Effective Altruism
Normal emotional challenges faced by altruists.
Lots of great advice about how best to run an EA group. Related: why groups should consider direct work.
Reducing risk of value drift.
Black people, Christians, and women are more likely than average to be interested in EA.
Advocating for diet change costs $310 per pig saved, which is inferior to GiveWell top charities.
Wiki of effective altruist cause areas. This is an incredibly cool resource.
Immigration
From the Onion: tips for staying civil while debating child prisons.
Five myths about the gang MS-13.
Jared Kushner’s grandmother was a refugee.
The Discourse
A really great explainer about the Supreme Court’s recent crisis pregnancy center decision and why it might be a win for free speech.
The SPLC is the victim of [ETA: a threatened] frivolous defamation lawsuit.
Is economic research biased by partisanship? “There’s another problem with praising a “libertarian”, or any researcher with strong beliefs, for honesty when their research conclusions don’t fit narrow priors. It puts their research that does fit narrow priors under a cloud. But only people with strong beliefs are put to this test. No one gets suspicious when a moderate democrat produces lots of research that fits moderate democrat priors. Why not? Do you assume reality is moderate?”
Rationality
How beautiful prose can conceal bad reasoning. (I like this because I’m a terrible prose stylist.)
Strategies for problem solving explained with mazes. I am not just linking this because of its use of Disney mazes, although that definitely helped.
Everyone is using the phrase “loss aversion” wrong.
Disability
One disabled woman’s experience of sexuality and body image. “When I realized I was essentially free, cast aside in the wild frontier of unacknowledged sexuality, things began to change for me. It’s not that I ceased to care how I looked altogether or that I stopped showering. It just meant I realized I had the power to choose what mattered to me.”
Disability-inclusive stock photos. This is really cool activism from a company one wouldn’t expect, actually!
“In the total study population of more than 23,000 people (excluding the people on antidepressants), 6 percent reported depression. Among the users of just one of the drugs that have depression as an adverse effect, the prevalence increased to 7 percent. Among people taking two or more of the potentially depression-inducing drugs, the prevalence went up to 10 percent. And among people taking three or more of the drugs, the prevalence was 15 percent.” If you’re depressed and on any medication, it’s worth checking your meds against this database.
Modest goals for disability awareness.
Videos about scoliosis surgeries and whether it counts as “inspiration porn” if it reflects the disabled person’s own experiences.
Gender
Sharp spike in unmarried 22-35-year-old men who haven’t had sex in the last year, starting in 2008. At present, nearly twice as many men are celibate as women (14% vs. 8%). Internet porn?
Body positivity has been coopted. “An alarming percentage of the public conversation about which bodies our culture values or rejects pivots around models, actresses, and other professionally beautiful people reassuring what they seem to believe is a dubious public that they are, in fact, super hot.”
Race
Just say Trump is racist.
AAVE is not Standard English with mistakes. Related: outline of AAVE grammar.
Telling white people they’re outnumbered makes them hate welfare.
Should indigenous tribes have the right to commit infanticide?
Christianity
Christians work with prison guards to help them cope with the trauma of their jobs.
“Notice here that James does not say “Well done you good and faithful rich, for your industrious perseverance has made you successful.””
Just Plain Neat
The Pyramids of Giza are near a Pizza Hut, and other disappointments.
The Fermi paradox has been solved.
In defense of slice of life stories.
Thing of Things 
The SPLC is the victim of a frivolous defamation lawsuit.
This is not true. There was never any lawsuit, and accordingly never any risk of a legal precedent being set.
The SPLC (once again) made a grotesquely incorrect and defamatory statement about an individual, were notified about it and chose to compensate their victim by supporting the victim’s charity work.
Ken White is not always reliable, especially when it come to characterizing actions or people he does not like.
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What’s wrong with Ken’s claim that the SPLC list can’t possibly be defamatory because it’s inherently meaningless and subjective?
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I think there’s a difference between the precise legal definition of defamatory and the colloquial definition. AFAICT, the SPLC would have won any defamation lawsuit filed against them, which there wasn’t in this case.
Which then raises the question, why wasn’t there a lawsuit, and why does Ken think we need to be concerned?
As a practical (not a legal) matter, claiming that the SPLC’s list is inherently subjective and meaningless is like claiming that the Oxford English Dictionary is inherently subjective and meaningless. You can use a certain point of view to make that statement true, but from another point of view they are both reference materials used by others as an authoritative source.
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There wasn’t a lawsuit because the SPLC settled after a lawsuit was threatened– perhaps because they were afraid of what would come out in discovery or of the negative publicity of a lawsuit. If you can get people to apologize for non-defamatory speech by threatening frivolous lawsuits, that’s really bad for freedom of speech.
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If you can get people to apologize for non-defamatory speech by threatening frivolous lawsuits, that’s really bad for freedom of speech.
I would say that it’s bad for freedom of speech if it were possible to win such lawsuits, or if one could use the process to harm those you could not legally win against (which is why I am so supportive of anti-SLAPP laws)
It is also bad for freedom of speech if powerful institutions cannot be brought to account for their speech. If the SPLC had been willing to apologize to Mr. Nawaz and withdraw the accusation without the threat, that would have been better than needing a threat to rectify the situation.
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This would be a case that has actual (imo) bad-for-free-speech implications. A white supremacist won damages against a woman that cursed him out in public. The compensatory damages were trivial, but the fact that he won isn’t (again, imo)
http://reason.com/blog/2018/07/02/unite-the-right-organizer-wins-5-in-dama
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@Fisher
“I think there’s a difference between the precise legal definition of defamatory and the colloquial definition”
“defamatory”, “slanderous”, and “libelous”, have all been colonized by the lawyers. If you ever try to use them in a colloquial way you will get “well actually it’s not a false statement of verifiable fact”, roughly 100% of the time.
Instead of those words I suggest “calumnious”.
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1) Does anyone know where I can find an archived copy of the SPLC Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists? It’s hard to discuss their specific claims without reading it.
2) The Supreme Court case on this issue, Milkovich, isn’t super clear. IMHO, the basic modern question on an opinion is whether a reasonable audience would understand that to be an implied statement of fact. In that specific case, the Court found that stating that someone lied about an admitted statement was potentially defamatory.
3) IMHO, I’d really need to see the tenor of the guide, which is now hard to find. In general, I have some concern that the SPLC has put quite a bit of effort into fostering the belief that their hate lists and the like are based on reasonable judgment and actual foundations, not that they’re just an opinion. So if you say “The SPLC has identified so and so as an anti-Muslim extremist,” then yes, if you go to page 46 of the pdf, you can (arguably) find all the undisputed facts that the SPLC relied on in making that judgment. However, I don’t think most people can argue that can cause damage – Amazon will kick you out of their charity program, your wiki page will get a note that the SPLC has identified you as anti-Muslim, etc. If a jury would find that “opinion” to be unjustified and false, it’s hard to say it wasn’t damaging.
4) White is an aggressive free speech advocate. In his view, saying “Michael Mann is a fraud” or “Robert Zimmerman is a murderer” or “Ayaan Hirsi Ali is part of a network of anti-Muslim extremists” is opinion, and that’s that. But as the Mann case shows, that’s not necessarily an accurate statement of what will happen if you actually go to court.
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Here is the report.
Apparently, the SLPC believes that trying to touch a naked lap dancer is anti-Muslim. There is at least one falsehood in that claim, because the dancer was not actually naked (although it actually was the Daily Mail that lied about that, which the images in their own story show).
I’ll leave it to others to check the more serious claims.
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I am willing to change my mind. Can you point me to a list of the specific factual claims made by the SPLC that were false and published with either knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for the truth? (Remember that “anti-Muslim” and “racist” are opinions, not facts, and therefore do not fall under anti-defamation law.)
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The lawsuit never existed. Therefore your statement that the SPLC was the victim of one (frivolous or otherwise) is untrue.
I could be wrong. Can you point out the specific lawsuit filed by Maajid Nawaz, with the jurisdiction and case number?
In other non-lawsuit related SPLC defamation cases, I can point you to specific false claims of fact published by the SPLC against other individuals that also did not result in lawsuits. The easiest one for you to verify would be when they claimed that Tim Pool attended and spoke at a Holocaust Denial conference in Iran. Tim Pool has never been to Iran, and has never spoken at any Holocaust denial conferences. The SPLC gave a full apology in that case, but did not pay Mr. Pool any money.
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So if I understand the crux of our disagreement here, it is about whether a person credibly threatening to sue you over clearly protected speech and you giving them lots of money and apologizing counts as being victimized by a frivolous lawsuit.
…This is a really stupid argument and I do not consent to host it on my blog anymore. (If I am mistaken about the crux of our disagreement, then you can continue ofc.)
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I believe the argument would be that the SPLC list is generally treated as factual by a broad spectrum of people*, and thus people placed on the list have a more plausible claim to defamation than someone who was called racist in a blog post, even one by the SPLC. I don’t see a principled way to actually decide such a case, but I think we non-lawyers can safely call the statement “defamatory but not appropriate for judicial response”.
* I do not have evidence available for this claim, but I’ve seen it made and am willing to believe that at least some evidence exists.
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I can’t say what the crux is. There are other possible areas of disagreement, such as:
Can a corporation with a third of a billion dollars and vast public and official support ever be a victim of an individual?
Can a legal (if unlikely to succeed) tactic, such as filing or threatening to file a lawsuit be a legitimate response to bad (but legal) behavior? And if so, is the (legally acting) malefactor a “victim?”
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I suspect it will probably read like opinion to you, but here’s the case I would make that the SPLC report is false, that the SPLC knows or should know it was false, and that it was damaging.
First generally, as a fallabilist and a naive Bayesian, I consider all statements to be statements of opinion – don’t you? As Ken points out, statements popularly considered opinion can be actionable if they imply they have a foundation in fact. The actual case that set the current rule, Milkovich vs. Lorain Journal, involved the statement that another person was a liar and that any reasonable person would agree that the plaintiff was a liar – certainly, it was the speaker’s opinion, but the Supreme Court found that a jury could conclude that the statement was defamatory on the facts alleged.
IMHO, the most offensive thing to me is the idea that this is a list of particularly hateful and pernicious anti-Muslim extremists and that after investigation, Nawaz belongs on the list:
“The Southern Poverty Law Center is a nonprofit organization that combats hate,
intolerance and discrimination through education and litigation. Its Intelligence
Project, which produces the investigative magazine Intelligence Report, tracks
the activities of hate groups and the nativist movement and monitors militias and
other extremist antigovernment activity.”
“Fueling [anti-Islamic] hatred has been the propaganda, the vast majority of it completely baseless, produced and popularized by a network of anti-Muslim extremists and their enablers. These men and women have shamelessly exploited terrorist attacks and the Syrian refugee crisis, among other things, to demonize the entire Islamic faith.”
“they routinely espouse a wide range of utter falsehoods, all designed
to make Muslims appear as bloodthirsty terrorists or people intent on undermining American constitutional freedoms”
“These propagandists [specifically, the 15 people the SPLC have identified in this guide] are far outside of the political mainstream, and their rhetoric has toxic consequences — from poisoning democratic debate to inspiring hate-based violence.”
“These spokespeople [again, the SPLC 15] were selected on the basis of their presence in national and local media and for the pernicious brand of extremism and hate they espouse against Muslim communities and the Islamic faith. While not intended to be an all-encompassing list, this group of propagandists are at the center of what is a large and evolving network of Islam-bashing activists, elected officials and their surrogates.”
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Which is fine if the SPLC is treated as one more looper on the Internet voicing their opinion about the Secret Global Conspiracy to do all good people down.
But when it comes to police forces using the SPLC lists as “here’s how we know what hate groups are operating in our jurisdiction so we can keep a watchful eye on them” because the SPLC is considered reliable and factual and that it’s not simply expressing an opinion, it’s giving judgement based on weighed evidence – then I think that slapping the bastards* with the threat of suing them into oblivion, frivolous or not, is a good way of ensuring they don’t lose the run of themselves.
Would you be happy, Ozy, to be put on the Hate Map? So that your local police force can locate you and monitor your activities? After all, the SPLC are only expressing an opinion about you being engaged in hate activities!
*I have a personal grudge against them, for reasons I don’t want to go into too much; suffice it to say, one of the groups on their Extremist Files Hate Map as a bigoted hate group would, if you believe them, mean that my late father (tangentially via a circuitous chain of tenuous A is linked to B is linked to C circumstances) should be regarded as an anti-Semitic homophobic racist sexist bigot (I’m probably forgetting a few of the Bad, Bad Names you should call him).
Need I mention my father was none of those things? But they were willing to tar people with that brush in order to keep the fear and outrage stoked to ensure donations keep rolling in. So to hell with them! Take them to court, even in Britain which has horrific libel laws that are regularly abused by wealthy and powerful foreigners to stifle and gag media coverage of their wrongdoing!
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Of course I don’t want to be put on a Hate Map. I think the SPLC is awful. But the whole fucking point of free speech is that you defend abominable speech. No one tries to censor non-abominable speech. By all means, say no one should trust the SPLC, say putting Ayaan Hirsi Ali on a list of Islamophobes is hateful and wrong, but don’t threaten to sue people to get them to shut up.
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@jossedley
“I consider all statements to be statements of opinion – don’t you?”
No! And this attitude obscures a crucial distinction that courts do, and ought to make.
“facts” are true statements for which it is possible, in principle for a third party to evaluate objectively. opinions are not.
The distinction is made clear by comparing “Mr. Foo is a card carrying member of the Nazi party” to “Mr. Foo is a Nazi”. Courts can objectively and fairly determine that a particular person is not an official member of a particular organization.
You do not want courts to be evaluating the “truth” of claims like “Foo is a nazi” or “Bar is an islamist”, for the purpose of punishing the people who made those statements. It’s too subjective. It’s too dependent on disputed boundaries between categories.
You can adopt the attitude of a radical skeptic, saying “everything is just an opinion”, and there’s some sense in which that is correct, but what it ignores is that some things are much more opinion-like than others, and this difference is critically important for drawing lines around the potential abuse of defamation law.
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@Deiseach
I don’t see how one can hold the SPLC legally responsible for other people taking them too seriously. That’s on those other people.
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@Lawrence D’Anna
Just to clarify, are we talking about what the law is in the US, or what we think it should be?
Either way, I don’t think the opinion/fact distinction is as easy as I think you are implying.
I can have an opinion about a (theoretically) provable fact: “In my opinion, John Redacre was not fully truthful in his statements to police last Thursday.” It’s IMHO less harmful than just making the statement outright, because it connotes less confidence in my belief.
It’s also possible that a statement is sufficiently vague that it’s hard to test – “John is a bounder and a rapscallion” – but which if you knew what I meant, you could probably determine in some cases that the statement was false and that I should have known it was false. On top of that, if my audience has a predictable understanding of the terms and believe that my statement implies supporting facts – “John is a sexual predator” – it can cause a lot of harm.
Some statements are essentially pure opinion – “In my opinion, John is an exceptionally handsome man,” but others are capable of being true or false even if they contain some vagueness and opinion – “John is a great athlete.”
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@jossedley
I think we’re talking about both. US law does distinguish between fact and opinion, and in my own opinion, it’s right to do so.
I agree the distinction is not always so easy to make. There are things which are clearly fact and things which are clearly opinion, but there’s lots of gray area in between. And I guess that’s why we have all these complicated lawyers and judges, to figure out the gray area.
One of the things Ken White talks about in his post on the SPLC is the notion of “opinions based on disclosed facts”. Statements that make it clear that they are not introducing new facts, but drawing conclusions based on facts already introduced, are opinions. Even if the conclusions they draw are about facts.
There is some fact of the matter about whether or not John was lying. If you say you know for a fact he’s lying, or worse that you saw him at the pub at the time he told the cops he was at the gas station, then your statement is potentially defamatory. But if you say it is your opinion that he was lying, then it cannot be defamatory.
At least, that’s how I read what Ken was saying about it. I’m not a lawyer and I’m not claiming to understand all the ins and outs of what courts consider to be statements of fact versus statements of opinion. I’m just saying they do consider the difference, and I’m glad they do.
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Ken lays out the law well. If you read his posts on Team Harpy, Michael Mann and SPLC, I think you’ll have a complete and nuanced understanding of libel law.
The question of whether an opinion is based on disclosed facts or implies the existence of undisclosed facts is a tricky one to predict and probably depends on your judge and jury. I think the biggest problem for the SPLC is its intro, in which it stated things about the list like “These propagandists are far outside of the political mainstream, and their rhetoric has toxic consequences — from poisoning democratic debate to inspiring hate-based violence” and “These spokespeople were selected on the basis of their presence in national and local media and for the pernicious brand of extremism and hate they espouse against Muslim communities and the Islamic faith.”
I laid it out some quotes in a little more detail downthread, but IMHO, the issue for a jury would probably be whether a reasonable reader would understand that Nawaz was on the list solely because of the specific facts alleged in his section, in which case it would be opinion based on disclosed facts, or whether a reader would understand that the SPLC’s opinion that Nawaz was “far outside of the political mainstream” and espoused a “pernicious brand of extremism and hate” implied the existence of undisclosed foundational facts.
It’s tricky – if the SPLC said “In our opinion, based on the facts identified below, it appears that Nawaz cares more about money than ideology, espouses a particularly pernicious brand of hate, etc.”, they would clearly be OK, but of course no one writes like that without a lawyer reining them in, so there’s some fuzz in how you interpret them.
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Randazza, one of the popehat bloggers, differs from Ken and lays out why he thinks suing the SPLC could have been successful in the comments of that blog. Implications on free-speech aside, when you’ve got a lawyer whom the lawyer you’re citing holds in high esteem disagreeing, I think it becomes inapt to consider the lawsuit frivolous.
The short version is ‘SPLC represented these statements as facts so it’s not unlikely to court will treat them as statements of fact’ but I highly recommend reading the full version.
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>Should indigenous tribes have the right to commit infanticide?
… ??? … no?
Incidentally the article’s not restricted to infanticide, for those of you who support that (you know who you are). It’s about “child-killing”. They seem to be explicitly including any murder of minors whatsoever; one of the specific examples was 12, another was 7.
The article is sparse on detail, but does explicitly say that the Brazilian Association of Anthropology officially support this practice remaining legal (in rather strong terms). So it does sound like there’s non-trivial opposition to banning … murder … of children?
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I think the question is: Should the Brazilian state interfere with indigenous peoples in order to prevent child-killing.
It’s a matter of jurisdiction, and the notion of the nation-state.
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The bit on avoiding value drift seems super creepy to me. Like, “no, we aren’t a cult, but just in case you are ever tempted to fall from The Way make sure to live your life surrounded by those who are similarly righteous!”
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Does anyone have any speculations on why the SPLC would cave in and surrender to a frivolous defamation suit? It makes no sense. What, are they suddenly incapable of litigation? Was it going to cost more than three million dollars to get a frivolous defamation suit dismissed? Were the underlying facts of SPLC’s despicable (but not defamatory) statements just too embarrassing? I don’t get it. Why did they fold?
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The theory I like best is “bad cases make bad law.”
In this particular case, there was a very sympathetic defendant and their statements were so egregiously wrong and poorly sourced such that if they got to a jury trial, the SPLC might have lost. They would rather pay him off and wait for a slam-dunk copycat litigant to sue them so they could fight that one and win.
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They wefe threatened with suit under British defamation law, IIRC (the man in question is British). Britian famously has some of the worst speech protections in the anglosphere, especially when it comes to defamation and libel.
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Love the Onion article.
The thing with civility is that both these things are, IMHO, true:
a) It is important to be able to get along with, or at least tolerate, people who don’t share your exact ideology; violence isn’t the way, etc, etc.
b) The above doesn’t mean that calling ICE agents ‘Most honorable sir’ as you open the debate club is a good way to address the issue of children being in cages.
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EA question: is there a good equivalent to Givewell for in-kind donations? I just cleaned out my wardrobe, in the process collecting about a suitcase-worth of clothes that no longer fit me but were still in reasonably good condition. I wanted to donate them, but I had previously read things about Goodwill that implied that it was not a great organization to be donating to. Ultimately I wound up putting them in a local-ish organization’s donation bin, but I’d like to know if there’s a good resource for that kind of thing in the future.
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I think most EA orgs don’t talk about in-kind donations because they’re almost always less effective than an equivalent amount of money. That said, I think Goodwill is uniquely crappy towards disabled people and most thrift stores are fine.
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Is there really that much more easily accessible or such a greater variety of internet porn than there was in 2008? I actually wonder (though this is perhaps uncharacteristically male-cynical of me) if some of this change has more to do with greatly increased awareness and recognition of and widening definitions for rape and rape-adjacent acts.
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Free internet porn is much easier to find now, with sites such as PornHub, etc.
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Yeah, I’ve never been into online porn (which makes me a very, very non-central man I guess), so I wouldn’t really know about this, and I guess it’s plausible that there’s more free stuff available now. I do remember that I had a roommate in college, back in 2007, who had a collection of porn DVDs in his room. And when looking back, I’ve wondered why he paid money for DVDs (he was poor to the point that he basically lived on Ramen and eggs) when the whole internet was at his fingertips.
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PornHub launched in 2007. YouPorn launched in 2006 and was part of the top 35 most visited sites in late 2007. So perhaps non-nerds were much more able to access porn online in 2008 and onwards.
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There might also be a hardware aspect to it — even though porn on the internet is old, devices for accessing that porn have become vastly more affordable and more discreet. If each kid has a smart phone, more might be watching porn more often than if the only computer with broadband is in the living room.
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I think it matches up fairly well to the first generation growing up with Internet porn: it’s about men continuing habits they started as teenagers (so starting roughly 1985-1998, for the 2008 cohort; there’s a sharp rise at 2010, which is 1987-2000).
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I remember trying a long time ago to convince my Italian tutor (who is a stauchly left-wing, anti-racist, anti-Trump/Salvini, gay-rights-marching vegan) of this exact proposition (in halting Italian that certainly didn’t do a good job of conveying the case eloquently). To be fair, she wasn’t exactly claiming that AAVE is Standard English with mistakes but rather that it’s just Standard English spoken with an accent, instead of a full-blown dialect as I was claiming. Maybe she’d be interested in seeing the AAVE grammar article linked in the post.
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I don’t think it’s right to argue that the speech is “clearly protected,” Ozy. Ken thinks that the speech should be protected, but as I understand current law, the question is whether opinions like “anti-Muslim” and “racist” are understood to imply the existence of supporting facts, which is necessarily a squishy question.
Without a copy of the Muslim field guide, I’m not comfortable agreeing that the suit is clearly frivolous, if we understand frivolous to mean “couldn’t win in court.” If you mean “shouldn’t win in court,” that’s opinion, and I won’t argue unless you imply foundational facts. 🙂
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There is a new paper published in Science which suggests that people have a tendency to start noticing things more when the quantity goes down (note that the paper is short and quite readable, as it is intended for a lay audience). So this may mean that people have a tendency to feel that they are not solving the issue when they are or will underestimate the improvement. So this can lead to value drift due to a feeling of hopelessness or helplessness.
There is also the opposite risk: of falling in love with a kind of altruism that has become less effective (or where there is new data showing that the earlier assessment was too positive). For example, an issue may have been largely solved and the remaining problems may be very costly, difficult or even impossible to solve, making addressing the issue no longer an effective form of altruism. Yet the perception can be that the problem is nearly as bad as it was and that nothing changed requiring a new assessment of cost-effectiveness.
—
The decline in men having sex seems too recent for it to have been caused by porn. I doubt that porn got hugely more accessible in 2008. The iPhone was launched in 2007 and there was a huge increase in smartphone penetration which may have reduced the other kind of penetration.
One theory for that is that new technology may have given women a better view of the dating market, allowing them to pick more attractive men for casual sex. Given the disparity in desire to have casual sex, relatively few men may now have sex with relatively many women, giving the rest of the men worse prospects, making them decide that it is no longer worth the effort to try or making them fail if they do try.
—
The reason why people may dislike welfare more if they hear that minorities are increasing in number may be that they (fairly logically) link the increase to immigration. So this can then be a basic ingroup preference (Americans vs foreigners).
Another possibility is noted by the paper: that some white people blame poverty among immigrant groups on their culture, which they are unwilling to pay for. This assessment may very well be partially correct.
A third possibility is that there is resentment against perceived discrimination in favor of minorities. Surveys suggest that there is substantial resentment of this kind. So then one may see this as opposition to methods that seek to create equality of outcome by means of treating people differently by race.
BTW. The finding that resentment rose greatly in 2008 may reflect that identity politics became much more prominent as part of the Democratic/left-wing platform & that many white people may respond badly to identity politics.
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A possibly overlooked driving factor for increases in celibacy in the 22-35 age range– a rise in helicopter parenting, an intensification of the density and intensity of high school extracurricular activity, and the rise of online gaming and social networking sites have significantly decreased the amount of unstructured, unsupervised time that teenagers get to spend together, so teenagers are less likely to have sex or romantic relationships than they used to be. (I’ve definitely seen statistics which show that the average age at which teenagers first have sex has been rising since the 1990s, so the math checks out). When those teenagers grow up, they probably need more time to “catch up” and master the set of social skills that they need to date and have sex. The discrepancy between the genders might be caused by the fact that older, more experienced men are much more likely to actively pursue younger women than vice versa.
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(Elaborating a bit more– the age at which the average teen has their first sexual encounter rising drives changes in the celibacy numbers for both men and women; the fact that it’s rising to ages where young men frequently find themselves in competition with their older counterparts for sex and relationships with young women drives the differential. Later age of first marriage and higher divorce rates are probably also driving up the number of 30-or-older guys going after women in their early 20s.)
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Here are more thoughts and analysis by the guy who published the graph. He ascribes a lot of the increase to delayed marriage, but another interesting detail is that both voluntary and involuntary celibacy rise for people who live with their parents (I guess unsurprisingly). IIRC, that increased over the recession years.
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20% of the people having around 50% to 60% of the sexual encounters still seems like a very uneven distribution even if it is better than 20% of the people having 80% of the sexual encounters. There is a lot of unfairness in this area of life no matter how many people try to avoid dealing with it. For everybody having their time of their life there are other people dealing with romantic frustration in unlimited amounts. Some people get to sow their wild oats when they are young and settle down into something more calm and stable latter. Others have to compromise on what seems to be each and every little thing. Their relationships could be entirely devoid of everything people like about relationships with a partner that isn’t as enthusiastic about them as they are about their partner.
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this is both plausible and relatable.
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yawn
Instead of posting links to random uncharitable satire, why not take the strongest arguments against being against family separation and try to argue against them ?
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(I just noticed I was maybe a bit rude there. What I meant is, I expect better than you than this.)
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*from you than this
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Because:
(a) my link post consists of links I find interesting and/or amusing, it is not a list of the Thirty Objectively Most Virtuous Things To Read About This Month
(b) I think the Onion makes an insightful point through satire about whether civility is justified in response to human rights violations
(c) I have a six-month-old and thus would probably respond to actually arguing about family separation with breaking into tears and saying “WHY DO YOU WANT TO TAKE MY BABY AWAY?????”
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Fair enough.
I’m not sure where you see any “insightful point” in the article beyond “People who don’t support open borders (that is, 93% of the U.S. population) are fascists who want to jail ethnic minorities, therefore it’s justified to harass them.”
In this case, is the most epistemically virtuous thing to do
1) quietly moving away from talking about things that are too triggering for you to rationally discuss, or
2) throw more gasoline in the fire of the impossibility of rational discussion around it by praising an article calling people Nazis ?
The latter fail Cognitive Trope Therapy so much: “I psychologically can’t do that, so no one should”.
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Personally, because the argument seems to be ‘There is unconscionable unnecessary cruelty going on during the enforcement of a policy the merits of which may be up for debate. Talking about trying to stop the unconscionable, unnecessary cruelty is, for some reason, not interesting – though I’m definitely not saying I am in favor! – so let’s debate the merits of the policy as if it were being perfectly executed right now.’
I’m fairly vehemently against separating families, but I’m willing to concede that I don’t know all the history and incentives and resulting human rights problems and I would not a priori judge anyone whose intuitions go the other way, if they are also willing to look at all angles and have some kind of ‘reduce harm’ value in their morality.
However, I also believe that if you implement a policy you are responsible to do it RIGHT. And that means without a single instance of parents being told a kid has to go for a bath and then never seeing the kid again, very young kids being held in a facility where a totally insufficient number of care workers is present, who are not allowed to comfort them by touch nor speak their language, kids being ‘made into’ unaccompanied minors administratively, pre-schoolers and school-age kids having to represent themselves in immigration court (those rules are set up for actual unaccompanied minors, who are usually very determined and tough teens, not kids who just lost the one attachment figure still in their lives, not that they’re great for teens either), parents who know where their kids are not being allowed to talk to them at all or only against extortionate prices, or, the most egregious, not even bothering to keep track of which kid came in with which adult so good luck ever trying to reunite parents and kids. You get a receipt for every half-chewed pack of gum you come into jail with, but somehow it seems keeping track of actual people is too hard? Most of these kids come with a pretty good and cheap tracking system, i.e. their parent.
Debating the pros of family separation is one thing. But let’s do that after these horrors are stopped. (Especially in a country of a for-profit prison and adoption industry, which makes no sense to my European sensibilities.) Once that’s done (or if someone can prove all those news items false, which I’d LOVE), I’d be happy to debate pros or cons. Of course, migration is a hotbed of human rights atrocities (see migrants being sent back into the Sahara to die, rampant abuse in refugee camps everywhere), but this one was created with a single word. It’s such a new policy, if you really want it implemented, just wait a LITTLE longer to do it as humanely as possible, with the caveat that even then, this is likely to cause attachment trauma that will reverberate for generations to kids who have already been through a lot.
Unless the cruelty is the point. In which case, I think people who hold that view should own it.
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Hmmm…
On the macro level, I think the US should make it easier for people to legally work in the US.
On the micro level, all the abuses you mentioned are unquestionably bad.
It’s only on the meso-level where the separation of families can be regarded as the lesser of many evils. (the others being children dragged through the desert as get-out-of-jail-free-cards and detaining the kids.)
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(That’s an entire thread of things I believe should not be allowed to happen under any responsible policy.)
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I’m the one who posted a link to this article on LW, and given this post is from 2015, probably the reason you have heard of it ! I feel weirdly proud by proxy ! Thanks, I guess !
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Oh it’s in contrast to historical depictions, is it? You know what historical depiction presents God as young, Caucasian and loving? Here’s a clue.
When your learned paper can’t distinguish between God the Father and God the Son, and can’t imagine why American religiosity may have focused on Jesus (hence the “young, Caucasian and loving”), and thinks Americans are somehow originating some hitherto unknown imagery, I don’t bother reading past the introductory paragraph.
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Okay, I lied: I’m reading the entire damn thing. And passages such as the following are making me yell at the screen “Go read the Revelations of Divine Love, you messers, then come back and quote me your neat little boxes of ‘liberal religion like this, conservative religion like that!”
In the words of that great thinker, Goofy: “Well gawrsh!”
This makes me want to fling myself out the window, though they do seem to have the faintest dawning realisation that hey, maybe imagery of GOD THE FATHER AS IN THE SISTINE CHAPEL DEPICTION OF GOD AS CREATOR FROM THE OLD TESTAMENT might just possibly perhaps perchance be somewhat different from GOD THE SON PARTICULARLY WITH THE AMERICAN EMPHASIS ON JESUS?
They talk about doing a follow-up paper; I wish they’d do something on how Catholic imagery (see the Sacred Heart) has been adopted or co-opted or slid across or absorbed by osmosis or something by American denominations (or non-denominations) that traditionally would have been dismissive of such things as Papist idol worship; how you get from iconoclasm to Big Butter Jesus fascinates me, and there is definitely a geographic/denominational/social class element to iconography. Some statues are pretty much Catholic ones with the paint colours altered (generally switching the red for purple) and the recognisably Catholic elements left out, but the inspiration of the original can still be discerned. Why and how the need for tangible images breaks through even in the descendants of the most iconoclastic traditions and how the taboos of the founders are forgotten is something more interesting than “we concluded by making some ‘noisy’ pictures of an amalgamated ‘average American’ face that young people prefer younger-looking pictures, African-Americans pick photos that look more like them, humans gonna human who’da thunk?”
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Murray Gell-Man was a legitimately smart person.
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I thought it was interesting, but IMHO you can’t really compare the work of medieval artists, who were working in a context of iconography, with the output of this method, which seems to be which direction do you move from the “neutral” face that they started with. (Which one commenter identified as Yuri Gagarin, reasonably in my opinion.)
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Re the Onion article:
Extended analogy: I was recently reading about how a large portion of the population has this super toxic schema where they regard romantic boundaries as “tests” rather than “boundaries.” If someone else establishes a boundary, they perceive it as an attempt to test the depth of their romantic feeling, since someone truly in love would be so overwhelmed by their feelings that they wouldn’t be able to respect boundaries. On the other end, a person who respects stated boundaries is regarded as uncaring and unfeeling, since if they had strong feelings they wouldn’t be able to help themselves.
That’s super toxic, right? Respecting boundaries is good, it should be a sign that you care about someone, not a sign that you don’t.
I’m seeing something similar happening regarding civility. Instead of being seen as a boundary that helps hold a society full of diverse and disagreeing people, civility is seen as a “test.” If you really care about an issue, you won’t be able to be civil, because you will be so overcome by your emotions. Obviously anyone who is able to stay calm and civil must not care, right?
I have to say that this also sounds super toxic to me. I did find the article amusing in spite of that.
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Do you have a link handy to the romance thing? That sounds interesting in its own right.
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A lot of the recent civility discussion is about whether you should, for example, refuse to serve Sarah Huckabee Sanders at your restaurant. You don’t have to have any particular emotions to refuse to serve high-level Trump administration officials; you can quite calmly say that your restaurant doesn’t serve high-level Trump administration employees.
I think that nonviolent resistance is absolutely an effective tactic, that it is ethical when used for ethical causes and against people who are fair game, and that if you run a small business in DC you should consider having a sign that says HIGH-LEVEL TRUMP ADMINISTRATION OFFICIALS NOT WELCOME UNTIL THE CHILDREN ARE REUNITED WITH THEIR PARENTS.
(More relevantly for the readers of this blog, if you’re a programmer in the Bay with a few years’ experience and your company is doing something evil, quit and tell them why. For bonus points, leak your resignation letter to Gizmodo.)
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@ozy
I wish you wouldn’t glorify it by calling it “nonviolent resistance”.
Nonviolent resistance is when you actually resist the thing itself, like sitting in the front of the bus, or at the lunch counter. Nonviolent resistance would be a border patrol officer refusing to implement the separation, or contractors refusing to work on the detention centers, or people standing in the road to block them.
Refusing to serve Sanders is just nonviolent being a jerk. Maybe Sanders is a jerk and deserves to be treated like a jerk. There’s certainly a solid argument for that position. And the Red Hen was certainly within their rights to do it. But you’re fooling yourself if you think that’s contributing to resisting anything. It doesn’t impede the Trump people from doing anything they wanted to do in any meaningful way.
I also think you’re ignoring what a lot of the recent civility discussion is really about, which is a lot more serious than refusing to serve somebody.
How do you feel about after refusing to serve her, they immediately escalated to following (stalking?) her to the next restaurant she tried, and trying to convince the people working there not to serve her?
Or about how in the next few days Maxine Waters suggested that people gang up and harass Trump officials at gas stations?
Or about how a gang of woke bros did exactly that to Elaine Chao, screaming at her, surrounding her and attempting to block her path?
This stuff is much less in the category of nonviolent resistance or nonviolent jerkishness. It’s personal harassment and intimidation, and it’s toeing right up to the line of actual violence.
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@Lawrence D’Anna
Indeed. It’s also very predictable that if one normalizes this, many people will go further and treat all Trump supporters this way. It’s also very predictable that the other side will retaliate in kind. So the main thing that it achieves is to make both sides act more tribal. The best case scenario of using this strategy extensively is pillarisation, where each group has their own restaurants, workplaces, schools and the like.
The worst case scenario is that it spirals into worse behavior, like violence, which we’ve actually already seen examples of. So far, this strategy doesn’t have strong support. So far.
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Did harassment and persecution ever change *anyone*’s mind ?
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That loss aversion article was really interesting; I hadn’t known/thought of about that gain vs loss thing re marginal thingy!
Meanwhile, I actually thought loss aversion was a yet *other* thing. And thought it was about a thing people *varied* on.
Specifically, like – there’s the thing with gambling on outcomes and expected value. Say if someone says ‘either I will give you $5 dollars right now, or I will flip this coin and if it’s heads I’ll give you $10 while if it’s tails I’ll give you nothing; pick which’. Iirc mathematically those have the same expected value, but people can vary on which one they go for? And keep varying as the numbers stop making it be even.
Except no that’s risk aversion, hm. Oh – same thing but you had to pay to talk to them to begin with, and did. (With amount values adjusted if needed).
What’s the actual word for that, then?
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decreasing marginal utility
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Re indigenous tribes and infanticide, my Views are those of the British general Charles James Napier: “You say it is the custom among your people to burn widows. Among my people, it is customary that when men burn a woman alive, we hang them by the neck until they are dead. Build your funeral pyre; next to it we shall build our gallows. You may follow your custom, and we will follow ours.”
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Oh wow, I remember Catullus from my high school Latin days, and the dirtbag versions are way better. Thanks so much for posting those.
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Alas, no Catullus 16.
(Facefuck thee and sodomise thee…)
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Some interesting discussion of the MS-13 link in the /r/slatestarcodex subreddit
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