Arnold writes "I give the conspiracy theory a 2 percent probability of being true"
Arnold, to what conspiracy theory do you refer? The factual evidence is George Floyd was not murdered but in fact died due to Fentanyl overdose. The prosecution of the police officers was political. It had a preordained purpose of assigning blame forr Floyd's death to the police.
That this happened is not a conspiracy. It was a political decision.
Put aside Chauvin's case. The sentences handed out to other officers on scene were unarguably 6-sigma discrepancies from any similarly situated police defendants. Whether or not they are actually guilty of anything is distinct from the fact that such sentences based on such information are extreme outliers. That fact by itself, plus the fatal dose of drugs in Floyd's system, combine to be more than sufficient to infer that the trials were more likely than not all farces with predetermined outcomes.
Re: Industrial Policy: for many reasons, it is more politically viable to support protectionist boondoggles than to promote regulatory reform. But one policy direction would deliver results, and the other one will just deliver cyclical disasters. "Regulation" in practice just means that the government sets the parameters for how you are allowed to run a business in a big manual enforced by some combination of government bureaucrats and a list of private bureaucrats who are allowed to issue a stamp on behalf of the government. We see production distributed to friendly territories overseas because companies do not need to follow the commands set by those big fat manuals or the various little boards of regulators.
When the actual Communist Party provides more straightforward and often lighter regulation than the USA, that should have provoked some introspection among American leaders, but it just seems to have made them double down.
With regard to Chauvin, I don't think that "conspiracy" is the right word for what happened. But the criminal justice system tends to yield, and produce results different from the norm, when put under extreme pressure. The prosecutors, judge, & jury understood that there would be hell to pay if the policemen were not charged and convicted. I suspect that if George Floyd had been white they would have been disciplined but not charged with murder.
In your hypothetical, I'm not sure they would have been disciplined. This case is far more egregious than Floyd (not aggressive, already handcuffed when police arrived). Criminal charges were dropped and the police involved all returned to active duty. ~7 years later the city has paid no settlement but on appeal, the possibility of criminal charges has been reopened.
The only part of the "Chauvin Conspiracy Theory" that was new to me is the claim that some of the lawyers in the D.A.'s office objected strongly enough to resign, and I have yet to see verifiable evidence this happened. However, that Floyd had a lethal level of fentanyl in his blood was known just a few days after his death as was the fact that the original autopsy found no evidence of neck compression. The latter detail fits nicely with the video/photographic evidence that Chauvin was not kneeling on Floyd's neck, and wasn't even putting much pressure on Floyd's back with the knee. What was new that is clearly verifiable is that the various pathologists that got involved afterwards put enormous professional pressure on the Minnesota pathologist whose job it was to carry out the initial autopsy, and there is no denying that there was enormous pressure put on the judge and jury to get Chauvin convicted regardless of the evidence. At the very minimum, for justice to be done properly, the trial needed a venue change out of Minneapolis.
Jon below/above is correct- if George Floyd had been a big fat white guy no case would ever have been brought against the other 4 police officers or Derek Chauvin- it would have been simply declared a death by drug overdose. Of course, if George Floyd were a big fat white guy, it is quite likely he would have received medical help much quicker because there wouldn't have been a large angry crowd surrounding the officers.
For a little while I was a "backup nanny" to a family with more than the usual number of children under four. The regular nanny was a much-older Mexican woman - not that long in the country, very limited English - who told me how she missed her not-yet-grown youngest child, a daughter back in Mexico. She also found in me a sympathetic (Spanish-practicing) ear regarding her aches and pains, the specifics of which I don't remember. I filled in a few times as driver and English speaker and preparer of the mother's written meal plan, when the parents went out of town.
I somewhat naively decided it was my duty to mention this woman's ills to my employer, in case she hadn't heard - maybe she ought to see a doctor?
Without any hint of wanting to make a "show" of compassion, she basically replied, oh, she has, but you know Mexicans, they are always complaining, they are always "sick" from something or other.
I *didn't* know this, particularly - but I think Chauvin (I have a mental image of a blase stare, was it from a still from the video?) in re Floyd's "I can't breathe" must have thought, they always bitch and moan, they always say "I'm dying" when I have them on the ground. And so ignored it. And what a lot of trouble that jaded-ness caused. And possibly also the stubborn desire not to yield to the hostile assembling crowd. It just seems like a lot of things led to Floyd's death, but he might have died without that knee on his back and how differently things would have gone.
Is there any guarantee that if I 'read the book in AI', that it's the same content? I thought GPT was 99% internet conventional wisdom and 1% the prompt, so maybe it will tell me that Hayek is a debunked conservative economist who believes in bootstraps and hates the poor.
Bad conventional 'wisdom' is one thing. At least theoretically, that bad stuff is out in the open.
A user can know it's there, can know what it says, can know that it is contributing to the output, and, with that knowledge, can try to engineer the prompts to filter out that junk. It's also possible to know about the exclusion of good stuff which may be unavailable because of some kind of intellectual property protections.
But much more worrisome is that an analogous thing is being done to the ChatBots as was done and is still being done to the Search Engines and Social Media Platforms, which is that all all kinds of censoring or promoting thumbs are intentionally being put on the scales to manage output, and the organizations are, at best, not being open about what they are doing, and, it seems, often intentionally keeping these acts secret and/or lying about them.
There have already been countless complaints from users of the various generative AI systems that suddenly and without warning or explanation the ChatBot Ministry of Truth has memory-holed some input that makes the user now unable to produce the same output. Lots of "Sorry, I've been programmed to conclude that the image you are trying to generate might be double-plus ungood, and thus to refuse to generate it for you," but again, without pointing to any kind of rule, definition, "term of service", etc., and obviously "this decision is final and there is no appeal" kind of process that would make Kafka blush.
At what point is a contract term void for being illusory when one side reserves to right to radically alter the censorship rules at any moment without telling anyone the truth about what they are doing?
A lot of people are talking about whether these bots should be regulated or not. It seems to me that requirements for telling the truth as regards these actions are somewhere between general rules against fraud and misrepresentation and actual regulations that tell you what you can and cannot do as a business. "Thumbs Transparency" isn't telling you how to run your business, it's just telling you that you have to tell your customers what the service you're trying to sell them actually *is*, which in the case of these kinds of black-box software services, is indistinguishable from what your business is doing to manipulate the output produced by those services.
I've always assumed that SBF's parents should be in a cell more than SBF.
SBF doesn't seem particularly genius-like to me. Most of the crazy criminal stuff seems like exactly what you'd get if you took a smart but sociopathic young weirdo and told him to act like what he thinks the CEO of an investment bank is supposed to act like. I have to think that serious, knowledgeable people always regarded him as a joke.
What's crazy is that so many other people weren't in on the joke. So I guess a lot of the real grift came from his law professor parents who pretty clearly were in on it and instrumental to getting him off the ground. They could have quietly let him flop (and knowing his personality, probably should have) but they buckled down and steered people toward their kid and successfully turned his destined to fail trust-fund-baby startup into a full blown criminal enterprise.
I'm sure others have thought of this - maybe it was Arnold's idea that I'm subconsciously stealing- but a neat variation on the chatbot/active reading approach might be flipping it into Socratic mode, where the chat bot asks the questions, still yielding a back-and-forth exploration of the material. Or a hybrid where both sides contribute questions and answers.
I'd rather we pay higher prices for chips than go to war with China over Taiwan, especially a war that it is not clear we could win. I agree that US industrial policy is a boondoggle, but my understanding is that some reshoring of semiconductor manufacturing is happening, and is bound to happen, with or without federal subsidies, because it is understood that reshoring is necessary to ensure a reliable supply of high-end chips. In my opinion, it would have been preferable to retain some domestic capability to manufacture chips to begin with. Despite sanctions, Russia (and presumably also Iran, among others) is having no problem procuring and/or producing the chips needed for precision-guided missiles and drones. No doubt that would have happened anyway, but arguably globalization of chip supply and the associated technology transfer sped up the process. Hypothetically, had semiconductor technology been invented in the Soviet Union rather than the USA (highly improbable due to their different economic systems, but just for the sake of argument), I can guarantee you that the Russians would have kept the technology to themselves. And with reference to yesterday's post (as well as many other of your previous posts), there is a trade-off between globalization/free trade and national security, but you seem to be so ideologically wedded to the former that you are reluctant to acknowledge it.
China is the one supplying Russia with its semi conductors.
Onshore semi conducters increase the odds of war with china because it gives us the option of fighting them for a prolonged period due to domestic supply. The fight over Taiwan is over a decision of whether to contain China by force, not to protect TSMC (which would be destroyed in any conflict).
"I give the conspiracy theory a 2 percent probability of being true, but no more than that, because
...
if true, the story means that several people in the prosecutor’s office believed that Chauvin was innocent, but none of them have come forward since.
I would have expected Chauvin’s lawyers to have noticed the strange behavior in the prosecutor’s office and flushed out the story"
You seem to be applying logic and rational thought to what is woke politics. There is nothing logical or rational about it. Lawyers can act like a jury, deciding guilt or innocence based on emotion rather than facts. To put it bluntly, their state of mind is no different than if they thought Jews were the source of evil in society. Maybe they can see that Chauvin was legally innocent but that doesn't mater to them and they still want him found guilty. It doesn't have to be in any way an explicit conspiracy. to se another analogy, when someone is canceled, there is almost never or never ever an explicit agreement to go after the person. This is no different.
And this means there is little or nothing for Chauvin's lawyers to flush out.
The Duke Lacrosse case is a useful reference. The DA had no evidence to support the charges. Surely the attorneys working for the DA knew there was no evidence. Yet the DA proceeded with indictments and prosecution of the defendants as if evidence existed.
Was this a conspiracy?
Nope. Just people acting in their self interest and willing to destroy innocent people in the process. Thus proving Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's words that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart
Yes, a good comparison, though I might frame it slightly differently. They took the word of a questionable witness despite conflicting evidence and little or no corroborating evidence.
I'm going to comment on yesterdays topic and feel free to delete if you want.
The idea that Jews should leave Israel is the dumbest idea I've ever heard. And I'll prove it with math.
Last year there were 181,000 births in Israel. I'm not going to do a bunch of fancy math, I'm just going to say 100,000 were non-Haredi Jews. If I'm a bit wrong it doesn't change much.
The birthrate of non-Haredi religious Jews is 4.0 per woman and secular Jews is 2.0 per woman. I'm going to make it an average of 2.8 because it makes the math I'm about to to easier, but if you use 2.0 its still going to be a lot of people.
Non-orthodox Jews in the west have a 1.4 TFR. So they have half as many children as Israeli Jews.
That means that if every single non-Haredi Jew in Israel moved to the west and assimilated into western Jewish culture there would be 50,000 Jews born each year instead of 100,000. So 50,000 less Jewish lives a year.
According to Jewish virtual library 1,415 Jews were killed by terrorism from Jan 2000 - Aug 2023. Octobers total is around 1,300 with 150 hostages. I'm just going to use 3,000 as a total.
50,000 * 23 = 1,150,000 extra ordinary Jews due to Israel existing.
3,000 / 1,150,000 = 0.26%
Even if we leave aside all the other hardships of abandoning Israel, doing so would "eliminate" about 385x more Jews from existence then Hamas as managed.
The real "Holocaust" is western progressivism. It kills Jews before they exist at an astonishing rate before they ever come into being, and it's what you should really be focused on.
I'm pessimistic about Israel ever being at peace with the Arabs, and while that's sad it's ultimately not important. Hamas could pull off an Oct 6th every single year and it still wouldn't warrant giving up on Israel. Quite frankly I think you ought to hyper ventilate over this less. Either remove the Arabs or accept that whatever trouble they ultimately cause its a price of doing business.
That business is that being a militant nationalist ethno-state seems to be only way to get replacement TFR amongst first world countries, which is the only thing that matters.
I don't believe that Hamas terror attacks are necessary for Israel to be a militant ethno state, certainly terrorism attacks haven't increased anyone else's TFR. But I can't rule it out either. Perhaps without the external threat Israel would slide into western progressivism and lose its reproductive edge.
Either way, Israel is good for the Jews and they shouldn't abandon it.
P.S. I'm not starting Iraq 2.0 with Iran because you lose 0.26% of your births to terrorism. Buck up. I thought the idea that the War on Terror was fought for Israel was a conspiracy theory that didn't even make any sense (none of it benefitted Israel), don't make the conspiracy theory real.
The “first draft” of the autopsy had OD as the cause of death. There would be physical trauma for asphyxiation, you could compare the trauma in Floyd to other asphyxiation victims. That would be interesting endeavor. Then there is the level of drugs in his body. I would bet against any impartial investigation finding asphyxiation as the cause. That said, Floyd was in custody and the officers, particularly Chauvin, had a duty to render aid - Floyd was their responsibility. The autopsy is public record.
"In elementary school he didn’t beat up other kids and steal their lunch money. As a teenager he didn’t rob a liquor store."
Is this really meaningful? What you are describing here is the path of the common thug- the guy who goes from robbing a liquor store as a teenager to robbing more liquor stores as a 30 year old.
When I was a kid I couldn't read past an unfamiliar word. I would try to fight this compulsion, but never successfully. At best instead of going off to the dictionary, I would write down the words to look up later. If no paper, an acronym made up of the first letters of the unknown words. Eventually I just kept a dictionary under the bed. This habit was distracting if you think about the universe of words a kid doesn't know and has never heard anyone utter.
When I got the internet, rather later than all the rest of you, this problem returned with force, only now it was recurring to Google to look up unknown references in books. Most often Wikipedia, often the Britannica-cribbed entries.
I really don't understand why Cowen thinks this is not already the way most of us read. Directly ask AI seems a distinct dumbing down.
This actually led to a dispute with husband. I now felt that our (old, from grandparents) Britannicas, macro and micro, were taking up too much space. We hardly ever went into them anymore. Plus the gold lettering had worn off so it was kind of a pain to find a volume. The macro entries are good, he said (he's a snob about that, finding the Britannica falls off after 1970, some science excepted of course). But I got rid of the micropedias.* Still, having such a bias, we are not likely to be receptive to a chatbot's choices.
*Ironically, mine is the micro mind, his is the macro. He doesn't feel the need to look things up while reading.
Arnold writes "I give the conspiracy theory a 2 percent probability of being true"
Arnold, to what conspiracy theory do you refer? The factual evidence is George Floyd was not murdered but in fact died due to Fentanyl overdose. The prosecution of the police officers was political. It had a preordained purpose of assigning blame forr Floyd's death to the police.
That this happened is not a conspiracy. It was a political decision.
Put aside Chauvin's case. The sentences handed out to other officers on scene were unarguably 6-sigma discrepancies from any similarly situated police defendants. Whether or not they are actually guilty of anything is distinct from the fact that such sentences based on such information are extreme outliers. That fact by itself, plus the fatal dose of drugs in Floyd's system, combine to be more than sufficient to infer that the trials were more likely than not all farces with predetermined outcomes.
Re: Industrial Policy: for many reasons, it is more politically viable to support protectionist boondoggles than to promote regulatory reform. But one policy direction would deliver results, and the other one will just deliver cyclical disasters. "Regulation" in practice just means that the government sets the parameters for how you are allowed to run a business in a big manual enforced by some combination of government bureaucrats and a list of private bureaucrats who are allowed to issue a stamp on behalf of the government. We see production distributed to friendly territories overseas because companies do not need to follow the commands set by those big fat manuals or the various little boards of regulators.
When the actual Communist Party provides more straightforward and often lighter regulation than the USA, that should have provoked some introspection among American leaders, but it just seems to have made them double down.
With regard to Chauvin, I don't think that "conspiracy" is the right word for what happened. But the criminal justice system tends to yield, and produce results different from the norm, when put under extreme pressure. The prosecutors, judge, & jury understood that there would be hell to pay if the policemen were not charged and convicted. I suspect that if George Floyd had been white they would have been disciplined but not charged with murder.
In your hypothetical, I'm not sure they would have been disciplined. This case is far more egregious than Floyd (not aggressive, already handcuffed when police arrived). Criminal charges were dropped and the police involved all returned to active duty. ~7 years later the city has paid no settlement but on appeal, the possibility of criminal charges has been reopened.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Tony_Timpa
The only part of the "Chauvin Conspiracy Theory" that was new to me is the claim that some of the lawyers in the D.A.'s office objected strongly enough to resign, and I have yet to see verifiable evidence this happened. However, that Floyd had a lethal level of fentanyl in his blood was known just a few days after his death as was the fact that the original autopsy found no evidence of neck compression. The latter detail fits nicely with the video/photographic evidence that Chauvin was not kneeling on Floyd's neck, and wasn't even putting much pressure on Floyd's back with the knee. What was new that is clearly verifiable is that the various pathologists that got involved afterwards put enormous professional pressure on the Minnesota pathologist whose job it was to carry out the initial autopsy, and there is no denying that there was enormous pressure put on the judge and jury to get Chauvin convicted regardless of the evidence. At the very minimum, for justice to be done properly, the trial needed a venue change out of Minneapolis.
Jon below/above is correct- if George Floyd had been a big fat white guy no case would ever have been brought against the other 4 police officers or Derek Chauvin- it would have been simply declared a death by drug overdose. Of course, if George Floyd were a big fat white guy, it is quite likely he would have received medical help much quicker because there wouldn't have been a large angry crowd surrounding the officers.
For a little while I was a "backup nanny" to a family with more than the usual number of children under four. The regular nanny was a much-older Mexican woman - not that long in the country, very limited English - who told me how she missed her not-yet-grown youngest child, a daughter back in Mexico. She also found in me a sympathetic (Spanish-practicing) ear regarding her aches and pains, the specifics of which I don't remember. I filled in a few times as driver and English speaker and preparer of the mother's written meal plan, when the parents went out of town.
I somewhat naively decided it was my duty to mention this woman's ills to my employer, in case she hadn't heard - maybe she ought to see a doctor?
Without any hint of wanting to make a "show" of compassion, she basically replied, oh, she has, but you know Mexicans, they are always complaining, they are always "sick" from something or other.
I *didn't* know this, particularly - but I think Chauvin (I have a mental image of a blase stare, was it from a still from the video?) in re Floyd's "I can't breathe" must have thought, they always bitch and moan, they always say "I'm dying" when I have them on the ground. And so ignored it. And what a lot of trouble that jaded-ness caused. And possibly also the stubborn desire not to yield to the hostile assembling crowd. It just seems like a lot of things led to Floyd's death, but he might have died without that knee on his back and how differently things would have gone.
Is there any guarantee that if I 'read the book in AI', that it's the same content? I thought GPT was 99% internet conventional wisdom and 1% the prompt, so maybe it will tell me that Hayek is a debunked conservative economist who believes in bootstraps and hates the poor.
Bad conventional 'wisdom' is one thing. At least theoretically, that bad stuff is out in the open.
A user can know it's there, can know what it says, can know that it is contributing to the output, and, with that knowledge, can try to engineer the prompts to filter out that junk. It's also possible to know about the exclusion of good stuff which may be unavailable because of some kind of intellectual property protections.
But much more worrisome is that an analogous thing is being done to the ChatBots as was done and is still being done to the Search Engines and Social Media Platforms, which is that all all kinds of censoring or promoting thumbs are intentionally being put on the scales to manage output, and the organizations are, at best, not being open about what they are doing, and, it seems, often intentionally keeping these acts secret and/or lying about them.
There have already been countless complaints from users of the various generative AI systems that suddenly and without warning or explanation the ChatBot Ministry of Truth has memory-holed some input that makes the user now unable to produce the same output. Lots of "Sorry, I've been programmed to conclude that the image you are trying to generate might be double-plus ungood, and thus to refuse to generate it for you," but again, without pointing to any kind of rule, definition, "term of service", etc., and obviously "this decision is final and there is no appeal" kind of process that would make Kafka blush.
At what point is a contract term void for being illusory when one side reserves to right to radically alter the censorship rules at any moment without telling anyone the truth about what they are doing?
A lot of people are talking about whether these bots should be regulated or not. It seems to me that requirements for telling the truth as regards these actions are somewhere between general rules against fraud and misrepresentation and actual regulations that tell you what you can and cannot do as a business. "Thumbs Transparency" isn't telling you how to run your business, it's just telling you that you have to tell your customers what the service you're trying to sell them actually *is*, which in the case of these kinds of black-box software services, is indistinguishable from what your business is doing to manipulate the output produced by those services.
SBF should be put in a cell with George Santos. They seem remarkably similar.
I've always assumed that SBF's parents should be in a cell more than SBF.
SBF doesn't seem particularly genius-like to me. Most of the crazy criminal stuff seems like exactly what you'd get if you took a smart but sociopathic young weirdo and told him to act like what he thinks the CEO of an investment bank is supposed to act like. I have to think that serious, knowledgeable people always regarded him as a joke.
What's crazy is that so many other people weren't in on the joke. So I guess a lot of the real grift came from his law professor parents who pretty clearly were in on it and instrumental to getting him off the ground. They could have quietly let him flop (and knowing his personality, probably should have) but they buckled down and steered people toward their kid and successfully turned his destined to fail trust-fund-baby startup into a full blown criminal enterprise.
I was thinking the exact same thing a few days ago.
Same here. They are, except for the scale of fraud, remarkable similar in all their behaviors, especially the "I didn't do anything wrong" response.
I'm sure others have thought of this - maybe it was Arnold's idea that I'm subconsciously stealing- but a neat variation on the chatbot/active reading approach might be flipping it into Socratic mode, where the chat bot asks the questions, still yielding a back-and-forth exploration of the material. Or a hybrid where both sides contribute questions and answers.
I'd rather we pay higher prices for chips than go to war with China over Taiwan, especially a war that it is not clear we could win. I agree that US industrial policy is a boondoggle, but my understanding is that some reshoring of semiconductor manufacturing is happening, and is bound to happen, with or without federal subsidies, because it is understood that reshoring is necessary to ensure a reliable supply of high-end chips. In my opinion, it would have been preferable to retain some domestic capability to manufacture chips to begin with. Despite sanctions, Russia (and presumably also Iran, among others) is having no problem procuring and/or producing the chips needed for precision-guided missiles and drones. No doubt that would have happened anyway, but arguably globalization of chip supply and the associated technology transfer sped up the process. Hypothetically, had semiconductor technology been invented in the Soviet Union rather than the USA (highly improbable due to their different economic systems, but just for the sake of argument), I can guarantee you that the Russians would have kept the technology to themselves. And with reference to yesterday's post (as well as many other of your previous posts), there is a trade-off between globalization/free trade and national security, but you seem to be so ideologically wedded to the former that you are reluctant to acknowledge it.
China is the one supplying Russia with its semi conductors.
Onshore semi conducters increase the odds of war with china because it gives us the option of fighting them for a prolonged period due to domestic supply. The fight over Taiwan is over a decision of whether to contain China by force, not to protect TSMC (which would be destroyed in any conflict).
"I give the conspiracy theory a 2 percent probability of being true, but no more than that, because
...
if true, the story means that several people in the prosecutor’s office believed that Chauvin was innocent, but none of them have come forward since.
I would have expected Chauvin’s lawyers to have noticed the strange behavior in the prosecutor’s office and flushed out the story"
You seem to be applying logic and rational thought to what is woke politics. There is nothing logical or rational about it. Lawyers can act like a jury, deciding guilt or innocence based on emotion rather than facts. To put it bluntly, their state of mind is no different than if they thought Jews were the source of evil in society. Maybe they can see that Chauvin was legally innocent but that doesn't mater to them and they still want him found guilty. It doesn't have to be in any way an explicit conspiracy. to se another analogy, when someone is canceled, there is almost never or never ever an explicit agreement to go after the person. This is no different.
And this means there is little or nothing for Chauvin's lawyers to flush out.
The Duke Lacrosse case is a useful reference. The DA had no evidence to support the charges. Surely the attorneys working for the DA knew there was no evidence. Yet the DA proceeded with indictments and prosecution of the defendants as if evidence existed.
Was this a conspiracy?
Nope. Just people acting in their self interest and willing to destroy innocent people in the process. Thus proving Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's words that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart
Yes, a good comparison, though I might frame it slightly differently. They took the word of a questionable witness despite conflicting evidence and little or no corroborating evidence.
I'm going to comment on yesterdays topic and feel free to delete if you want.
The idea that Jews should leave Israel is the dumbest idea I've ever heard. And I'll prove it with math.
Last year there were 181,000 births in Israel. I'm not going to do a bunch of fancy math, I'm just going to say 100,000 were non-Haredi Jews. If I'm a bit wrong it doesn't change much.
The birthrate of non-Haredi religious Jews is 4.0 per woman and secular Jews is 2.0 per woman. I'm going to make it an average of 2.8 because it makes the math I'm about to to easier, but if you use 2.0 its still going to be a lot of people.
Non-orthodox Jews in the west have a 1.4 TFR. So they have half as many children as Israeli Jews.
That means that if every single non-Haredi Jew in Israel moved to the west and assimilated into western Jewish culture there would be 50,000 Jews born each year instead of 100,000. So 50,000 less Jewish lives a year.
According to Jewish virtual library 1,415 Jews were killed by terrorism from Jan 2000 - Aug 2023. Octobers total is around 1,300 with 150 hostages. I'm just going to use 3,000 as a total.
50,000 * 23 = 1,150,000 extra ordinary Jews due to Israel existing.
3,000 / 1,150,000 = 0.26%
Even if we leave aside all the other hardships of abandoning Israel, doing so would "eliminate" about 385x more Jews from existence then Hamas as managed.
The real "Holocaust" is western progressivism. It kills Jews before they exist at an astonishing rate before they ever come into being, and it's what you should really be focused on.
I'm pessimistic about Israel ever being at peace with the Arabs, and while that's sad it's ultimately not important. Hamas could pull off an Oct 6th every single year and it still wouldn't warrant giving up on Israel. Quite frankly I think you ought to hyper ventilate over this less. Either remove the Arabs or accept that whatever trouble they ultimately cause its a price of doing business.
That business is that being a militant nationalist ethno-state seems to be only way to get replacement TFR amongst first world countries, which is the only thing that matters.
I don't believe that Hamas terror attacks are necessary for Israel to be a militant ethno state, certainly terrorism attacks haven't increased anyone else's TFR. But I can't rule it out either. Perhaps without the external threat Israel would slide into western progressivism and lose its reproductive edge.
Either way, Israel is good for the Jews and they shouldn't abandon it.
P.S. I'm not starting Iraq 2.0 with Iran because you lose 0.26% of your births to terrorism. Buck up. I thought the idea that the War on Terror was fought for Israel was a conspiracy theory that didn't even make any sense (none of it benefitted Israel), don't make the conspiracy theory real.
Now that's an effective altruist angle!
I had always put the chance of Chauvin getting a fair trial at about 2%. (Doesn’t mean I think he is innocent.)
That high?
As for SBF, anyone writing about CE? I'm quite fascinated by her story.
Here's one piece about her: https://www.theringer.com/tech/2023/10/16/23919236/sam-bankman-fried-sbf-trial-caroline-ellison-testimony-ftx-cryptocurrency?ref=thediff.co
Thank you!
The “first draft” of the autopsy had OD as the cause of death. There would be physical trauma for asphyxiation, you could compare the trauma in Floyd to other asphyxiation victims. That would be interesting endeavor. Then there is the level of drugs in his body. I would bet against any impartial investigation finding asphyxiation as the cause. That said, Floyd was in custody and the officers, particularly Chauvin, had a duty to render aid - Floyd was their responsibility. The autopsy is public record.
"In elementary school he didn’t beat up other kids and steal their lunch money. As a teenager he didn’t rob a liquor store."
Is this really meaningful? What you are describing here is the path of the common thug- the guy who goes from robbing a liquor store as a teenager to robbing more liquor stores as a 30 year old.
Or someone that is dumb and gets caught. I am sure SBF would have been subtle.
When I was a kid I couldn't read past an unfamiliar word. I would try to fight this compulsion, but never successfully. At best instead of going off to the dictionary, I would write down the words to look up later. If no paper, an acronym made up of the first letters of the unknown words. Eventually I just kept a dictionary under the bed. This habit was distracting if you think about the universe of words a kid doesn't know and has never heard anyone utter.
When I got the internet, rather later than all the rest of you, this problem returned with force, only now it was recurring to Google to look up unknown references in books. Most often Wikipedia, often the Britannica-cribbed entries.
I really don't understand why Cowen thinks this is not already the way most of us read. Directly ask AI seems a distinct dumbing down.
I'm sorry, I realize this is a minority view.
This actually led to a dispute with husband. I now felt that our (old, from grandparents) Britannicas, macro and micro, were taking up too much space. We hardly ever went into them anymore. Plus the gold lettering had worn off so it was kind of a pain to find a volume. The macro entries are good, he said (he's a snob about that, finding the Britannica falls off after 1970, some science excepted of course). But I got rid of the micropedias.* Still, having such a bias, we are not likely to be receptive to a chatbot's choices.
*Ironically, mine is the micro mind, his is the macro. He doesn't feel the need to look things up while reading.
Picking your own direction will only reinforce the tendency to read only what you want to read on the internet.