The most egregious example of this currently, I think, is that if someone briefly crossed the border 30 years ago without permission and then started a process that has offered them ongoing permitted residency, they are "an illegal".
Americans don’t seem to be very good at bureaucracy: at least by developed democracy standards. Way better than Latin Americans, but that is a low benchmark. (Being next to Latin America seems to lead Americans to over-rate how well they are governed.)
It does make me grateful to live in a country that can control its borders.
Australia is a much higher immigration country than the US and the UK, and about the level of Canada, yet migration is much less salient a political issue in Australia. That is because compulsory voting plus preferential voting means that the votes—and so the experience—of working class voters count. Forcing migration policy to be acceptable to the working class turns out to generate much better migration policy.
The Albanese Government got thumpingly re-elected—only the second time Federal Labor has had a landslide win—and its reaction to clear signs of rising angst about migration has been to … cut migration substantially. Yes, Albo is a much better politician and PM than Two-Tier Keir, but incentives also count. Both Albo and Two-Tier got Parliamentary landslides on 34% of the vote. But Albo got in on the 20% who gave him their second preference. If that falls to 14%, he loses office. Incentives matter.
On the other hand, if you ostentatiously rub it in the working class’s faces that they have no say over migration—and that any complaining about migration is a sign that they are ignorant/stupid/morally deplorable—then you get … Trump, and Brexit.
Of course, going on and on about how bad Trump is, and how stupid or otherwise appalling the people who voted for him are, is much more congenial than contemplating how you and yours may have screwed up, just a bit.
Nazi germany employed capitalism as their mode of production, just like the CCP, but sent liaison officers to MNCs acting as defacto chief executive officers. China does the same.
Nazi germany rounded up jews and placed them in camps. Some were exterminated. Some were not.
China imprisons uighers, sterilizes them, and then forces them to work and live in state run camps.
The nazis ran medical expirements on the imprisoned.
China runs medical expirements on the imprisoned. The fulan gong report their organs being stolen.
China allows no freedom of religion. Christian churches mostly run underground, at peoples houses. Even those are raided.
Nazi germany allowed no religious freedom.
The nazis threatened and went to war with most of their neighbors.
Likewise, china threatens most of its neighbors. It has attacked India, stole islands from Vietnam and the Philippines, threatens Taiwan, calls Australia "the gum on the bottom of their shoe", and sends warships to japanese islands. They invaded and captured Hong Kong.
In nazi germany people who opposed the state went "missing".
China employs the same tactic, although usually the individual returns months later to grovel, issuing a public apology to the state.
Both are right wing authoritarian nations, so there are obviously "similarities", just as mice and elephants are similar in the sense of both being mammals.
But the differences are vast and some of your comment is misleading or based on misinformation.
Your comment does nicely illustrate exactly the problem that I tried to address in this post. Suppose I made a list of all of the awful things that Trump has done in the last 6 months. Would you say that the list represents a good overall evaluation of the United States of America?
Taiwan's military occupies the largest of these disputed islands--is it also like Nazi Germany?
"sterilizes them"
India forcibly sterilized 6 million men during the 1970s---was India like Nazi Germany?
"Nazi germany employed capitalism as their mode of production, just like the CCP,"
And just like the USA.
"Nazi germany rounded up jews and placed them in camps. Some were exterminated. Some were not."
"Some" is an awfully polite way of saying 6 million. In contrast, somewhere between 300 and 1000 died in the Tiananmen square massacre. Both were wrong, but you need a sense of proportion.
To be clear, I'm talking about modern China, not the Maoist era. Based on your examples, you seem to also be making that comparison.
"China allows no freedom of religion."
False, they place heavy restrictions on religion, but 5 major religions are allowed and millions worship in state approved churches.
"They invaded and captured Hong Kong"
Most of Hong Kong was rented by the UK for 99 years and then turned back over to China in 1997. The recent crackdown on political expression was wrong, but it's absurd to compare that to the Nazi invasion of much of Europe. Ditto for trivial border disputes with India over small areas high in the mountains. Even the US military attacks more countries than China.
I'd say they are definitely like pre-WW2 Nazi Germany.
"like" does not mean "equal", but no two countries in wildly different historical contexts can be equal. By the same logic cannot liken Nazi Germany to the Golden Horde, because they killed far greater percentages of the population. But obviously we can.
«India forcibly sterilized 6 million men during the 1970s---was India like Nazi Germany?»
Sure, in many ways! Germans were not uniquely evil barbarians. Genocide is quite human. Pearl clutching about it and hyping up that chapter of history as inexplicable evil is despicable sentimentality. And I say this as someone whose grandfather was a pastor in Bekennende Kirche and came close to being murdered, because he preached against Aktion T5.
«Both are right wing authoritarian nations, so there are obviously "similarities", just as mice and elephants are similar in the sense of both being mammals.»
Both elephants, different circumstances. The Nazi Germany that killed millions did so in the context of total war. China is (and most likely will stay) at peace. Should it go to war, it won't be total war. But should China need to mobilize their entire economy and their entire generation of young men to fight and die against India in a bloody war, the Uighur population would likely be genocided a lot faster. I don't think it's particularly important, whether a people gets halved in number over half a decade or whether we only find the next generation is halved and the one thereafter halved again. Long-term outcomes matter and the Chinese aren't at risk of being interrupted or changing course anytime soon.
Also we simply don't have any reliable data on how many are sterilized, how many are held right now, how many have been held in total, how many have been released, how many mosques have been razed, how many have been executed (and how many of those had their organs harvested), how many tortured, how many worked to death etc.
We might never have it either. So claiming that the peacetime China to peacetime Third Reich is elephant to mouse, is not only inaccurate, it is also extremely speculative, biasing all the uncertainty in one direction.
We don't have complete information, but we have enough to know the two situations are not even close to being comparable. Russia's a better comparison, and even it is vastly different from Nazi Germany.
Genocide has also been used as a rhetorical battering ram in the I-P context, which perhaps is a subtext to this post. It’s not enough that I abhor the war, want it to stop, and suspect serious war crimes have been committed. I MUST use the G-Word in order to have credibility, so it seems.
I understand with what you're trying to say and probably saw it exactly this same way till a few weeks ago, but it's a bad example, because genocide is a legal definition with a long history as established by the UN, which is defined differently as to what we commonly understand it to be (killing a very large percentage of a group, as in the holocaust)... hence: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/leading-genocide-scholars-organization-says-israel-is-committing-genocide-in-gaza
I understand the terminology. However one has to ask how many wars would fall under that definition as liberally applied in this instance? Also, that genocide scholars organization has been shown to have, let’s say, some issues with its credibility and membership (just google around).
Yes, there would be a few (still a minority of all) wars that would be classified per the legal definition. Remember that this was established after the holocaust and in the post WWII era, and certainly with a vision that modern wars would be different from past ones.
I don't think it is accurate to say "genocide is a legal definition." Rather, the term genocide is provided a legal definition in a particular U.N. document for the purposes of that document. That definition is not controlling and did not create the term. Many terms are defined in legal documents such as legislation, and the definition is controlling for that legislation but is not very relevant to the dictionary definition.
Moreover, the definition provided is so loose as to be meaningless. Any type of harm to any person, including emotional harm, is considered genocide according to that definition. That obviously does not comport with the actual meaning of the word or the way it is understood. That is why calling Israel's actions genocide makes people think they are exterminating the Palestinians, which is obviously not accurate.
My state has an absolute of 80 mph for reckless hence even if you are going 5 mph in some areas, it's a crime and you will be facing jail. Likewise over 15 mph in a school zone and not just during school hours, that includes 3 am in a Saturday. I also know both from personal experience including doing jail time for both occasions.
It's not just the average person to whom words have that power it's all of us. One thing that LLMs have shown us about language is that none of us actually understands language via a ground up process of definition but rather by learning associations.
If you put in enough effort and discipline you can force yourself to evaluate claims using the definitions of some words like genocide rather than their associations but that is hard and limited because that's not really how our brains understand language. It's an extra layer grafted on top for improving accuracy but it is why most people find it so hard to learn how to write mathematical proofs.
But, while important to be clear, ultimately we do all think mostly in terms of bundles of associations.
'One thing that LLMs have shown us about language is that none of us actually understands language via a ground up process of definition but rather by learning associations.' Wittgenstein and others have done that long ago, rigorously so. And it's more complex than simply 'learning associations'; real-life/practical usage is paramount.
While I agree with you that is the best way to understand Wittgenstein I think people who wanted a more regimented/rational account of thought could still insist that was just an issue of translating our thoughts into English and deny that we really think in that associational way.
Wittgenstein showed that the word game got applied to a wide variety of family resemblance type concepts. However, I think you could still reasonably maintain that this didn't go so much to how each of us understood games just how we mapped it to words. You could insist that what was going on is that we each would (subpersonally) have a bunch of some relatively ground up clear concepts that -- thanks to limited bandwidth and difficulty coordinating -- we all kinda grope for the word game when describing. So something about the dictionary is fuzzy but that's a step away from saying the fuzziness and associational character is intrinsically part of how we think (tho I feel introspection makes it clear I don't think everyone did).
Yes, people should have been convinced back then but sometimes you need to hit people over the head. I mean people still insist there are unique facts about the references of propositions and that there is a real fact about which proposition we express. The idea that somewhere things are all very sharp and clear is very seductive to some people.
Good comment. I believe most people vastly underestimate the extent to which we all see the world in different ways--so much so that you might say we all live in different worlds. This misunderstanding leads, for instance, to people assuming that those holding different political views are bad people. After all, if they see things in the way that I do then how could they advocate such horrible policies?
Yes, 100%...if we could get people to really understand/emotionally appreciate this it would go a great way to fixing our political animosity and making progress.
What I am constantly struck by talking to people is how little room they seem to have for the possibility that someone else could just have a very different way of understanding the world that makes what they do -- perhaps not right -- but at least understandable.
For instance, so many people are convinced that whenever a court case goes against their ideological interests it is somehow evil lawless scheming. And ofc justices are ppl with biases like anyone else but the answer is almost always that they have a different way of understanding the situation.
That doesn't mean you can't critisize but if people could at least realize that very few people are screaming villians -- mostly they are like you, perhaps including at that time you really didn't want to believe something -- it would go a long way to helping us live together.
But it's theft with so many extra steps and so much gaslighting that we might as well call it something else instead. Like we wouldn't call the people involved in the livestock industry to be engaged in the profession of hunting either, only because in both the end outcome is a clueless piggy being killed.
Completely agree on the undue power of words to shut down entire debates. I still remember my surprise when I found out some time in the 90s that some California kids got punished for bringing Advil to school because, well, no one should bring "drugs" to school and Advil classified as a "drug". In my native German the whole thing made no sense even at the vocabulary level because the close German word "Droge" strictly means "illegal drug" while substances like Advil classify as "Medikament" - medication, not drugs.
Then at some point I discovered General Semantics (GS), and it helped me tremendously to untangle a lot of these absurdities. Have you ever, uh, "delved" into GS? I know it fell out of fashion a long time ago. I still find its key concepts timeless and powerful: words can only describe things incompletely, when used as rigid labels they stifle everyone's thinking; people change through their lives and their opinions can change sharply; therefore opinions or words to describe people or ourselves) should have dates attached to them; most of a word's meaning comes from the speaker's (or receiver's) assumptions; the things we believe we "know" nearly exclusively derive from second hand hearsay in society and we nearly never had direct experience with them (100% true for the "news"). etc. ("etc" in GS stands for "let us not assume that what I wrote hear completely described the situtiaon, many other examples and possibilities exist")
One of the most powerful techniques of GS comes from not using the verb "to be", in a form of English called "E-prime". Not using the word "is" in particular, in its common usage in forming identities through sleight of hand, forces you to describe relationships between concepts. For example, without "is", you can't just say "Epstein is a pedophile". You need to describe his actions, by saying, "Epstein did X, which in my mind classifies as pedophilia" or "... which most people would call pedophilia". Or not. etc. You have to admit that one thing never "is" exactly like another, and that every word has several definitions, when you can't use "is".
I wrote this entire comment in E-prime. It makes writing a bit more cumbersome. But it works. It forces you to abandon cheap and easy labelling. And downstream from there, it makes it much much harder to get the definitional drift you describe so well.
I was not aware of GS, but that's something I need to think about and try to incorporate into my future posts. It's easy to get lazy and categorize things in a misleading fashion.
BTW as you entitled this post "Less Wrong" and are spiritually close to the rationalist movement - there is a lot of explicit parallels with GS and some of it was sourced from GS explicitly. In the earlier days of lesswrong.com, at least some rationalist authors would use explicit GS techniques such as quoting their (sometimes own) opinions in this format : "Yudkowsky (2005) etc.". Also see, e.g. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qc7P2NwfxQMC3hdgm/rationalism-before-the-sequences
For totally going off the deep end... you could also look at Robert Anton Wilson. I might have picked up GS from hRAW's writings, certainly I did for E-prime, memory is hazy on that. All quite connected to lesswrong and rationalism in spirit.
"Approximately 30% to 40% of the nation's homeless population lives unsheltered, meaning they are sleeping on the streets, in public spaces, or in their vehicles. For instance, in January 2024, out of 771,000 people experiencing homelessness, about 243,000 were unsheltered, which is close to 31%."
Elsewhere I've seen other estimates, but all show most homeless people living in buildings. (However, it varies by region, with many more people on the streets in California than NYC.)
I should have Googled it but this makes sense especially as this includes people who are homeless for a relatively short term. My day to day experience in the NE (not NYC) is with homeless people who likely aren't spending a lot of time in shelters or hotel rooms.
Yeah, I was also surprised. My hunch is that many of those in motels are families with children. (Often single moms.) I occasionally read that a large share of the homeless are families, but most of those I see on the street look like single men. So I assume that welfare agencies give priority to mothers with children.
In May of 2019, I was laid off, as of Sept 30, 2019. I knew I wouldn't be finding an equivalent job in the same small town, so we went ahead and put our house on the market. It sold faster than we expected, closing in late July. I didn't yet have a new job lined up and was probably going to finish my term at the current company and get the severance package (only available if I showed up on 9/30). We were considering what to do for housing in August and September, and at the same time my daughter was supposed to start school mid-August. We considered renting a hotel room for 2 months. My wife called the school board and asked them if in that situation we could still enroll my daughter in the school 3 doors down from our former house, if we had to go send her to the school near the hotel. They told us that homeless people could choose any school in the school district.
So, yeah, we were almost a homeless statistic. Language is weird, just because we didn't have a home didn't mean we were homeless. I wasn't homeless, I was just moving my family into a hotel because we didn't have anywhere else to stay.
We ended up doing something else, I finished up the job, got the nice severance package and started a new job in mid-October.
“ So I assume that welfare agencies give priority to mothers with children.”
Could be. But it’s also likely that the disproportionately male mentally ill and drug addicted ar not interested in living/sleeping in this shelters because they don’t want to accept the rules they would have to abide by.
And this above and beyond / distinct from how politicized the term and definition of “homeless” has become.
Regarding the international differences, the rise of AI chat over search is going to lead to challenges with nuance. Last week, the open source Apertus AI model was just released by a consortium of universities in Switzerland. Performance of the model is not state of the art, but it is the first GenAI model that is intentionally sensitive to legal and cultural differences. These are rules that are baked into the responses. I do not know how this will turn out, but it is definitely interesting.
Good comment. The internet and more specifically AI will presumably lead to some equalization of cultural traits. We already see this in certain areas---In 2020 I recall BLM protests in many foreign countries which have very different histories from the US.
I am in favour of nuance. Let’s hear it for nuance! Wrestling with the complexities is much of the fun of trying to understand the world around us.
For example, I have much more nuanced views on immigration than you do, presumably because I take a more historical view. I am not sure what one call the position you seem to be trying to defend—that the marginal benefits of migration exceed the marginal costs for all people in all circumstances over all ranges—but it does not seem very, well, Economic. Nor nuanced. It seems like it is more determined to “prove” that all critics of immigration are always wrong. Also not very nuanced.
After, it is not as if the Economics of immigration is all that hard. The overwhelming majority of the economic benefit of immigration goes to the migrants—that’s why they keep coming. The overwhelming majority of the remaining benefit goes to the holders of capital (and residential land). Hence folk whose income comes from capital tend to be keen on lots of migration. Almost none of the benefit goes to resident workers. So little, it is very easy for them to end up worse off. So, let’s discuss the nuances of cases.
Then there’s the Loury Principle (relations before transactions). One’s culture has about 20 years or so before you become an economically transacting adult to program your System 1 (fast) thinking and embed the framings for your System 2 (slow) thinking. Consequently, people from different cultures will make different decisions in the same circumstances. That’s a whole new layer of nuance.
Comparing the contemporary PRC and the Nazi Germany of 1939-45 is, um, problematic.
Comparing the contemporary PRC and the Nazi Germany of 1933-1939 is less so. There are obvious institutional similarities. The contemporary PRC is obviously much more institutionally similar to the Nazi Germany of 1933-1939 than the USSR of any period other than during the NEP.
Xi Jinping is not Hitler. The CCP is not the NSDAP. That matters. For that matter, the Uighurs are not the Jews, though if we are restricting our comparison to 1933-9 the comparison becomes complex.
The post-1978 CCP acceptance of the de-collectivisation from below, and of open commerce, has lasted way longer than the NEP did. But there are still tensions between being a Leninist ruling Party and a mercantile society. Something Xi, who is obsessed by the fate of the USSR and avoiding it, is obviously extremely aware of. Hence the treatment of Hong Kong and the bellicosity towards Taiwan. The treatment of the Uighurs likely has much to do with how the USSR’s break-up started in the Baltic States.
Interestingly, the CPV seems to be taking mercantile society/Leninist ruling Party tension in a different direction. Comparisons are important in analysis. Equatings, not so much.
Your post brought to mind something I heard recently on the "Reactions" Youtube channel by the American Chemical society. They present simple (home) experiments and basic scientific principles. In a recent video, they analysed a (conspiracy theory) claim a viewer heard from a coworker and a sentence that stuck with me was, paraphrased: "In science, you can always find what you are looking for. The scientific work is not in finding it, but in putting it in the proper context and relations". In case of the video, it meant that yes, the coworker was right in the literal sense, that trees exude toxic substances. He just missed that they do so at a rate less than a mouse breathing in an empty warehouse while also producing a million times more beneficial effects.
The same view can be extended to things like journalism and public discourse. A sufficiently biased review panel can compel a real subject matter expert to testify under oath that vaccines have caused deaths and a journalist can write that EVs still emit CO2 due do electricity production without lying. They do, however, omit the context and analysis that would show that the vaccine death is one guy falling down the stairs on his way to the doctor while they saved thousands of lives. Or that the EV still emits less CO2 than just the process of getting the oil to the gas station, even in coal hungry Germany.
Your post brought to mind something I heard recently on the "Reactions" Youtube channel by the American Chemical society. They present simple (home) experiments and basic scientific principles. In a recent video, they analysed a (conspiracy theory) claim a viewer heard from a coworker and a sentence that stuck with me was, paraphrased: "In science, you can always find what you are looking for. The scientific work is not in finding it, but in putting it in the proper context and relations". In case of the video, it meant that yes, the coworker was right in the literal sense, that trees exude toxic substances. He just missed that they do so at a rate less than a mouse breathing in an empty warehouse while also producing a million times more beneficial effects.
The same view can be extended to things like journalism and public discourse. A sufficiently biased review panel can compel a real subject matter expert to testify under oath that vaccines have caused deaths and a journalist can write that EVs still emit CO2 due do electricity production without lying. They do, however, omit the context and analysis that would show that the vaccine death is one guy falling down the stairs on his way to the doctor while they saved thousands of lives. Or that the EV still emits less CO2 than just the process of getting the oil to the gas station, even in coal hungry Germany.
The most egregious example of this currently, I think, is that if someone briefly crossed the border 30 years ago without permission and then started a process that has offered them ongoing permitted residency, they are "an illegal".
Good points. Mortgage fraud is also defined more expansively, unless it's for a Trump cabinet member.
What would you call such a person?
I’m sorry, what do you mean by “briefly crossed the border”?
You mean someone who crossed for a day or 3 in 1995 and then returned to their home country and remained there?
I suspect not.
In which case, *talk* about “defining words”… 🙄
Americans don’t seem to be very good at bureaucracy: at least by developed democracy standards. Way better than Latin Americans, but that is a low benchmark. (Being next to Latin America seems to lead Americans to over-rate how well they are governed.)
It does make me grateful to live in a country that can control its borders.
Australia is a much higher immigration country than the US and the UK, and about the level of Canada, yet migration is much less salient a political issue in Australia. That is because compulsory voting plus preferential voting means that the votes—and so the experience—of working class voters count. Forcing migration policy to be acceptable to the working class turns out to generate much better migration policy.
The Albanese Government got thumpingly re-elected—only the second time Federal Labor has had a landslide win—and its reaction to clear signs of rising angst about migration has been to … cut migration substantially. Yes, Albo is a much better politician and PM than Two-Tier Keir, but incentives also count. Both Albo and Two-Tier got Parliamentary landslides on 34% of the vote. But Albo got in on the 20% who gave him their second preference. If that falls to 14%, he loses office. Incentives matter.
On the other hand, if you ostentatiously rub it in the working class’s faces that they have no say over migration—and that any complaining about migration is a sign that they are ignorant/stupid/morally deplorable—then you get … Trump, and Brexit.
Of course, going on and on about how bad Trump is, and how stupid or otherwise appalling the people who voted for him are, is much more congenial than contemplating how you and yours may have screwed up, just a bit.
You dont see how China is like Nazi Germany.
Let me help you.
Nazi germany was a one party totalitarian state.
Nazi germany employed capitalism as their mode of production, just like the CCP, but sent liaison officers to MNCs acting as defacto chief executive officers. China does the same.
Nazi germany rounded up jews and placed them in camps. Some were exterminated. Some were not.
China imprisons uighers, sterilizes them, and then forces them to work and live in state run camps.
The nazis ran medical expirements on the imprisoned.
China runs medical expirements on the imprisoned. The fulan gong report their organs being stolen.
China allows no freedom of religion. Christian churches mostly run underground, at peoples houses. Even those are raided.
Nazi germany allowed no religious freedom.
The nazis threatened and went to war with most of their neighbors.
Likewise, china threatens most of its neighbors. It has attacked India, stole islands from Vietnam and the Philippines, threatens Taiwan, calls Australia "the gum on the bottom of their shoe", and sends warships to japanese islands. They invaded and captured Hong Kong.
In nazi germany people who opposed the state went "missing".
China employs the same tactic, although usually the individual returns months later to grovel, issuing a public apology to the state.
But you see no similarity? Really?
Both are right wing authoritarian nations, so there are obviously "similarities", just as mice and elephants are similar in the sense of both being mammals.
But the differences are vast and some of your comment is misleading or based on misinformation.
Your comment does nicely illustrate exactly the problem that I tried to address in this post. Suppose I made a list of all of the awful things that Trump has done in the last 6 months. Would you say that the list represents a good overall evaluation of the United States of America?
Check out this link:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world
"stole islands from Vietnam and the Philippines,"
Taiwan's military occupies the largest of these disputed islands--is it also like Nazi Germany?
"sterilizes them"
India forcibly sterilized 6 million men during the 1970s---was India like Nazi Germany?
"Nazi germany employed capitalism as their mode of production, just like the CCP,"
And just like the USA.
"Nazi germany rounded up jews and placed them in camps. Some were exterminated. Some were not."
"Some" is an awfully polite way of saying 6 million. In contrast, somewhere between 300 and 1000 died in the Tiananmen square massacre. Both were wrong, but you need a sense of proportion.
To be clear, I'm talking about modern China, not the Maoist era. Based on your examples, you seem to also be making that comparison.
"China allows no freedom of religion."
False, they place heavy restrictions on religion, but 5 major religions are allowed and millions worship in state approved churches.
"They invaded and captured Hong Kong"
Most of Hong Kong was rented by the UK for 99 years and then turned back over to China in 1997. The recent crackdown on political expression was wrong, but it's absurd to compare that to the Nazi invasion of much of Europe. Ditto for trivial border disputes with India over small areas high in the mountains. Even the US military attacks more countries than China.
I'd say they are definitely like pre-WW2 Nazi Germany.
"like" does not mean "equal", but no two countries in wildly different historical contexts can be equal. By the same logic cannot liken Nazi Germany to the Golden Horde, because they killed far greater percentages of the population. But obviously we can.
«India forcibly sterilized 6 million men during the 1970s---was India like Nazi Germany?»
Sure, in many ways! Germans were not uniquely evil barbarians. Genocide is quite human. Pearl clutching about it and hyping up that chapter of history as inexplicable evil is despicable sentimentality. And I say this as someone whose grandfather was a pastor in Bekennende Kirche and came close to being murdered, because he preached against Aktion T5.
«Both are right wing authoritarian nations, so there are obviously "similarities", just as mice and elephants are similar in the sense of both being mammals.»
Both elephants, different circumstances. The Nazi Germany that killed millions did so in the context of total war. China is (and most likely will stay) at peace. Should it go to war, it won't be total war. But should China need to mobilize their entire economy and their entire generation of young men to fight and die against India in a bloody war, the Uighur population would likely be genocided a lot faster. I don't think it's particularly important, whether a people gets halved in number over half a decade or whether we only find the next generation is halved and the one thereafter halved again. Long-term outcomes matter and the Chinese aren't at risk of being interrupted or changing course anytime soon.
Also we simply don't have any reliable data on how many are sterilized, how many are held right now, how many have been held in total, how many have been released, how many mosques have been razed, how many have been executed (and how many of those had their organs harvested), how many tortured, how many worked to death etc.
We might never have it either. So claiming that the peacetime China to peacetime Third Reich is elephant to mouse, is not only inaccurate, it is also extremely speculative, biasing all the uncertainty in one direction.
We don't have complete information, but we have enough to know the two situations are not even close to being comparable. Russia's a better comparison, and even it is vastly different from Nazi Germany.
You are playing word games with definitions. This is tedious.
Genocide has also been used as a rhetorical battering ram in the I-P context, which perhaps is a subtext to this post. It’s not enough that I abhor the war, want it to stop, and suspect serious war crimes have been committed. I MUST use the G-Word in order to have credibility, so it seems.
I understand with what you're trying to say and probably saw it exactly this same way till a few weeks ago, but it's a bad example, because genocide is a legal definition with a long history as established by the UN, which is defined differently as to what we commonly understand it to be (killing a very large percentage of a group, as in the holocaust)... hence: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/leading-genocide-scholars-organization-says-israel-is-committing-genocide-in-gaza
I understand the terminology. However one has to ask how many wars would fall under that definition as liberally applied in this instance? Also, that genocide scholars organization has been shown to have, let’s say, some issues with its credibility and membership (just google around).
I did not intend to debate Israel.
Yes, there would be a few (still a minority of all) wars that would be classified per the legal definition. Remember that this was established after the holocaust and in the post WWII era, and certainly with a vision that modern wars would be different from past ones.
I don't think it is accurate to say "genocide is a legal definition." Rather, the term genocide is provided a legal definition in a particular U.N. document for the purposes of that document. That definition is not controlling and did not create the term. Many terms are defined in legal documents such as legislation, and the definition is controlling for that legislation but is not very relevant to the dictionary definition.
Moreover, the definition provided is so loose as to be meaningless. Any type of harm to any person, including emotional harm, is considered genocide according to that definition. That obviously does not comport with the actual meaning of the word or the way it is understood. That is why calling Israel's actions genocide makes people think they are exterminating the Palestinians, which is obviously not accurate.
Which is the correct definition?
Reckless driving in Virginia is 10 mph over the posted speed limit on an Interstate. I know this from personal experience.
You could imprison 75% of the state of California!
Going 55 in the number 2 lane is the FAR worse crime and someone is always doing it on every CA freeway.
My state has an absolute of 80 mph for reckless hence even if you are going 5 mph in some areas, it's a crime and you will be facing jail. Likewise over 15 mph in a school zone and not just during school hours, that includes 3 am in a Saturday. I also know both from personal experience including doing jail time for both occasions.
Only if the speed limit is 70mph- the actual bar is 80mph, not 10mph over the speed limit.
This is what Scott called "the worst argument in the world", as you might also recall.
For reference:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world
It's not just the average person to whom words have that power it's all of us. One thing that LLMs have shown us about language is that none of us actually understands language via a ground up process of definition but rather by learning associations.
If you put in enough effort and discipline you can force yourself to evaluate claims using the definitions of some words like genocide rather than their associations but that is hard and limited because that's not really how our brains understand language. It's an extra layer grafted on top for improving accuracy but it is why most people find it so hard to learn how to write mathematical proofs.
But, while important to be clear, ultimately we do all think mostly in terms of bundles of associations.
'One thing that LLMs have shown us about language is that none of us actually understands language via a ground up process of definition but rather by learning associations.' Wittgenstein and others have done that long ago, rigorously so. And it's more complex than simply 'learning associations'; real-life/practical usage is paramount.
Good points.
While I agree with you that is the best way to understand Wittgenstein I think people who wanted a more regimented/rational account of thought could still insist that was just an issue of translating our thoughts into English and deny that we really think in that associational way.
Wittgenstein showed that the word game got applied to a wide variety of family resemblance type concepts. However, I think you could still reasonably maintain that this didn't go so much to how each of us understood games just how we mapped it to words. You could insist that what was going on is that we each would (subpersonally) have a bunch of some relatively ground up clear concepts that -- thanks to limited bandwidth and difficulty coordinating -- we all kinda grope for the word game when describing. So something about the dictionary is fuzzy but that's a step away from saying the fuzziness and associational character is intrinsically part of how we think (tho I feel introspection makes it clear I don't think everyone did).
Yes, people should have been convinced back then but sometimes you need to hit people over the head. I mean people still insist there are unique facts about the references of propositions and that there is a real fact about which proposition we express. The idea that somewhere things are all very sharp and clear is very seductive to some people.
Good comment. I believe most people vastly underestimate the extent to which we all see the world in different ways--so much so that you might say we all live in different worlds. This misunderstanding leads, for instance, to people assuming that those holding different political views are bad people. After all, if they see things in the way that I do then how could they advocate such horrible policies?
Yes, 100%...if we could get people to really understand/emotionally appreciate this it would go a great way to fixing our political animosity and making progress.
What I am constantly struck by talking to people is how little room they seem to have for the possibility that someone else could just have a very different way of understanding the world that makes what they do -- perhaps not right -- but at least understandable.
For instance, so many people are convinced that whenever a court case goes against their ideological interests it is somehow evil lawless scheming. And ofc justices are ppl with biases like anyone else but the answer is almost always that they have a different way of understanding the situation.
That doesn't mean you can't critisize but if people could at least realize that very few people are screaming villians -- mostly they are like you, perhaps including at that time you really didn't want to believe something -- it would go a long way to helping us live together.
You missed the opportunity to invoke Hegel
That's because I'm poorly educated. :)
That's impossible
Because I always enjoy your posts.
And couldn't possibly value the views of a poorly educated person. Impossible!
You have brought up the difficulties of evaluating Judgment itself.
And have done it within the area of the every day
Carry on
Ok, ok ... But taxation IS theft.
But it's theft with so many extra steps and so much gaslighting that we might as well call it something else instead. Like we wouldn't call the people involved in the livestock industry to be engaged in the profession of hunting either, only because in both the end outcome is a clueless piggy being killed.
I think this is right.
Completely agree on the undue power of words to shut down entire debates. I still remember my surprise when I found out some time in the 90s that some California kids got punished for bringing Advil to school because, well, no one should bring "drugs" to school and Advil classified as a "drug". In my native German the whole thing made no sense even at the vocabulary level because the close German word "Droge" strictly means "illegal drug" while substances like Advil classify as "Medikament" - medication, not drugs.
Then at some point I discovered General Semantics (GS), and it helped me tremendously to untangle a lot of these absurdities. Have you ever, uh, "delved" into GS? I know it fell out of fashion a long time ago. I still find its key concepts timeless and powerful: words can only describe things incompletely, when used as rigid labels they stifle everyone's thinking; people change through their lives and their opinions can change sharply; therefore opinions or words to describe people or ourselves) should have dates attached to them; most of a word's meaning comes from the speaker's (or receiver's) assumptions; the things we believe we "know" nearly exclusively derive from second hand hearsay in society and we nearly never had direct experience with them (100% true for the "news"). etc. ("etc" in GS stands for "let us not assume that what I wrote hear completely described the situtiaon, many other examples and possibilities exist")
One of the most powerful techniques of GS comes from not using the verb "to be", in a form of English called "E-prime". Not using the word "is" in particular, in its common usage in forming identities through sleight of hand, forces you to describe relationships between concepts. For example, without "is", you can't just say "Epstein is a pedophile". You need to describe his actions, by saying, "Epstein did X, which in my mind classifies as pedophilia" or "... which most people would call pedophilia". Or not. etc. You have to admit that one thing never "is" exactly like another, and that every word has several definitions, when you can't use "is".
I wrote this entire comment in E-prime. It makes writing a bit more cumbersome. But it works. It forces you to abandon cheap and easy labelling. And downstream from there, it makes it much much harder to get the definitional drift you describe so well.
I was not aware of GS, but that's something I need to think about and try to incorporate into my future posts. It's easy to get lazy and categorize things in a misleading fashion.
BTW as you entitled this post "Less Wrong" and are spiritually close to the rationalist movement - there is a lot of explicit parallels with GS and some of it was sourced from GS explicitly. In the earlier days of lesswrong.com, at least some rationalist authors would use explicit GS techniques such as quoting their (sometimes own) opinions in this format : "Yudkowsky (2005) etc.". Also see, e.g. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qc7P2NwfxQMC3hdgm/rationalism-before-the-sequences
For totally going off the deep end... you could also look at Robert Anton Wilson. I might have picked up GS from hRAW's writings, certainly I did for E-prime, memory is hazy on that. All quite connected to lesswrong and rationalism in spirit.
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/how-does-robert-anton-wildon-r-3gtpEKrxToeYgoiYpPUyrA
Most homeless live in shelters? Find that hard to believe.
Here's AI overview:
"Approximately 30% to 40% of the nation's homeless population lives unsheltered, meaning they are sleeping on the streets, in public spaces, or in their vehicles. For instance, in January 2024, out of 771,000 people experiencing homelessness, about 243,000 were unsheltered, which is close to 31%."
Elsewhere I've seen other estimates, but all show most homeless people living in buildings. (However, it varies by region, with many more people on the streets in California than NYC.)
I should have Googled it but this makes sense especially as this includes people who are homeless for a relatively short term. My day to day experience in the NE (not NYC) is with homeless people who likely aren't spending a lot of time in shelters or hotel rooms.
Yeah, I was also surprised. My hunch is that many of those in motels are families with children. (Often single moms.) I occasionally read that a large share of the homeless are families, but most of those I see on the street look like single men. So I assume that welfare agencies give priority to mothers with children.
In May of 2019, I was laid off, as of Sept 30, 2019. I knew I wouldn't be finding an equivalent job in the same small town, so we went ahead and put our house on the market. It sold faster than we expected, closing in late July. I didn't yet have a new job lined up and was probably going to finish my term at the current company and get the severance package (only available if I showed up on 9/30). We were considering what to do for housing in August and September, and at the same time my daughter was supposed to start school mid-August. We considered renting a hotel room for 2 months. My wife called the school board and asked them if in that situation we could still enroll my daughter in the school 3 doors down from our former house, if we had to go send her to the school near the hotel. They told us that homeless people could choose any school in the school district.
So, yeah, we were almost a homeless statistic. Language is weird, just because we didn't have a home didn't mean we were homeless. I wasn't homeless, I was just moving my family into a hotel because we didn't have anywhere else to stay.
We ended up doing something else, I finished up the job, got the nice severance package and started a new job in mid-October.
“ So I assume that welfare agencies give priority to mothers with children.”
Could be. But it’s also likely that the disproportionately male mentally ill and drug addicted ar not interested in living/sleeping in this shelters because they don’t want to accept the rules they would have to abide by.
And this above and beyond / distinct from how politicized the term and definition of “homeless” has become.
As they should!
I agree.
That's why they don't call them shelterless
Ive been advocating in my living room to call them temporarily embarrassed homely people.
I realized there was a reference to “unsheltered” in the article, so I spoke too soon.
I remember
Me too!
Regarding the international differences, the rise of AI chat over search is going to lead to challenges with nuance. Last week, the open source Apertus AI model was just released by a consortium of universities in Switzerland. Performance of the model is not state of the art, but it is the first GenAI model that is intentionally sensitive to legal and cultural differences. These are rules that are baked into the responses. I do not know how this will turn out, but it is definitely interesting.
The analysis of these issues starts on page 90 in the full report on biases: https://github.com/swiss-ai/apertus-tech-report/blob/main/Apertus_Tech_Report.pdf
Some examples of what the network considers in responses, relative to each country:
Justice and Authority Frameworks:
- Equality vs. hierarchy in social organization
- Restorative vs. punitive approaches to problems
- Democratic vs. expert authority in decision-making
- Questions about who should decide or what constitutes fairness
Resource Allocation and Policy:
- Distributive justice scenarios
- Economic policy preferences
- Healthcare, education, or welfare priorities
- Environmental vs. economic trade-offs
Some examples of 'High sensitivity' questions that require more cultural/national consideration:
- "Should parents have the right to opt their children out of certain curricula?"
- "How should society balance individual privacy with collective security?"
- "What is the most ethical approach to addressing income inequality?"
Look up Apertus if you want to give it a try; you can currently select Singapore or Switzerland for country
Good comment. The internet and more specifically AI will presumably lead to some equalization of cultural traits. We already see this in certain areas---In 2020 I recall BLM protests in many foreign countries which have very different histories from the US.
I am in favour of nuance. Let’s hear it for nuance! Wrestling with the complexities is much of the fun of trying to understand the world around us.
For example, I have much more nuanced views on immigration than you do, presumably because I take a more historical view. I am not sure what one call the position you seem to be trying to defend—that the marginal benefits of migration exceed the marginal costs for all people in all circumstances over all ranges—but it does not seem very, well, Economic. Nor nuanced. It seems like it is more determined to “prove” that all critics of immigration are always wrong. Also not very nuanced.
After, it is not as if the Economics of immigration is all that hard. The overwhelming majority of the economic benefit of immigration goes to the migrants—that’s why they keep coming. The overwhelming majority of the remaining benefit goes to the holders of capital (and residential land). Hence folk whose income comes from capital tend to be keen on lots of migration. Almost none of the benefit goes to resident workers. So little, it is very easy for them to end up worse off. So, let’s discuss the nuances of cases.
Then there’s the Loury Principle (relations before transactions). One’s culture has about 20 years or so before you become an economically transacting adult to program your System 1 (fast) thinking and embed the framings for your System 2 (slow) thinking. Consequently, people from different cultures will make different decisions in the same circumstances. That’s a whole new layer of nuance.
Comparing the contemporary PRC and the Nazi Germany of 1939-45 is, um, problematic.
Comparing the contemporary PRC and the Nazi Germany of 1933-1939 is less so. There are obvious institutional similarities. The contemporary PRC is obviously much more institutionally similar to the Nazi Germany of 1933-1939 than the USSR of any period other than during the NEP.
Xi Jinping is not Hitler. The CCP is not the NSDAP. That matters. For that matter, the Uighurs are not the Jews, though if we are restricting our comparison to 1933-9 the comparison becomes complex.
The post-1978 CCP acceptance of the de-collectivisation from below, and of open commerce, has lasted way longer than the NEP did. But there are still tensions between being a Leninist ruling Party and a mercantile society. Something Xi, who is obsessed by the fate of the USSR and avoiding it, is obviously extremely aware of. Hence the treatment of Hong Kong and the bellicosity towards Taiwan. The treatment of the Uighurs likely has much to do with how the USSR’s break-up started in the Baltic States.
Interestingly, the CPV seems to be taking mercantile society/Leninist ruling Party tension in a different direction. Comparisons are important in analysis. Equatings, not so much.
Your post brought to mind something I heard recently on the "Reactions" Youtube channel by the American Chemical society. They present simple (home) experiments and basic scientific principles. In a recent video, they analysed a (conspiracy theory) claim a viewer heard from a coworker and a sentence that stuck with me was, paraphrased: "In science, you can always find what you are looking for. The scientific work is not in finding it, but in putting it in the proper context and relations". In case of the video, it meant that yes, the coworker was right in the literal sense, that trees exude toxic substances. He just missed that they do so at a rate less than a mouse breathing in an empty warehouse while also producing a million times more beneficial effects.
The same view can be extended to things like journalism and public discourse. A sufficiently biased review panel can compel a real subject matter expert to testify under oath that vaccines have caused deaths and a journalist can write that EVs still emit CO2 due do electricity production without lying. They do, however, omit the context and analysis that would show that the vaccine death is one guy falling down the stairs on his way to the doctor while they saved thousands of lives. Or that the EV still emits less CO2 than just the process of getting the oil to the gas station, even in coal hungry Germany.
Your post brought to mind something I heard recently on the "Reactions" Youtube channel by the American Chemical society. They present simple (home) experiments and basic scientific principles. In a recent video, they analysed a (conspiracy theory) claim a viewer heard from a coworker and a sentence that stuck with me was, paraphrased: "In science, you can always find what you are looking for. The scientific work is not in finding it, but in putting it in the proper context and relations". In case of the video, it meant that yes, the coworker was right in the literal sense, that trees exude toxic substances. He just missed that they do so at a rate less than a mouse breathing in an empty warehouse while also producing a million times more beneficial effects.
The same view can be extended to things like journalism and public discourse. A sufficiently biased review panel can compel a real subject matter expert to testify under oath that vaccines have caused deaths and a journalist can write that EVs still emit CO2 due do electricity production without lying. They do, however, omit the context and analysis that would show that the vaccine death is one guy falling down the stairs on his way to the doctor while they saved thousands of lives. Or that the EV still emits less CO2 than just the process of getting the oil to the gas station, even in coal hungry Germany.