their toll on the different slices of society:
cars kill 38,800 per year, but those are mainly active people (sure, the senior do drive, but less so than working people and the youth). There are also orders of magnitude more who are left with serious life long consequences.
In contrast, the 200,000 covid19 deaths are mostly seniors who are the end of their lives with pre-existing conditions that would kill short term.
With covid19, the adverse effects of lockdown (on education and the economy) are harder on the people who are affected the least by the disease.
And the ones we should protect (the elderly) are no longer participating actively in the economy.
So this is very different from the 1918 flu were things were flipped, the young (in their 20s) were significantly more affected. I think it would be hard to argue that this is a worse situation for society.
Note that I’m not saying the elderly should be sacrificed or anything like that, just that we’re actually lucky the most affected could be protected without shutting down the economy too much.
At a more cynical level, there’s no free lunch for humanity. Our main threat is global warming, and its root cause is overpopulation.
If we don’t control overpopulation, nature will do it for us one way or another:
Overpopulation and frenetic globalism also bring an increase in the likelihood of pandemics (covid didn’t reduce overpopulation that much, but it sure put a brake on global sectors of the economy, like tourism, airlines, etc).
So, yes, in a way covid is more serious than road fatalities because we could theoretically bring car fatalities to zero (autonomous cars, etc), but controlling viruses is a different story, those are just the flip side of having thriving life on earth.
But covid19 is still pretty mild compared to all the uncontrollable “adjustments” to overpopulation that are coming our way if humanity stays on this course (many of which we can start to see in the news: massive wild fires, massive flooding, constant hurricanes,…).
Comment #81 September 29th, 2020 at 4:23 pm
matt #79: That’s an interesting question. At one level, of course, the independence of CH is “just another theorem”—one that happens to have ZF itself as its subject matter, rather than manifolds or quantum error-correcting codes or whatever else. But it’s one of the deepest theorems I’ve ever learned! So for starters, I’ve reflected on which aspects I would or wouldn’t have been able to come up with myself. The actual models of ZF+CH and ZF+not(CH) that one constructs now strike me as 100% natural and well-motivated, but the proofs that they satisfy all the required properties still have some dizziness-inducing reasoning that I can only verify after the fact.
As for “philosophical” views, the main change is that I had previously thought of the continuum itself as most likely “absolute,” and only the possible subsets of the continuum as non-absolute. But understanding Cohen’s proof showed me that this is wrong: the continuum itself is model-dependent! To make CH false, you literally put in more reals; you don’t just add in new subsets of your existing reals. But I plan to write more about all of this shortly!
Comment #82 September 29th, 2020 at 5:14 pm
@anonymous #16
I can sympathize with this view, but I don’t think it’s true. Trump himself has said that he was given his catch phrase of “draining the swamp” by a marketing group (at one of his rallies no less!). I think it’s more accurate to say that Trump doesn’t have many sincerely held beliefs, aside from his own self-interest, and that he’ll go with almost anything that he thinks will increase his public image. Unfortunately, I think a lot of politicians are the same, they’re just not as honest about it, so you’re right about that aspect of Trump.
Furthermore, if Trump supporters really wanted to cast a vote for someone who was honest, sincere, and trustworthy, then they would be Bernie supporters (as you later note). Some of them actually were, so for those people your words might be correct, but that’s likely not the lion’s share of Trump supporters.
I too despise the cultivated political facade. Trump has the same problem though: his advisors run the show and Trump is very likely just the front man.
So either the team behind the candidate is the only thing that matters, and Trump and Biden should be evaluated fairly on this alone without regard to their personal flaws (contra many of the claims made here and elsewhere), or personality also matters and our leaders should embody our best values. I think Trump and Biden both fail spectactularly, for different reasons.
Comment #83 September 29th, 2020 at 5:34 pm
@Vaarsuvius #76:
That’s not quite correct. Black people’s interactions with police escalate to physical violence more often than white people’s interactions with police, but they don’t get killed more often. That black people die disproportionately at the hands of police is a widely circulated claim that’s largely false. Of course, it’s likely that black people disproportionately *suffer* at the hands of police in most other ways.
Drives me crazy when people so readily undermine their own movement by making bogus claims.
Studies have repeatedly shown that liberals and conservatives suffer equally from motivated reasoning, leading them to discount countervailing evidence and believe fake news if it suits their narrative. It’s frankly depressing.
Comment #84 September 29th, 2020 at 6:08 pm
@Raoul #52:
Here’s my assessment of your 3 claims:
1. The mainstream media is plenty “diverse”: almost correct, with the caveat that every publication on the centrist spectrum or rightward is harshly criticized by anything left of it, and also, most people only get their news from one or two sources, so this “diversity” does not really reflect the reality.
2. Many decades of hundreds of millions spent by the likes of the Koch brothers to influence media: true.
3. Have pushed the national dialogue far to the right: pants on fire!. The Democrats have shifted way further left and the Republicans have stayed roughly consistent. You might be inclined to point to the 2004-2011 shift right, but note that that shift simply follows a strong leftward shift from 1999-2004 and brings it back to 1994 level.
Comment #85 September 29th, 2020 at 7:46 pm
fred, even if 80% of 200,000 deaths were old people, that still leaves 40,000 deaths, still comparable to a year full of car fatalities. There’s nothing in comparison to car fatalities that makes this any better.
And again, this is how bad it got when you shut down the economy to deal with it. If you didn’t, the figures would have been much worse. When you look at hard hit states like new york, the death toll relative to population there is just astronomical no matter how you try to twist it in your denial.
Even when you try to dehumanize and treat it like statistics they are alarming. You need to snap out of this denial because it’s just disconnected from reality, even more than the overdramatization of the media. The numbers are bad. They are bad even for young people. 0.1% chance for young healthy adults is still a high number. The hospitalisation rates can still potentially crash hospitals, which can lead to even more young deaths than the current statistics.
Comment #86 September 29th, 2020 at 9:22 pm
Armin: I’ll meet you halfway throughout this reply, because you are right that critical thinking operates on a base of ethics and epistemology. This is sometimes phrased by saying that reasonable debate only works when people share the same set of underlying values (which play the role of axioms). An easy example of differing values in this thread are calculated utilitarian approaches to covid deaths vs Kantian idealist approaches that treat all deaths as incalculable tragedies. And while value systems have long been discussed and debated, epistemological differences might be even more significant in our time; I refer to a relative general lack of agreed upon objective facts in our political discussions. So even the utilitarians disagree about how the impact of covid and associated restrictions should be measured.
A useful concept to apply to understand how people differ in their political epistemologies is the notion of a learning rate for machine learning, or similarly a temperature in simulated annealing. A model programmed with a large penalty for making an error will be cautious, and likely to arrive at a local extremum. A model with a low penalty for making errors will do a better job at exploring the global parameter space, but will produce results with a larger variance. These two approaches work best in conjunction, and we all tune our learning rates / error penalties in response to different circumstances.
Generally speaking, I favor a low penalty of error in discussions that belong purely to the realm of ideas. The circumstances of the discussion are crucial; I select a different penalty for errors in a blog comment thread than I would if I were literally in charge of a government response that people’s lives depend on. Another point I want to be clear on is that a low penalty for errors does not indicate a lack of preference, respect, or even love for finding the truth. It doesn’t mean a lack of skepticism. Rather, it’s most about not letting the fear of making mistakes hold us back from the pursuit of truth. It’s a strategic preference, and the set of scholars I admire is dense along the spectrum of “caution / safety” vs “boldness / risk”.
The reason I use a low error penalty in discussions of ideas is that I am drawn to maximizing information in the sense of Shannon, and so I am generally chasing after statements that are rare or surprising, but also true (false or fictional statements carry no information, in this context). This passion for surprising but true information is the impulse that motivates many people to study physical science (based on the amount of pop science that aims to “blow your mind”). People say the allure of conspiratorial or counter-mainstream thinking is in believing that complicated events were actually planned and under control, or believing one is special for having knowledge that others don’t. But a more sympathetic take on it is that the most surprising statements are also the ones that carry the most information. Information seeking intellectuals are good people to have in society, but can get off track a bit as they run out of major new things to learn (e.g. Newton’s alchemical pursuits). And we should remember that there is a role for high temperature / low penalty people who are free to explore the global parameter space.
Applying this to our specific exchange, I can mostly respect the pre-judging of a documentary based on the reputation of the source presenting it. In this case I did not have to place much trust in the documentarian to get something out of it, but it’s not so important and your response is reasonable. I would point out that an excess of pre-judgement and dismissal of each other’s sources, rather than watching them with an open mind, shuts down discourse, and this is a general problem in our time. So this specific case doesn’t matter, but it’s a general thing to examine. In my low error penalty epistemology, there is no risk for me to watch any type of video. I inherently distrust people so I will judge the video on the merits of what they present. I am actively skeptical of wholesale fabrications. If something manages to manipulate me (which has happened before! especially with the mainstream media), that’s unfortunate but it will only be temporary since I am always seeking more information.
In conclusion, my hope in explaining all this is to contribute to people being aware of these kinds of ethical and epistemological differences, which can overall help people to move towards productive discourse with individuals that hold very different views from their own.
Comment #87 September 29th, 2020 at 11:34 pm
Well, I just tuned in to some of the US presidential debate, seemed crazy to me. Danger signs here. I’m very glad I’m not living in the States. You are hurtling towards a mini-Singularity Scott (a ‘political Singularity’), a good (or not so good!) trial run for the big one? 😉
The world you know is ending….
Comment #88 September 30th, 2020 at 6:04 am
If given the choice I will opt for a timeline in which evolution provided more selection pressure on mental rather than physical fitness. Musk will likely soon offer vague details about his plan to offer tourism to other timelines.
Political discourse in the US can be described by a Schoolyard Model. On one side you have a new to the schoolyard sociopath and on the other side a sociopath that is a long term veteran of the schoolyard. On one side you have a sociopath that made a fortune by deviously hoodwinking others and on the other a sociopath who made a fortune by deviously hoodwinking others (I was personally a victim of only one of these that had a base of operations in DC). In the spirit of schoolyard contests each side must cast the other as devil incarnates and provide no quarter. If ever there was an evidential case for tribalism as a product of sociobiology then it is now, this very day. In the spirit of the schoolyard all those who would otherwise be expected to see nuance see only black and white (figuratively and literally).
It does bother me to consistently notice people who would otherwise be expected to appreciate nuance be in the black/white vanguard. I notice the constant conflation of ultimate deaths from Covid with current deaths from Covid. This is constantly used as criticism of the Swedish approach to the pandemic even though Sweden currently has very low rates of new infections and deaths (I just checked the latest statistics). The deaths in the first year from Spanish Flu in Sweden were 36,000 while deaths from Covid are less than 6,000 there currently, immensely different by my reckoning.
The lockdown debate it seems to me is a Rorschach test for fascist tendencies. Those that prefer a large measure of societal control are heavily invested in lockdowns while those opposed tend to prefer individual freedoms. At the start the lockdowns were sold as flattening the curve and when apparent the curve didn’t need to be flattened to save national health care systems, the argument then shifted and conflated current deaths with ultimate deaths.
Here is the latest per capita deaths by country and if you see a strong correlation between lockdown strategy and per capita deaths then please provide-
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/
Here is the chart of US deaths from flu by age group from 2017/2018-
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1127698/influenza-us-deaths-by-age-group/
Here is a chart of the first 100,000 Covid deaths by age group-
https://www.acsh.org/sites/default/files/coronavirus%20covid%20mortality%20us%20by%20age.png
The higher risk for older people with co-morbidities is well known. To compare Spanish Flu more equally with Covid you would need to include some recognition of shortened life with respect to life expectancy and then the disparity is even more immense. Spanish Flu (influenzas in general) tend to have higher fatality risk for much younger people and so by total number of years of shortened life span huge additional difference.
The areas with very high percentage Progressive populations are urban and with local and state Progressive politicians in office. They are however unhappy and seem to think if they export their unhappiness to every state and region by way of the federal government then their happiness will increase. In fact they will still be equally unhappy but closer to the then lowered mean level of national happiness.
If the federal government were to become smaller, and states became more the fundamental unit of governance, then people could migrate as they wished which should then result in greater general satisfaction with government. I suspect the Blue areas would still be very unhappy knowing that other states governed differently and people there thought differently. It would take immense infusions of federal funds to urban areas to raise general satisfaction levels measurably if at all possible.
Comment #89 September 30th, 2020 at 6:39 am
Oops…Sweden has about twice the population now compared to 1918 first Spanish Flu season.
Comment #90 September 30th, 2020 at 8:17 am
For the record, I live in NYC, and the city is now *literally* dead.
In order to save NYC from covid19 they had to kill NYC… then, after the first wave, it turned out that well over 25% of the population has the covid19 antibodies (the general population showing higher numbers than front line workers).
If you walk around Wall Street or Midtown on a weekday (the business centers), there’s no one around, it’s like on a Saturday except with zero tourists.
Countless businesses have shut for good and will not reopen.
Whatever restaurants are still open, they hardly have any business.
The vast majority of the office workforce, commuting from NJ and CT, are simply unable (hard to leave home when kids can’t go back to school) or too scared to come back to work because of what’s being reported by the news media (the local mishandling of covid19, the protests/riots, the surge in crimes,…).
Comment #91 September 30th, 2020 at 8:47 am
One issue with rampant globalism is that the world is now physically “over-connected”, e.g. one person mishandling a bat/pangolin in Wuhan China can affect cities on the other side of the earth within a couple of weeks.
Also if the current world population is a given (8 billion people), it’s only natural to expect all those people to aspire to a life style similar to the West (a house, a car, multiples computers, AC, flying all over the world,…). But the planet simply can’t sustain that level of materialism.
We now have a nascent technology that can help with all this: VR/AR.
Virtual tourism, virtual face to face communication, shift from material possessions to digital possessions, better teaching/learning tools, better ways to empathize with each other, …
So, if you’re a CS student and wonder what’s the next big thing, you can contribute. The field is new and exciting, full of great opportunities.
Comment #92 September 30th, 2020 at 8:59 am
Sandro
“I think it’s more accurate to say that Trump doesn’t have many sincerely held beliefs, aside from his own self-interest, and that he’ll go with almost anything that he thinks will increase his public image”
I do think that Trump does have some “sincerely held beliefs” beyond his own direct ego self-interest, but they’re dangerously out-dated: mostly visions of what patriotism meant in the 1950s, with a strong military, a strong nuclear deterrent, a very “zero sum game” view of world economy and relations. He pushed those antiquated points mostly on his own, he was already yapping about that stuff back in the 80s (and those resonated with people like Bannon and Bolton too).
Comment #93 September 30th, 2020 at 11:37 am
The grim details of the current state of NYC
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/28/nyregion/nyc-budget-coronavirus.html
It’s not just due to the local covid19 response, but also the result of the current ultra progressive leftist mayor Warren Wilhelm Jr. (aka Bill De Blasio) spoiling all the improvements from 12 years of Bloomberg running the city.
Comment #94 September 30th, 2020 at 1:46 pm
@fred #91
Indeed. Some Democrats’ position on open borders a year ago was already a little naive IMO, but them calling everyone who disagreed with open borders racist or xenophobic was just poisoning discourse.
I hope the pandemic has clearly shown how laughable the whole idea of open borders really is, and that liberals are not cautious enough when it comes to weighing certain threats (and conservatives are overly-cautious, which is why we need both).
Comment #95 September 30th, 2020 at 4:34 pm
NYT caught twisting the science on school reopening:
Comment #96 September 30th, 2020 at 5:03 pm
There was a time when Americans knew right from wrong, the true from the fake and could distinguish a leader from a snake oil salesman. That seems a long time ago now back in the days before the internet when Western movies were the main form of entertainment and heroes and heroines had principles and courage to go with it. How fondly I remember the 17 inch black and white television of my childhood and how disappointed I am that I could not bring it with me into the 21st Century.
Comment #97 September 30th, 2020 at 7:17 pm
@fred #80
Even if everyone who died of COVID only had an average of 4 years of life expectancy left (and even the very old have that sort of expectancy) that’s 800,000 person/years of life lost in 6 months. Those sorts of risks we take very seriously; that’s about the same annual rate of person/years lost as to traffic accidents, and we have all sorts of institutions at every level of government as well as private enterprise devoted to mitigating the risk of traffic accidents. It’s vastly higher than the average risk of terrorism, yet we devote hundreds of billions annually to terrorism prevention.
@Sandro #83 — While it is true that by some measure Blacks are not killed by police disproportionally to Whites, this statistic is distorted by the fact that a large number of Whites are killed by police in suicide-by-cop, and this is far rarer among Blacks (suicide rates are 2-3x higher for Whites than Blacks). These are admittedly hard numbers to quantify, but it’s certainly possible that the majority of White death by police is in fact suicide, and if you then apply the difference in general suicide prevalence to estimate the fraction of Blacks killed by police that are suicide you can conclude the risk of non-suicide death by police is really much higher for Blacks than Whites.
Comment #98 October 1st, 2020 at 2:54 am
Fred #95
I am shocked by your video-it was actually well balanced and fact based. The data about children has been available for quite some time and Sweden used this data at the start to develop their response but otherwise fact based.
I agree with your position on global population and currently about another 80 million new net consumers of resources per year. I had a conversation with an extremely well credentialed respected but strongly Progressive MD a few weeks ago. I noted that current global population dynamics increase risk for pandemics and so the time to next pandemic will likely decrease. Not only is total population still increasing but also still a strong global trend of urbanization. From the standpoint of a virus you couldn’t ask for better trends-more hosts for quintillions more replications and hosts closer together for easier transmission. He described this as nihilism which I contested as simply stating the obvious link between pandemics and population dynamics.
From the beginning of this I have been shocked that data from the Diamond Princess cruise ship was ignored as was post SARS/MERS research on Coronaviruses conducted in Singapore and Hong Kong by respected laboratories. I concluded that the driving force for the lockdowns was not science but politics. It also seems strange to me that the aged are warehoused, pending death, in an optimal environment for transmission of viruses by respiration and then when they die from a viral infection it appears to shock much of society.
Comment #99 October 1st, 2020 at 3:37 am
Fred#95
A usual definition of Pediatrics is medical care for those under the age of 18 so an age break at 18 is optimal with respect to usual definitions. Unsurprisingly the American Academy of Pediatricians recommends pediatric care up to 21 years of age. 🙂
Comment #100 October 1st, 2020 at 3:06 pm
The author’s punchline gets it exactly backwards. Trump’s supporters correctly see this as a battle between Good and Evil. If Trump loses, it’s game over for the human race. The Leftists will immediately move to permanently consolidate power. Elections will be permanently rigged so that they cannot be removed from power. Their dominance of schools, colleges, media, government departments, corporations, will be tightened to total control, and Marxist/racist dogma will be mandatory. Sociopaths of all kinds, school bullies, rioters, criminals, illegal immigrants, terrorists, foreign adversaries, will be unleashed on a defenseless and terrified public to keep them compliant. They will engage in massive financial fraud, often undermining national security. We know they will do these things, because they already have been doing these things, but with Trump gone, we would pass a permanent tipping point of no return. While the Leftists would take total power within the United States, the country itself would collapse, and quickly fade in power, leaving the Chinese Communist Party as the sole world superpower, which was their plan all along, with the American Leftists merely being useful idiots. The entire planet would descend into a permanent horrific Orwellian totalitarian dystopia. The End …
..unless Trump wins. Then there is a chance to stop all this, and turn things around. Things were moving in the right direction, despite and enormous array of forces directed against Trump, whose only real source of power is the people, but then the CCP launched their virus, an act of warfare designed to bring down Trump. If they succeed, it’s game over.
Comment #101 October 2nd, 2020 at 3:03 am
fred#90 #91
“the planet simply can’t sustain that level of materialism”
“a very “zero sum game” view of world economy and relations. He pushed those antiquated points…”
Those points are not antiquated, they are cynical conclusions of the world’s materialism. Maybe they are too pessimistic, but not totally illogical.
Comment #102 October 2nd, 2020 at 10:12 am
Allemaraiccire #100
but the left news media will always make sure free speech is used to defend the values of democracy!: