My values, howled into the wind
scottaaronson.blog
scottaaronson.blog
Maybe a bigger tent coalition is needed to restore sanity on basic things, such as "kids should be allowed to learn so they can function in a technological society"?
Neither major party is the coalition I'm talking about. It doesn't exist yet. But I can dream.
This is too absurd to even be a non-sequitur.
And frankly, if Dems control this state "100%" then one has to ask why? Why has the GOP given up so much ground (remember, California has only sent two people to the nations highest office/POTUS, Nixon and Reagan, who were both Republicans. Historically a GOP that occupied up to 40+ percent of registered voters is now less than 25%, most of them going to Independent not Dem. This was in my lifetime, and I was GOP for a long time.
They lost ground due to the Dems being the least stupid and unhinged of the two major parties. Not because the Dems are great, just less incoherent and insanely clownish assjockeys.
Hmm! Let's review the logic...
1. Insane things are happening to math education in California
2. Democrats control California 100%
3. Therefore, Democrats are causing the insane things in California
4. Therefore, Democrats are not always and everywhere the coalition to restore sanity, but sometimes make things more insane
The logic seems pretty basic and sound to me. I suspect even children will be able to follow it, provided California Democrats allow them to take logic.
Ha ha ha. No.
The CMF is a product of the CA DoE, an organization ultimately led by either elected officials (the state superintendent) or appointees of elected officials (the state board, appointed by the Governor). And since it's education in California, I don't even have to look to know that those leaders are 100% Democrats. Because Hell will freeze over before today's California lets anyone but a Democrat touch education policy.
Nevertheless, I did confirm that the obvious is true with a couple Google searches. All CA School Board members were appointed by Democratic governors Brown or Newsom, and the superintendent has been a Democrat since the 90s, although the office is officially "nonpartisan" (whatever that means).
Your unwillingness to follow a simple, obvious logical point doesn't make that point weak.
It's uninteresting to have a "debate" with someone whose primary tactic is disingenuous ignorance in the service of protecting a favored in-group, so I'll stop here. Bye.
I get why the 2 party system evolved at the federal level, but there's no reason why we couldn't have more parties at the local level. That's exactly what happens in Canada, for example.
They’re talking about integrated math where students all learn the same concepts at the same time, but students that can handle more complex work still get it. Some math concepts will actually be introduced earlier than they were previously, and the curriculum is shifting to include more applied math like statistics rather than calculus being the end-all.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-05-21/why-cali...
This is a failing approach. Math is built incrementally: you don't do "more complex work" for the heck of it, you progress incrementally by building upon what you've learned previously, throughout the K-12 curriculum. Having the students march in lockstep and literally "learn the same concepts at the same time" is a recipe for severe, enduring, unaddressed gaps in foundational math understanding, of the sort that is critically relevant to all subsequent work in STEM including statistics and data science.
Heck, the gold standard educational approach is "mastery learning", which is based on not having students progress in lock-step, but everyone learning at their own pace with close-to-individualized tutoring to the greatest feasible extent. The approach you describe is trying to do the opposite! Forget about algebra, this is exactly how you get students who can't even grok fractions in 8th grade or so.
Feel free to apologize and change my mind, but I have you flagged as a liar and the conversation will proceed accordingly.
Playing dumb won't help you here, liar.
And nice edit, but it's not up to you to decide whether misquoting me is legitimate because you feel a word I said isn't relevant to your point. Quite obviously it was relevant, as I elaborated.
You're dishonest for the sake of rhetoric and you should be ashamed of yourself.
I should have singled out the word “attacks” because thats the bone i’m picking… no one is attacking anything, that’s reductive language that insinuates hostility towards algebra and creates this divisive rhetoric. It’s simply a curriculum change, maybe it’s a bad one… but it’s not completely illogical and I’m interested to see how it goes.
Sorry if I was unclear, I can assure you I have no interest in making you look bad because I have no idea who you are.
Update: “early” doesn’t change that for me, it’s not “attacks on early algebra” it’s a curriculum change
“revolting liar” also seems really extreme and personal for this simple disagreement
We're done here. You're a revolting liar and always will be.
Misquoting isn't something you get to do because of how you feel about the statements involved. It's dishonest.
And it's not about how I feel. It's objectively wrong.
As terrible as the Republicans are, some opinion polls are showing historic numbers of voters planning to vote Republican in the midterms, including a growing number of non white voters.
[1]: Shtetl-Optimized: Exciting opportunities at Kabul University! https://archive.ph/GhNGd
The success of the radical equity crowd, and the parallel degeneration of American conservatism make good arguments for doing the opposite.
The equitarians have stuck to their principals for decades, and through propaganda and persistence begun to execute on their goals with little compromise. They've shown that compromising with the opposition is for losers when you know what you want.
Theirs is a model of political success. Don't compromise, even for harm reduction. Let them drag the useful idiots who gave them power down the self destructive path they're on, and wait for the reaction to achieve your own goals without compromise unless your offered a chance to achieve exactly what you want.
In California if you want your kid to learn algebra... or basic communication skills... you send em to a private school or teach them at home. But I still don't buy this sudden terror of algebra being removed from school. Cite the source.
I insist upon the precise nature of my claim because its precision is what makes it correct. So many in these comments imply that the changes proposed in the California Mathematics Framework (CMF) are hopelessly "complex" and impossible to understand for the layman, and so therefore we should trust the experts and not attempt to make any factual statement whatsoever about what is in the CMF. This is encouraged by the CMF itself, which is 800 pages long and does everything in its power to deny that it is anything in particular, merely generally wonderful [1]. This is smokescreening, obscurantism, credentialism, and most of all elitism. I do not accept it. It is absurd and anti-citizen democracy to insinuate that ordinary citizens are incompetent to understand and opine on math curricula.
All that said, please read this, and links therein: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6146
Select passages follow. Again, please follow the links in the original for details:
> ...the CMF encourages schools to stop offering Algebra I in middle school, while placing obstacles (such as doubling-up, compressed courses, or outside-of-school private courses) in the way of those who want to take advanced math in higher grades. When similar reforms were implemented in San Francisco, they resulted in an “inequitable patchwork scheme” of workarounds that affluent students could access but that their less privileged counterparts could not. The CMF also promotes trendy and shallow courses (such as a nearly math-free version of “data science”) as recommended alternatives to foundational mathematical courses such as Algebra and Calculus. These courses do not prepare students even for careers in data science itself!
> The CMF states that “many students, parents, and teachers encourage acceleration beginning in grade eight (or sooner) because of mistaken beliefs that Calculus is an important high school goal.” Students, parents, and teachers are not mistaken. Neither is the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE), which set in 2015 a goal to double the number of African American students taking calculus by 2025. Calculus is not the only goal of K-12 math education, but it is important for students who wish to prepare for STEM in college and beyond.
See also:
[1] "Ra" -- the quality, embodied by the CMF, of aspiring to general wonderfulness while evading being pinned down with any specifics https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2016/10/20/ra/
[2] The shoddy and sometimes outright fraudulent statistics supporting the CMF https://www.familiesforsanfrancisco.com/updates/inequity-in-...
Wonderful, thank you.
On the Ra thing, here is the thesis from the blog post:
> Ra is a specific kind of glitch in intuition, which can roughly be summarized as the drive to idealize vagueness and despise clarity.
Can you really tell me that this has no application to your real life and experiences?
If you truly feel it's irrelevant, spend two hours trying to figure out what exactly the CMF says and get back to me. Start here [1].
I actually read the chapter on grades 6-8 [2]. It engages in the classic Ra move of speaking out of both sides of the mouth: it criticizes early introduction of algebra content for being too challenging, causing students to fail, while claiming that its alternative proposal is actually more rigorous and challenging. Is it possible to make a curriculum more demanding while simultaneously reducing fail rates? Possibly, but it is not a claim we should accept lightly.
[1] https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/
[2] https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/documents/mathfwchapter7.doc...
Our current system is simply not working.
The trick is to introduce that slower math framework while still keeping an option for some students take algebra earlier.
These centrist positions are not the discourse that the modern democratic party is engaging in. Instead it is things like the California bill referenced, AOC's wealth tax, Bernie's litmus tests, and "modern monetary theory" and culture war topics.
Is this legitimatly the democrats going to the left or is just the loudest and most extreme voices that get amplification to drown out the centrists?
These positions are remarkably centrist - and centrism is out of favor with both parties.
A lot of people in America’s peer countries think the Democratic Party is at least as right-wing as their own country’s center-right party. We are now living in a world with globalized social media. Your kids are learning to not necessarily believe the mythologies.
Do you think that’s all part of the “90% ... democratic party lines?”
always amazes me how one of the biggest criticisms of Trump is that he didn't take advantage of an emergency to seize more power. What would their reaction have been if he'd pulled a Xi and started welding people into their apartments in New York City at the start of the pandemic like China did in Wuhan? Or forced them to download a real time tracking app onto their phones for contact tracing? Surely that couldn't be abused at all
Maybe he's being too subtle.
Most of us don't fit in the idiotic dichotomy given us. Even a typical liberal centrist/leftist is quite at odds with much of the orthodoxy out there. One can be a 2A zealot and a straight progressive ticket otherwise. Just as one can be a China hawk, anti-2A, and pro-LGBT. Just as one could be on the right and in favour of gun control. Not anymore. We are now all square pegs being forced into round holes. But for all we protest against orthodoxy, our voices seem to disappear. Thus howling into the wind.
Perhaps the most shocking point from the article: the oft-trumpeted claim that SF schools reduced retake rates of Algebra 1 from 40% to 7% by delaying it to 9th grade is entirely fraudulent.
I would never vote for anything but democrats in the current form, but I think they are deeply corrupt and not really working for the people. Sadly easily the best we have right now. Especially in California we could do with competition from good republicans. And from better democrats.
- Open primaries
- Ranked choice voting
I believe our current system rewards either extremism or outwardly expressed extremism. Each side has to one-up others on the same side to prove that they are the purest avatar of their side. Current candidates are physical manifestations of click-bait.
But at the same time, effective politics requires nuance and competence. The shouting match that is current US politics definitely lacks nuance. I believe nuance is a prerequisite to competence.
In the last ~6 years or so, I learned that there are some people towards the middle, on the “other side” that I’d have been delighted to select as my #2 choice either for reasons of temperament or specific policies. Open primaries and ranked choice voting would have let me do that.
Pretty much.
We've allowed a system of regulatory capture, gerrymandering, lobbying payola, and an incoherent pandering media pipeline to make the whole political discourse a giant meth-addled goat rodeo.
Saving this one for a rainy day. Thank you. I frequently find myself in these, of one size or another.
As a parent, especially of young men, this scares me greatly.
It feels like where are in the reverse of the 50s. Where the 50s promoted masculinity, downplayed femininity the exact opposite is true now. Instead of father knows best, it's instead father knows nothing.
My best advice to young men - Be polite. Be deferential. Study well. Work hard. Take care of yourself. Help others. Don't assume that anyone is going to recognize your work or your achievements without crying privileged, but also realize that regardless of it that is true, you have a responsibility to help others.
This seems to me to apropos to the original article.
At the same time, some people demanding help and claiming oppression, are some of the most privileged people in society and more than capable of taking care of themselves.
Direct your charity to those most in need of it.
These are all fairly mainstream center-left views. E.g. except for the get rid of beurocracy in the fda one, i agree with all of them, and im not particularly out there.
If someone who has these relatively mainstream views feels unrepresented in the mainstream political discourse, something is wrong with the discourse.
Or that individual is really determined to believe that their relatively mainstream views are radical and individual
The trouble is you wouldn’t notice if all you pay attention to in order to “understand American political discourse” is pay attention to the parties and the major news outlets.
Also, preference falsification is a big thing.
I recently read the book Democracy For Realists that makes the point that in a society where people care about multiple issues there will be no 51% coalition that also holds the 51% position on every issue. It’s basically impossible. For anyone interested in the details of that theory, I posted a long excerpt here, along with an example:
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/democracy-for-realists-part...
>>> encouraging kids to learn advanced math whenever they’re ready for it.
I think the actual number of kids who are likely to be super advanced in math and continue with that interest past high school is so small that encouraging that interest will have absolutely no measurable effect on how the rest of us fare in school or life. Yet it could have a great effect on the quality of life for those kids, and for the future welfare of society. In fact, being great at math, given the tiny number of people who are, is a drop in the bucket compared to being great at computer programming. Likewise for kids who develop an aptitude for playing classical music.
I am in a constant state of shock and disgust at how many Envious Levelers there are in society, and their planet-engulfing sense of entitlement to drag everyone down to their level.
Harrison Bergeron was written because it is a real possibility.
And the kids who are "advanced" in math greatly outnumber those who are still doing anything with math by age 25, which is close to zero, even in supposedly technical fields. I was not an exceptional math student in high school, but became a math major and still use math today.
And it distorts the subject matter itself. 40 years ago, my high school didn't offer calculus because it would be "elitist," though we did have an elite hockey team. But at the same time, we got more interesting material in math, including proofs and problems that had no answer. Today: No proofs, but lots of drill work. Proofs were what made math come alive for me.
It’s a school. You are literally there to learn things.
Do better.
I'd need to see evidence for such a thing.
I don’t have a strong opinion about how much advanced education a public school system should provide, though I might suggest those educations which require specialized machines or equipment that can be shared among many students might deserve priority over those that just require a talking head and chalkboard.
A couple of my best teachers did let me do this, but it was quite clear that it was the exception rather than the rule, and it depended entirely on their idiosyncratic and countercultural sense of concern for the well-being and development of all students, even gasp the talented ones.
There is absolutely zero effort involved, and the idea that this takes away from other students is just good old Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD).
Don't FUD the conversation without evidence, please.
In fact, I think this alone would be one of the be best predictors of a person’s intellect and interest in thinking deeply about things: ask 10 politically polarising questions in different areas and score responses based on how diverse they are.
To illustrate what I'm trying to say, consider the two polarizing issues of abortion and capital punishment. The standard right-of-center view in the US - if you asked almost any Republican - is to be pro-life when it comes to individuals not killing fetuses and pro-death when it comes to the State killing grown adults. This is not only inconsistent in its logical application of whether anyone has a right to kill anyone, but also wildly inconsistent with the right wing's antipathy toward state power over the individual. Meanwhile, the other party in this country is anti-death-penalty by the state and pro-choice for the individual, while preferring state power over individual autonomy in most other cases.
Now who's holding wildly different, inconsistent political stances on polarizing questions? Probably the 70% or so of Americans who hew to either the standard liberal or conservative platforms, without considering their internal contradictions.
It takes some intellect to question the foundations and consequences of your beliefs and to try building a unified framework around them. It also takes some arrogance to assume that if you can't reconcile two contradictory views you hold, nobody else can either, and one of them must be wrong.
For example, I find it rather obvious that nobody deserves to be rich when many poor people are lacking the basic necessities of life. I also find it rather obvious that allowing people to become rich encourages, under the right circumstances, behavior that benefits everyone in the society. I haven't been able to reconcile those views, and I haven't been able to find anyone who can do that and explain it to me. On the other hand, I have found many people who see the contradiction and choose to reject one of the beliefs. They choose to believe that some people deserve to be rich (and others deserve to be poor), or that nobody should be allowed to get rich.
And that's how we get political polarization.
Think about it this way: you have two countries at two ends of the world. They are independent, have their own policies, culture, economy. People in one are pretty smart about policies and hard work and build wealth over decades while people in the other can't organize, have constant struggle for power, zero social policies and end up not being able to feed their every growing population.
Is there any reason people in the rich country should feel moral obligation to not be rich and devote resources to lift the other country out of poverty? Additional problem is that the poor country won't easily give up independence and accept smart policies so the situation is kinda hopeless.
Now apply to the local level. Even if you feel moral duty towards those in need you can't do much if you don't get some authority over their decisions/culture/education etc.
For examples of how local authority is less impactful than soft power, consider the economic and cultural growth of the entire planet under American cultural dominance from 1918 to 2001.
But "allowing people to become rich ... benefits everyone in the society" is, however arguable, a policy position and not a negative judgment on personal behavior. It proceeds from the fact that in every society, ever, wealth stratification emerges; and it accepts that the state has an interest in both allowing some accumulation of capital and in preventing a runaway hoarding of wealth.
So I think you could reconcile these views. Both of your statements follow a consistent, demonstrable underlying argument: That without some intervention by the state, too much wealth will accumulate at the top and extreme poverty will reign at the bottom. From that starting point, your views aren't contradictory; you would be on the side of well-regulated markets. You're not stepping into the fantasy lands where either eating the rich or trickling down wealth will cure poverty.
It's consistent and logical. The values it comes from are just different then yours or mine.
So yeah. I meant to say somewhere else that consistency isn't the only thing.
edit. just in bouncing my eyes between my response and yours I know that we both understand some of the underlying basic honor system of the thing you're describing as a set of ethics. And in protecting their family they ain't wrong, just that that's not what they're really doing, is it.
My main gripe with pro-lifers as with others moral warriors so to speak is authoritarianism. I don't want to prove my values are superior or more consistent . I just want them to leave me and people like me alone. If they want to enforce their views on their community it's fine with me as long as you can voluntarily leave. It's not enough for them though. They want to force everyone else to accept their moral judgement as well.
Authoritarianism and inability to understand that their value call is not universal is the problem here.
Today you're the victim of a lot of conspirators.
Tomorrow you're the hero.
Nevermind the people driving you to kill those other people are also conspirators, using you to kill their personal rivals.
Must be easy to see the world this way. I've never been dumb enough to do it, but maybe you could spare a couple words and explain why it's so great.
"No".
Say you and I both agree our city should build a new ballpark. I think they should put it out in the old industrial zone. You think they should build it conveniently close to downtown, which would involve tearing down my house. The city ends up deciding to build it near downtown, except they're going to tear down your house to do it. Now who's going to take you seriously if you complain about your house being torn down, when you were just arguing it was fine to tear down someone else's?
I want a state that does things according to reasonable, universally applied principles. Sometimes those are going to be things I don't like, but it's more important that the principles be upheld than that I get the result I want. I might want to see someone dead, but the principle of not killing people supersedes that. Because if the city has no guiding logic like, "it's wrong to tear down houses because this guy thinks we should" then they'll eventually come for your house, because you're never gonna be that guy.
Does everyone lie for the social justice cause because the truth never matches a pure ideological idea?
Is silence accepting the lie here empowering social justice or by not fully supporting the lie are you cast out of the movement and seen as working for the man or for power?
- Every person of intelligence and good will agrees upon the definition of "social justice".
- Every person who disagrees with "${author}" 's conception of social justice is at best part of the problem, or at worst a willing agent evil.
Having read some social-justice-related Internet arguments from the sidelines, I get the impression that this lie/confusion is particularly vexing to those who aren't in the stereotypical social-justice camp.
… who wants to end world hunger … and do it using GMO crops?
On first blush, I would say this is someone who is somehow overly attracted to idealized approaches -- dare we say silver bullets? -- without considering secondary effects or big picture, problem-first analysis. Most of his positions / proposals sound a lot better, but something seems off "off" about these first two.
The first one just doesn't pass the smell test. Nuke plants are expensive and slow to build, and wishing it were otherwise won't make it so; and from a basic risk analysis perspective, it would be foolish to put most of our eggs in the geoengineering basket, without putting the problem of near-term emissions front and center.
And as for the second -- let's just say the problem of global hunger is perhaps more multi-level and multi-factored than the issues that GMO, even in a best case scenario, can ever hope to address.
There are problems with all these technologies, and great depth to each of the challenges they address, but just as coal was a revolution over wood, and natural gas over coal, so too can imperfect solar, wind, or nuclear be over natural gas. Or perhaps GMOs will help us reverse some of the sins of today’s mono crops.
In exchange for poisoning the air, killing streetcars, and (with the help of farcically idealistic mid-century urban planning) decimating whole communities, physically and spiritually (not so coincidentally with disproportionate effects on certain disadvantaged groups). A silver bullet to the horse manure problem, perhaps, but to the sustainable public transport problem .. a dull hammer, wouldn't you think?
Just as coal was a revolution over wood, and natural gas over coal, so too can imperfect solar, wind, or nuclear be over natural gas. Or perhaps GMOs will help us reverse some of the sins of today’s mono crops.
I agree that both nukes and GMOs can potentially be part of the arsenal of approaches to these problems. But to anoint them as our "best" solutions to these problem strikes me as fanciful, to say the least.
I'd maybe call them our best insufficiently-used solutions: things that we can most easily do a bunch more of and make a big difference. They won't get the job done on their own (e.g. nuke plants don't solve the transport / liquid fuels problem, but they contribute to plentiful base load which could even be helpful as part of solving that).
My understanding is that solar is still too inconsistent to be the sole energy source for a power grid, but solar + nuclear could be.
Thinking solar can be a complete near term solution to carbon emissions strikes me as faith based reasoning, without fundamental break through sin batttery technology.
Recent experience with nuke construction is that they consume $billions and produce exactly zero watts. The latest is $30 billion already spent on an unfinished and probably soon cancelled 2GW plant, because it would take more $billions to finish, and would then be unable to compete on price.
I don't think you can fairly call anything that hasn't ever even provided .1% of the power in a grid "proven tech" with a known economic picture.
> Underground hydrogen storage is mature;
Electrolyzing hydrogen at scale isn't, and the economics of electrolyzer cells are still awful.
> Recent experience with nuke construction is that they consume $billions and produce exactly zero watts.
I think it's interesting you wave away all the economics and practical problems with renewables, but ignore the fact that humankind has a long successful economic history of nuclear production and presumably could do this again if there were the political will. E.g. you make nuclear being hard into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Renewables get good news all the time. We know solar will be X% cheaper next year, wind Y%, and storage Z%, for years to come. Electrolytic production of H2 and NH3 is improving fast, with increasingly cheaper catalysts being discovered all the time.
If safe nuke plants could be built without pervasive (wholly legal!) corruption, 3GW in 3 years for $3B, I might be all for it. But I don't know any way to get there.
About double that cost and 50% greater timeframe is doable, IMO, with a greater emphasis on nuclear as part of the solution.
Looking at California: right now we have about 20GW demand sustained overnight in excess of our 1.3GW of wind power. If you got 6GW of additional nuclear in there over our existing 2GW, and tripled wind... it looks a lot more tractable (but still very hard) to meet the remaining 10GW with storage. At the very least, our hydroelectric resources could be stretched much further, which makes the rest of the problem easier.
And, of course-- that 10 / 20GW can be expected to go up, a lot:
- We are phasing out natural gas heating, so we're going to have a lot more resistive and heat pump heat than before.
- Vehicle electrification.
Overnight we burn a lot of natural gas here in California. It's not going to be feasible to build enough wind to meet current demand, and storage doesn't look practical to get the job done either. And nighttime demand can be expected to go up a lot as people buy electric cars.
Nuke costs are going up, not down. Lately, it is at $billions for zero watts.
"Not going to be feasible", and "doesn't look practical" are not based in fact. Storage is not being built out yet because solar watts still displace NG watts, 1:1, and storage cost is falling even faster than solar. But the iron-air battery factories we will need are now under construction.
Money is fungible, but the supply curves for nuclear plants, solar panels, storage, etc, are not flat.
Further, as a political reality: the money allocated to renewable subsidies and nuclear subsidies isn't a direct exchange. If you convince governments to subsidize nuclear $20B less, you don't magically get $20B more for renewables.
> Nuke costs are going up, not down.
Yup, and why is that? Certainly that has something to do with the current regulatory environment and the scale at which nuclear is deployed. I.e. there's no magical way it has gotten "harder" other than us doing it less and losing expertise.
> "Not going to be feasible", and "doesn't look practical" are not based in fact. Storage is not being built out yet because solar watts still displace NG watts, 1:1
In summer, we already have wholesale power costs dip negative at midday from time to time. That's going to become more pronounced.
And at night, we have about 16GW of natural gas (counting imports) vs. 3GW of wind (counting imports) here in California. Maybe we can triple wind with a massive investment, but IMO that's about the point where we're going to see significantly diminished returns. And this is one of the markets that has most aggressively deployed renewables in the US and has some of the best resources for solar and wind outside of the desert.
A few GW more of nuclear in the mix would make a significant difference.
All these numbers are about present demand, too. Increased vehicle electrification is going to push up nighttime demand further.
If the nukes ever did come online, years on, their power would then be unable to compete on price with wind and storage, costs of which are still plummeting. More likely, they would be cancelled first, and the money, real estate, and concrete wasted.
Putting those $billions into offshore wind, HVDC transmission lines, hydrolysis, and underground hydrogen storage would be an overwhelmingly better use. Current NG plants can switch over incrementally to burn H2 as it becomes available.
Yes, it takes awhile. This is a problem we should be working on! And "it won't help for awhile" isn't great justification for not doing something forever.
> but would suck up dollars that could otherwise be spent building out wind and solar that would produce immediately.
Already argued against with no objection by you.
> their power would then be unable to compete on price with wind
I do not think it is feasible for California to deploy ~6x as much wind as we have now. And we might need significantly more than that (overprovisioning for reliability, increased nighttime demands).
> storage
Again, we have no clarity that grid-scale storage using batteries is realistic or sustainable, even assuming doing it with new technologies like smelting iron.
We simply need to be betting on everything to get through this. Solar-thermal probably doesn't win either, but we should absolutely be doing more of it than we are now.
> More likely, they would be cancelled first.
Even if one cedes your point, and some capital costs need to get written down, so be it. You still get the power. The operating costs of nuclear are cheap: it's the capital costs that are problematic.
France proves the point: the CO2 intensity of energy production in France is significantly lower than neighboring states that have bet heavily on renewables. And this was done with comparatively ancient technology. If France got it done in the past, why can't it be done now?
A cancelled nuke plant generates zero watts, forever. And, nuke plant operation costs are only increasing. Reduced water availability increases this cost.
Offshore wind is wholly untapped, in California. Installing solar over crop land reduces water and heat stress, both increasing yield and freeing up water for hydro storage.
Iron-air batteries do not involve smelting (once produced). The iron oxidizes, yielding energy. Their advantage is extremely low cost per stored watt-hour.
Nuclear is about $30 operating/megawatt hour. Solar, counting capital costs, is about $40/megawatt hour for utility scale solar and about $150/megawatt hour for rooftop after subsidies... but this is just daytime power and not base load. You'd need to add the cost of storage.
> And, nuke plant operation costs are only increasing.
This is false. They'd gone up for awhile, but then started a powerful downward trend. 2019 was a record low value even before correcting for inflation. 2019 is also the most recent year for which we have full data.
> Iron-air batteries do not involve smelting (once produced). The iron oxidizes, yielding energy.
And then is reduced, to recharge. There's various approaches here, from nanoscale powder sintering and pure electrochemical reduction to literally just reducing the iron anode at temperature ("smelting").
The issue is the capital costs-- and as you say, they are awful right now because so few nuclear plants are being constructed, because:
- They face an unclear and varying regulatory environment, where there have been plants fully completed and not granted a license to commence operation.
- Natural gas is so damn cheap.
I have been trying to understand nuke construction economics. Ultimately, it seems tied to our mode of government: for any entity smaller than the Feds to pull together the $billions for a nuke project takes enlisting a huge patronage network, who must then be ladled gravy. Most of the cost is not construction, as such, but gravy, disguised. It stretches to a decade and beyond because the moment it's finished, the gravy dries up. No one actually involved wants that ever to happen, not even if the stalling makes no one ever want to start another project like it.
So, a nuke plant is like a bullet train or urban transit tunnel. The Feds might be able to build a nuke plant, but every detail of the industry, what there is of it, is tuned to extracting gravy, which I doubt even the Feds could overcome (presuming they would want to).
An incremental nuke that grows in 100 MW units, and produces power very early, might work, adding capacity continually. (But turbines want economy of scale.) Or, a nuke to provide process heat for a cluster of industrial plants in the daytime, commissioned and managed by them, but generating regional power overnight. But the well seems too toxic.
The purely incremental nature of solar, wind, and batteries leaves little room for corruption, making them tough competition. With HVDC transmission cost falling and efficiency rising, whoever builds out cheapest can prop up everybody for a thousand miles around.
The thing about nukes is that the heat driving it seems free, but heat is pretty cheap. The cost of turning heat into power, and all the complications, dominates.
I see the first as an argument against the type of environmentalist who argues that global warming is a huge problem, but that it must be solved only by reducing consumption and promoting solar/wind renewables—that nuclear and geoengineering are actually undesirable in that they compete with or distract from these more ideal solutions.
Similarly the second isn't necessarily saying that GMOs alone will solve world hunger, but that writing off any GMO food as unnatural and therefore bad is shortsighted, and misses out on an incredibly valuable tool to combat hunger.
Of course he wasn't saying they should be our "only" solutions to these problems. But he definitely did not merely say they should be components of a broader strategy (which I do agree with), or that they shouldn't be "written off".
He specifically said they should be our best and primary approaches to these problems -- which again, strikes me as over-idealized, if not outright naive and fanciful.
* He didn’t use the word primary anywhere in the post. * He didn’t say that GMOs are the best response, just that “he wants to [end world hunger] with them.”
He didn’t say that GMOs are the best response, just that “he wants to [end world hunger] with them.”
Look, when someone says "I want to solve problem X with Y" and mentions no other approaches -- then clearly they are saying that Y is the best response to X.
That's how I do these things. You can do whatever you want of course.
What he laid out here is just mainstream gospel.
And then he punctuates it with "correct".
Which is to say, he's calling out the latest popular totalitarianism.
Yes, I might be spoiling the punchline here but it seems like it needs to be underlined.
Take this for example:
> It’s like, what do you call someone who’s absolutely terrified about global warming, and who thinks the best response would’ve been (and actually, still is) a historic surge in nuclear energy, possibly with geoengineering to tide us over?
The Democratic Party has recently endorsed nuclear power:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertbryce/2020/08/23/after-48...
Republicans seem on board as well:
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/543267-house-r...
Others appear to be tautologies:
> … who wants to end world hunger … and do it using GMO crops?
I have yet to see anyone promote GMO as a way to make better tasting crops. It's always painted as a way to better feed the planet and reduce starvation. To support GMO seems to be an affirmation for ending world hunger. At least it would be entertaining to see someone try to argue that that's not the best use of GMO.
Still other opinions are often heard, but when push comes to shove, actively opposed. For example:
> … who supports free speech, to the point of proudly tolerating views that really, actually disgust them at their workplace, university, or online forum?
Yet:
> … who believes in patriotism, the police, the rule of law, to the extent that they don’t understand why all the enablers of the January 6 insurrection, up to and including Trump, aren’t currently facing trial for treason against the United States?
Those who participated didn't think of themselves as traitors. They thought of themselves as doing their patriotic duty, exercising their Constitutional rights of speech and assembly, and their moral right of action against tyranny. They may be delusional, but that's how they describe themselves. Not coincidentally unlike the lawbreakers who interfered with nuclear weapons research, animal cruelty practices, racial discrimination, the British occupation, the Vietnam War, and abortion clinics.
The platform quote is basically lip-service to nuclear fans. Quite different from the Manhattan-Project-level of a response I imagine the author is in favour of.
>Others appear to be tautologies
There are a lot of opponents of GMO crops that consider themselves liberal or progressive.
>Those who participated didn't think of themselves as traitors.
Those that protested outside are not traitors. Those that broke into the Capitol building, with the intent to stop the count or not, committed treason. Trying to overthrow the government is not speech. Yeah the founding fathers were treasonous, but they were successful.
How does poisoning abunch of poor island people help global warming?
Certainly nuclear power generation has almost nothing to do with nuclear weapons testing.
Or set government buildings on fire in response to George Floyd's death (which the police officer found responsible for was later sentenced to decades in prison for). Or who did the exact same thing the Jan 6 "insurrectionists" did to shut down Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation.
It has clicked recently that I now understand how urgent it is to develop tech to find and inhabit other planets, as the moment we got a picture of our own planet from the moon, whether anyone acknowledged it or not, life and culture here has became a finite zero sum game, and I now doubt that's something we can roll back. This isn't even a negative view, it's just that the tech that enables it will also enable a new source of hope that I think people can orient toward again.
The intuition behind this is appealing (that a lack of religion invites a void that is filled by crazier things), but the current evidence seems to indicate that this is incorrect. Mainstream religions aren't a "prophylactic" against newer craziness like QAnon.
In fact, the reality is the opposite. QAnon is most effective in converting people who already believe in Christianity.
You could also look at partisanship. Countries with less religion aren't really any more partisan.
Unfortunately, there is still plenty of "casual" Christians who don't care, and people who are Christians in name only. They get snared fairly easily.
IMO, a well-rooted Christian will essentially resist having their faith changed or added to. But they are the minority group in many places, because it's a path that requires personal sacrifice that not many want to undergo.
> In fact, the reality is the opposite. QAnon is most effective in converting people who already believe in Christianity.
I don't think you're looking at the right things. If you'll permit an extended quote from another Scott:
> In high school I took a sociology class, and the teacher talked about how modern society was atomized and there were no real community bonds and so on. And I thought this was dumb. I didn’t live in an atomized society! My family knew our next-door neighbors, and we’d even been over at their house once for dinner. There was a Community Center a few blocks away, and when I was a kid I would go there a couple of times a year for some kind of Neighborhood Art Night. Sometimes my mother volunteered at my school, and my dad was too busy to volunteer but probably would have if he could. We weren’t devoid of community at all.
> And then three things happened. Number one, I read some good anthropology about primitive and medieval societies, which actually described pre-atomized life and the way that there was barely even an individual identity and the community determined everything you ever did. Number two, I spent a little time in an honest-to-goodness Third World village and saw a little of what life was like there. And number three, I got involved in some good subcultures – including Bay Area rationality – which were slightly but noticeably less atomized than the neighborhood where I grew up. I realized that I’d mistaken the existent-but-weak forms of community in my suburban neighborhood for the really-strong forms of community that people complaining about atomization say we’re missing, because I had so little experience with the latter I couldn’t even imagine them.
( https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/07/concept-shaped-holes-c... )
You're looking at the void that people are trying to fill with newer, more satisfying religions, calling that void "mainstream religion", and then saying that mainstream religion doesn't block the adoption of newer more virulent religions. But mainstream religion in the United States died a long time ago. The people you're "disagreeing" with are looking at the same void, calling it a void, and complaining that there's nothing there to block the adoption of maladaptive beliefs. Which is the same complaint that you're making.
I was more thinking of "wokeism" as a religion that fills the religious void since it has its own moral code and dogmas unlike QAnon.
This also made me realize I haven't thought about utopia in a long time.
E.g., right at the top: Geoengineering, really? Maybe he does not know the expression "termination shock". Or "ocean acidification". And, does the author know nothing of the history of nukes in the US? Nuke projects nowadays produce $10B+ ratepayer debt and, ten years on, zero watts.
Your first post could be read as a thinly disguised insult. Your second post is the same, but even more in the open. I wonder what you get out of this behavior?
I hoped for an interesting insight, given your strong assertion.
edit
I see you edited your first post. I guess that is as good as it gets.
"Termination shock" and "ocean acidification" may be looked up and read about in as much detail as anybody cares for. Likewise, recent history of US nuke projects.
There is a ---Dawkins----Gould--- political spectrum, and Scott and his people are in the Dawkins camp, in terms of the content certainly, but also in terms of the personal relationships, if one were to make a big over time social graph.
The Gould camp however I think is the better / more correct / more insightful one.
I am just going to go down the list and write some off the cuff thoughts
> It’s like, what do you call someone who’s absolutely terrified about global warming, and who thinks the best response would’ve been (and actually, still is) a historic surge in nuclear energy, possibly with geoengineering to tide us over?
> … who wants to end world hunger … and do it using GMO crops?
Also, GMO this or Nuclear that I would not consider a point of disagreement. (I have no idea what Gould thought of those, but if he disagreed I suppose I would chalk that up to the era and say they are not the point of my construction.)
A Gould person might be skeptical of "world hunger" as a concept, or the implicit characterization of it as something that has to do chiefly with how food is produced.
> who wants to smash systems of entrenched privilege in college admissions … and believes that the SAT and other standardized tests are the best tools ever invented for that purpose?
This might be a specifically Scott Aaronson thing.
Personally speaking, I would say there was a time in elementary school (in California, too!) I was pissed they ended the skipping ahead in math program just as I hit the relevant age. But I feel like I was able to still end up doing plenty of advanced Math, so I am not too salty today. It's certainly not the keystone of my politics or world view.
Maybe there is a larger story to tell here---I guess if I had to generalize I am more concerned with jobs being stupid and education being "supply without demand" absent 0-sum credentials rat race than the quality of the education itself---but then again maybe there isn't. I am not sure.
> who feels a personal distaste for free markets, for the triviality of what they so often elevate and the depth of what they let languish, but tolerates them because they’ve done more than anything else to lift up the world’s poor?
"world's poor" jumps out like "world hunger". How to characterize pre-industrial/modern/colonial consumption is very methodologically fraught. And China being the place where the absolute majority of this happened also muddies the water. Markets are interesting for allowing small scale social experiments, but whatever the story is on poverty without arbitrarily cropping history a Gould person would say is a lot more nuanced than Aaronson is giving it credit for.
> … who’s happiest when telling the truth for the cause of social justice … but who, if told to lie for the cause of social justice, will probably choose silence or even, if pushed hard enough, truth?
Mainstream culture war rots brains and wastes time. I am skipping this.
> … who wants to legalize marijuana and psychedelics
Sure
> and also legalize all the promising treatments currently languishing in FDA approval hell?
Yet merely promising stuff that gets out of FDA hell also slurps out of Medicare's teat in worrisome ways. Moreover, "treatments" is a very myopic way to look at public health. Some combination of:
- Public healthcare
- Abolition of car culture and other underlying causes of widespread unhealthiness
- Separation of "treatment being good enough to make legal" and "treatment being good enough that the state should pay for it"
- Drug bounties vs foisting all the risk on the private sector so it has to rent seek to recoup
is more interesting to focus on
> … who feels little attraction to the truth-claims of the world’s ancient religions, except insofar as they sometimes serve as prophylactics against newer and now even more virulent religions?
Dawkins people are so hung up on religiosity as cause, not mere symptom. It also seems counter-productive tactically, even if it were true. Secularism does well when society rapidly technically advances and people are socialized enough to not need to search for alternatives. Darwins people seem to want to just indoctrinate secularism in ignorance of understanding the social processes that created it.
> … who thinks the covid response of the CDC, FDA, and other authorities was a historic disgrace—not because it infringed on the personal liberties of antivaxxers or anything like that, but on the contrary, because it was weak, timid, bureaucratic, and slow, where it should’ve been like that of a general at war?
No disagreement. But Gould people would say this is 0 surprise and fits large pattern of emaciated state and civil service, going back decades.
> … who thinks the Nazi Holocaust was even worse than the mainstream acknowledges it to be, because in addition to the staggering, one-lifetime-isn’t-enough-to-internalize-it human tragedy, the Holocaust also sent up into smoke whatever cultural process had just produced Einstein, von Neumann, Szilard, Born, Meitner, Wigner, Haber, Pauling, Ulam, Tarski, Erdös, and Noether, and with it, one of the wellsprings of our technological civilization?
No disagreement. Yeah important to realize the US intellectual spoils of war was still very sad and lost a lot of value. Don't extrapolate from Von Neumann loving the US that it was otherwise.
This is a funny thing because Darkins people seem very in the Anglo-American intellectual tradition. Gouldists are open to more continental things, which I would argue probably are closer (not just geographically) to the pre-Nazi Central European intellectual tradition. Obviously Jews did have a huge and outsized contribution, but in the general strain of "19th Century nationalism was a mistake" I would argue it was a very pluralist tradition, in a region that had very complex ethnic and linguistic boundaries.
> … who supports free speech, to the point of proudly tolerating views that really, actually disgust them at their workplace, university, or online forum?
Kind of like secularism, no firm disagreement but less emphasis, and questioning of cause versus effect. Doctrinaire Liberalism holds that free speech must be self-supporting, and equivalence of moral good and sustainability. Other strands are less self-assuredly optimistic.
> … who believes in patriotism, the police, the rule of law, to the extent that they don’t understand why all the enablers of the January 6 insurrection, up to and including Trump, aren’t currently facing trial for treason against the United States?
This is kinda odd. "Treason" as a crime has very shaky foundations under liberalism. Where is the free speech/assembly/association absolutism now?!
> … who’s (of course) disgusted to the core by Trump and everything he represents, but who’s also disgusted by the elite virtue-signalling hypocrisy that made the rise of a Trump-like backlash figure predictable?
Thinks "elite hypocrisy" as a cause of Trump sounds like a lot of idealism and not very much materialism.
> … who not only supports abortion rights, but also looks forward to a near future when parents, if they choose, are free to use embryo selection to make their children happier, smarter, healthier, and free of life-crippling diseases (unless the “bioethicists” destroy that future, as a previous generation of Deep Thinkers destroyed our nuclear future)?
This stuff receives too much attention a la "trolley problem"s. But if one does support it, saying nothing about maintaining generic diversity, filtering absent full understanding of consequences, and evolution fundamental about optimizing against a dynamic and unpredictable metrics is rather poor tactics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law generalized, folks!
> … who, when reading about the 1960s Sexual Revolution, instinctively sides with free-loving hippies and against the scolds … even if today’s scolds are themselves former hippies, or intellectual descendants thereof, who now clothe their denunciations of other people’s gross, creepy sexual desires in the garb of feminism and social justice?
More culture war diversions. Hippie -> neoliberal pipeline I suppose could be interesting, but not in that way.
I don't have a great idea how to sum up, these ideas are still a bit raw in my head. I am not sure to what extent this line of inquiry in intellectual history is well-studded.
I suppose a concrete place to to begin is how to connect micro and macro phenomena. The Dawkins camp is very keen on the micro stuff, and wants to study the micro stuff very hard and then extrapolate. The Gould camp spends more time thinking about the macro stuff alone before trying to connect the two. That makes bridging the gap harder, and it could well be argued the Gould camp hasn't spent enough time working on that harder problem they made for themselves. But at least their description of the macro is a bit less biased by micro considerations.
I've never heard of this spectrum before.
I looked around and found https://www.marxist.com/marx-darwin-and-gould-the-revolution... which has some neat quotes but is written at times in a bit a rigid way that I think would be a cringy rhetorical misfire for this audience. But as I am currently taking some economics classes, the biology--economics relationships are top of mind.
Dawkin's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene-centered_view_of_evolutio... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microfoundations along with neoclassical economics writ large have some pretty clear parallels.
So it's more like the quest for better programming languages and libraries, than "right" and "wrong".
I see no other way to resolve these sorts of disputes productively.
I feel like this is a bad argument. There's never been an instance of non-free markets that was given any sort of room to grow healthily without substantial outside powers trying to force it to fail. Free markets being the standard economic model doesn't deserve any praise. It's impossible to know without more examples of non-free markets whether we're making progress because of it or despite it.
I think this is universally understood to be the reason markets work best: they aren't as fragile. The world is an extremely chaotic place where anyone with resources can use those resources to influence anyone or anything else. The most important quality of an economic system is the ability to function despite that fact.
No, it's the best system (so far) because 'humans' cause pressure on other countries (and their own) to fail.
> This seems like a poor argument too, and is definitely not supporting the claim that free markets lift people out of poverty.
My argument doesn't support a claim I wasn't making? Weird.
The only example I can think of is Soviet-style communism - I assume that the substantial outside powers you're referring to are western capitalism? If so... soviet communism was as substantial and working at least as hard (probably harder) to make capitalism fail, but capitalism was able to withstand assault by outside powers.
To claim that capitalism is the reason for people being lifted out of poverty just seems ridiculous when there's not really a way to show causation.