transgenderer:

I need to make a walrus pog image. I feel like their faces were made to pog. AI art maybe?

Do kinda feel sorry for the OP there who vagueblogged, presumably in an attempt to avoid discourse, and got a giant rationalist discourse thread.

loving-n0t-heyting:

eightyonekilograms:

discoursedrome:

tsarina-anadyomene:

Okay, I am just going to vague about this. The suggestion that you should just read Lord Scott’s blog post summaries instead of reading the actual books is almost a living parody of the things I criticize about rats. In my experience, it is very easy to be underwhelmed with the views of a philosopher from 1000 feet. It is much harder to be underwhelmed by sustained engagement with a philosopher. Hume is not a philosopher I particularly like. But I read most of his work, and there are a lot of things in there that are quite novel and exciting when you dig into it. Reading a primary text of any of the greats has consistently been an incredibly rewarding experience for me, and I feel like I gain infinitely more insight by combing through the details for myself than from just hitting the highlights.

@kata4a was saying in the comments:

this is actually one of the things that is the hardest for me to get about philosophy i think

like it’s an attitude that makes sense to me to have toward literature or poetry but not for something with ambitions of truth seeking so I feel like maybe there’s something i’m not getting about the whole thing

and I sort of have to agree with this. like no, you aren’t going to get the same level of quality from a blog post unless it’s written extremely well, but if you can’t get most of the value of the philosopher’s work from reading, say, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or a textbook overview or the best-written rewrite/distillation available, then it suggests that the value of that work fundamentally does not lie in the insights it provides about the world, it’s something else, something that’s artistic and amorphous and textured and inexplicable. to say that philosophers’ contributions to human life and understanding of the world are equivalent to their work in such a way that one can’t circumvent the original work while deriving the insight is equivalent to saying that philosophers are producing art, not knowledge or wisdom, and that the benefit of reading philosophy is more experiential then in terms of improving your understanding or enlightenment.

people like to talk around this, to suggest that no it is doing all that other stuff, it’s just that you can only get it througn a deep engagement with the work in question, but literally nothing else works this way and it’s hard to imagine how something even could work this way. it attributes an almost quranic level of deep canonicity to works that are, in many cases, notorious clumsy writing. The suggestion that a work can’t be meaningfully distilled even in theory is tantamount to saying that every part of it is the most efficient possible expression of its value proposition, which is an audacious claim to make even about works of pure art. It’s astonishing to make this claim about works whose purported value claim is that they provide insight or explanation. A well-grounded suspicion of sound-bite explainer culture should not generally be placed in dichotomy with deep engagement with original works on grounds other than artistic appreciation, because that implies that the original work’s value is irreducible in a way that frankly implies a deep lack of confidence in the field’s own capacity to understand and express itself.

Endorsed all of this, and I will also add that, anecdotally, as I have gotten older, I have moved in precisely the opposite direction as the OP wants: I used to be a real snob about trying to always read philosophical primary sources; once I gave up on that and read contemporary textbooks instead, I understood things much more clearly. Which is obvious, if you think about it: the original authors were writing for (and to persuade) an audience with a background and context we don’t have, and in many cases to refute or at least elaborate then-popular viewpoints we don’t believe in anymore.

Like, in other sciences, you wouldn’t read primary texts except as a historical curiosity. I actually have read (parts of) Newton’s Principia Mathematica, and… it’s totally impenetrable! This book more-or-less invented calculus, but it would be crazy to use it to learn calculus, because subsequent centuries of authors and educators have figured out better ways to convey the same concepts. If philosophy is supposed to be taken seriously as a discipline for revealing truth, it needs to pass the basic test of “other authors can convey the same points using gentler pedagogy.”

The problem is that, even if philosophy is a truth-seeking discipline, it’s still one dominated by fundamental and wide-ranging disagreements, meaning that everyone has an axe to grind, very much including interpreters and professional digesters. How to make sense of a given philosopher will depend more generally on what kinds of views make sense in the first place, and obviously philosophers differ widely in what kinds of views they think make sense

The risk isn’t principally that latter day scholarship on Hume (or whoever) is going to be an overly lossy compression function (tho that’s not a non-problem), it’s that it’s going to be a highly noisy channel. Allan Bloom gives a good set of examples in the preface (which is excellent and everyone should read, especially anyone interested in translation) to his version of Plato’s republic: here are a bunch of translators whom we can see, in retrospect, managed to seriously bungle the meaning of the text, mistaking their alignment with academic/cultural trends at the time for having pierced to the intellectual kernel of the work. (Bloom does indulge in some philosophy-as-literature reasoning, but tbh that’s much more plausible of Plato than of many other major historical philosophers, and I think it’s detachable from his bigger main point) This is a rampant hazard in philosophy that looks back on the Greats. Just one example: a major debate in contemporary ethics is the question of “particularism:” is morality a matter of applying general principles to particular cases? Aristotle very clearly seems to talk about this issue in the nicomachean ethics, but there is huge disagreement about how to interpret his conclusions… disagreement that unsurprisingly largely cuts along the same lines as disagreement about the object level. Any summary of the relevant passages is inevitably going to be coloured by the authors own views. This problem generalises

The suggestion of ignoring the books Scott reviews for his blog post summaries is surely a case in point: Scott is one of the most highly opinionated and persuasive ppl ik, and that is obviously going to affect his summarising. You should only trust his summaries to the extent you think he is himself reliably right on the topic he’s writing about, and I think he’d be the first to tell you not to treat him like a prophet. For ultra contentious foundational texts, the same reasoning applies in even greater force

Ofc this in a sense reflects philosophy’s failures as an intellectual enterprise in that it has failed to conclusively settle lots of questions to the satisfaction of all reasonable parties. But it’s not like a lot of these questions aren’t themselves very interesting and important, or like there’s some clear other means of addressing them

This is sort-of the same issue as @jadagul’s interpretation, albeit more circumscribed. Doesn’t Plato, too, have his own axe to grind?

If we’re seeking truths (at least truths about, eg, ethics, rather than truths about Plato as a historical person), shouldn’t we be as worried about Plato’s biases as anyone else’s?

This does, to be sure, cut against trusting any single person’s interpretation. But that really means not trusting *any* single interpretation, including the original.

jadagul:

jiskblr:

jadagul:

fnord888:

jadagul:

discoursedrome:

jadagul:

discoursedrome:

tsarina-anadyomene:

Okay, I am just going to vague about this. The suggestion that you should just read Lord Scott’s blog post summaries instead of reading the actual books is almost a living parody of the things I criticize about rats. In my experience, it is very easy to be underwhelmed with the views of a philosopher from 1000 feet. It is much harder to be underwhelmed by sustained engagement with a philosopher. Hume is not a philosopher I particularly like. But I read most of his work, and there are a lot of things in there that are quite novel and exciting when you dig into it. Reading a primary text of any of the greats has consistently been an incredibly rewarding experience for me, and I feel like I gain infinitely more insight by combing through the details for myself than from just hitting the highlights.

@kata4a was saying in the comments:

this is actually one of the things that is the hardest for me to get about philosophy i think

like it’s an attitude that makes sense to me to have toward literature or poetry but not for something with ambitions of truth seeking so I feel like maybe there’s something i’m not getting about the whole thing

and I sort of have to agree with this. like no, you aren’t going to get the same level of quality from a blog post unless it’s written extremely well, but if you can’t get most of the value of the philosopher’s work from reading, say, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or a textbook overview or the best-written rewrite/distillation available, then it suggests that the value of that work fundamentally does not lie in the insights it provides about the world, it’s something else, something that’s artistic and amorphous and textured and inexplicable. to say that philosophers’ contributions to human life and understanding of the world are equivalent to their work in such a way that one can’t circumvent the original work while deriving the insight is equivalent to saying that philosophers are producing art, not knowledge or wisdom, and that the benefit of reading philosophy is more experiential then in terms of improving your understanding or enlightenment.

people like to talk around this, to suggest that no it is doing all that other stuff, it’s just that you can only get it througn a deep engagement with the work in question, but literally nothing else works this way and it’s hard to imagine how something even could work this way. it attributes an almost quranic level of deep canonicity to works that are, in many cases, notorious clumsy writing. The suggestion that a work can’t be meaningfully distilled even in theory is tantamount to saying that every part of it is the most efficient possible expression of its value proposition, which is an audacious claim to make even about works of pure art. It’s astonishing to make this claim about works whose purported value claim is that they provide insight or explanation. A well-grounded suspicion of sound-bite explainer culture should not generally be placed in dichotomy with deep engagement with original works on grounds other than artistic appreciation, because that implies that the original work’s value is irreducible in a way that frankly implies a deep lack of confidence in the field’s own capacity to understand and express itself.

“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.”

Okay, that was unnecessarily mystical and buck-passing, so let’s try again.

There’s a difference between declarative knowledge and practical or procedural knowledge. Declarative knowledge is “knowledge that”, and consists of facts or information; it can be fully encoded in sentences, and can (in theory) be effectively summarized.  The encyclopedia is full of declarative knowledge.

Procedural knowledge is “knowledge how”, and consists of skills.  Classic examples are things like sports and musical performances: you can’t learn how to play guitar just by reading a book on guitar-playing.  At some point you have to actually pick up a guitar and play it.  (Badly.  And then less badly.  And then less badly still.)

As a general rule, people tend to overestimate how much knowledge is declarative.  Most students think of most academic courses as being full of declarative knowledge, which is why they want to memorize things and cram for the test.  But in fact many courses (and in particular math courses, which I know best) are full of procedural knowledge, learning how to execute certain tasks and master certain skills.

And this is why math books have exercises.  You can learn declarative knowledge just by reading a book, or an essay, or whatever.  If you read a pop history book and have a good memory, you’ll walk away with dozens or hundreds of new declarative facts.  But you can’t learn procedural knowledge without practicing it, and so you have to do the exercises in the book to actually learn.

And plausibly some philosophy falls into this category, too.  If you want to convey some declarative facts (or declarative factual claims), you can summarize them.  But if what you’re trying to convey is a way of thinking, that’s much trickier.  It’s not summarizable.  And the entire book is an effort to help people shift the way in which they think, the how. 

That might not be efficiently extractable.  And the clunkiness of the writing might even be a feature: it is clunky to engage with in the normal way, so you have to develop new ways of engaging, which are the point.

This is an important distinction and I agree with it up until “that might not be efficiently extractable.” I fhink if you step away from philosophy and look at cases that are unambiguously “procedural knowledge”, it’s clear there very few cases where the source that originally introduced the knowledge has remained the canonical place to learn it, and that the few places where this has happened are limited to very new procedures or to procedures whose first expression was famous for its clarity.

That is to say, it seems clear from real-world examples that while it’s not as readily condensible into bullet lists or pithy articles as declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge is subject to the same incentives: the framework for teaching or expressing it can be improved on, and having done so we almost always displace the original (the work that invented or popularized the thing at issue), consigning it to the discipline of history, specifically because there is little association between the ability to come up with a good idea and the ability to communicate it well, even when the idea is expressed as a practice rather than a proposition.

This is true, but it’s much harder to “distill” procedural knowledge, because students still have to do the thing. You can improve and streamline practice somewhat, but there are real serious limits there. (And of course I’m arguing that learning math is largely procedural knowledge and we’ve definitely improved on that!) But I was making a slightly different point, which is that the procedure being learned may sort of be inextricable from “grappling with a long and weird text”. Like, we’ve streamlined math education, but we can’t streamline “doing exercises” out of it. To learn to philosophize, you have to grapple with big philosophy texts. And that oculd be updated in various ways. But since philosophies are incredibly complicated, each text will give you a _different one_. Now in the model we bring in from learning math, or guitar, we maybe iterate towards better or more streamlined philosophies. But if you think that a more streamlined philosophy is not necessarily better, you’re inherently losing something by streamlining it; the philosophy itself is changed by that process.

I mean, the notable thing about “doing the exercises” that you can’t steamline out is that doing the exercises is separate from reading the book. So it seems kinda weird to claim that the philosophy equivalent of “doing the exercises” is, like, reading a longer book.

I will acknowledge that “grappling with a long and weird text” is itself a procedural skill that can be learned. But surely grappling with books (though it might be instrumentally useful) is not what philosophy is about.

(If anything, it seems like you would be on firmer ground if you were *more* exclusionary, and to say that understanding a philosophy requires *writing* about that philosophy. Or even living by the precepts of that philosophy, though that might run into a problem with actually existing scholars of philosophy).

The practical skill I’m talking about isn’t, like, “doing philosophy”. Or even “grappling with a long and weird text”.

The practical skill is thinking like Immanuel Kant. You spend a bunch of time embedded in Kant-thought, and that helps you learn how to create Kant-thought on your own. If you go read Christine Korsgaard, you’re not marinating in Kant-thought; you’re marinating in Korsgaard-thought.

Now Korsgaard-thought has a lot in common with Kant-thought, because Korsgaard has spent a lot of time marinating in Kant-thought. But it’s still different.

And this is why, like, if you take a test in a philosophy class, the questions aren’t “What do you think about X?” so much as “What would Kant/Hume/Bentham/whoever think about X?”

And then from this perspective, the point of a philosophy text is to guide you to think like the author. In much the same way that poetry wants to make you feel a certain way, philosophy wants to make you Or think a certain way. (And those two things aren’t that different.) If you read a summary of a poem, you may get the “content” but you won’t get the feeling it’s trying to engender; philosophy I think works much the same way.

Now this is not how a lot of people doing philosophy think about what they’re doing. But people can be wrong about what they’re doing!

I’ve heard this claim before, and it seems reasonably plausible that it is true. It doesn’t, however, explain why I’d want to do that.

Kant had some ideas. They were novel and influential. But they’re not novel anymore. Applying the algorithm “think like Kant” to the modern world is unlikely to come up with novel ideas; it will come up with ideas which look like Kant’s ideas applied to new situations, which I could just do by learning Kant’s ideas and applying them to new situations when it seemed appropriate. (Not to particularly pick on Kant.)

The only purpose that seems definitely useful for is inculcating an appreciation for philosophy(/philosophers). That would be a pretty good explanation for why philosophy departments do it, but not at all an explanation for why it is valuable.

I think this is exactly backwards. If you think the ideas are important, you should learn the content of the ideas. And that will let you come up with things that look like Kant’s ideas applied to new situations.

The goal is to figure out the ways that Kant thought. To inhabit his worldview, to develop his cognitive tools. And then you can interact with the world in a Kantlike way. (Much like Christians want to interact with the world in a Christlike way.) It’s not enough to be able to recite the Beatitutdes or the Categorical Imperative; you have to internalize Kant’s attitudes, his approach to the world, so that those ways of acting and being come naturally to you.

When you engage with Kant at length you learn how to inhabit a Kantlike mien, a Kantlike attitude, a Kantlike inner life. You engage with Mill and learn how to be Mill-like, and react to things in the way Mill would. And then you engage with Hume and learn how to be Humean.

And since that’s learning, not just a collection of facts and positions, but a disposition, it’s hard to shortcut.

Now modern analytic philosophy isn’t doing this. Modern analytic philosophy is a weird hybrid of linguistics and math that tries to make narrowly circumscribed declarative claims; and I think modern analytic philosophy does lend itself well to being summarized.

But when we’re looking at the classical thinkers—remember that “philosophy” mostly wasn’t a distinct identifiable field for most of human history. Aristotle talked about a lot of things. We don’t study his biology, because that’s been supplanted by modern biology textbooks. And we don’t study his physics. And we don’t study his political science.

What we still study directly is his philosophy. That’s exactly the stuff that can’t effectively be summarized and repackaged.

But why is it so valuable to learn to think like Kant specifically rather than Korsgaard or any number of other people. If the ideas are valuable, why are they so bound up in the idiosyncrasies of one specific person?

Like, the comparison to Christians trying to be Christlike is apt but not exactly flattering. Christians believe that Christ is metaphysically special and unique; that’s a fundamentally religious position.

jadagul:

fnord888:

jadagul:

discoursedrome:

jadagul:

discoursedrome:

tsarina-anadyomene:

Okay, I am just going to vague about this. The suggestion that you should just read Lord Scott’s blog post summaries instead of reading the actual books is almost a living parody of the things I criticize about rats. In my experience, it is very easy to be underwhelmed with the views of a philosopher from 1000 feet. It is much harder to be underwhelmed by sustained engagement with a philosopher. Hume is not a philosopher I particularly like. But I read most of his work, and there are a lot of things in there that are quite novel and exciting when you dig into it. Reading a primary text of any of the greats has consistently been an incredibly rewarding experience for me, and I feel like I gain infinitely more insight by combing through the details for myself than from just hitting the highlights.

@kata4a was saying in the comments:

this is actually one of the things that is the hardest for me to get about philosophy i think

like it’s an attitude that makes sense to me to have toward literature or poetry but not for something with ambitions of truth seeking so I feel like maybe there’s something i’m not getting about the whole thing

and I sort of have to agree with this. like no, you aren’t going to get the same level of quality from a blog post unless it’s written extremely well, but if you can’t get most of the value of the philosopher’s work from reading, say, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or a textbook overview or the best-written rewrite/distillation available, then it suggests that the value of that work fundamentally does not lie in the insights it provides about the world, it’s something else, something that’s artistic and amorphous and textured and inexplicable. to say that philosophers’ contributions to human life and understanding of the world are equivalent to their work in such a way that one can’t circumvent the original work while deriving the insight is equivalent to saying that philosophers are producing art, not knowledge or wisdom, and that the benefit of reading philosophy is more experiential then in terms of improving your understanding or enlightenment.

people like to talk around this, to suggest that no it is doing all that other stuff, it’s just that you can only get it througn a deep engagement with the work in question, but literally nothing else works this way and it’s hard to imagine how something even could work this way. it attributes an almost quranic level of deep canonicity to works that are, in many cases, notorious clumsy writing. The suggestion that a work can’t be meaningfully distilled even in theory is tantamount to saying that every part of it is the most efficient possible expression of its value proposition, which is an audacious claim to make even about works of pure art. It’s astonishing to make this claim about works whose purported value claim is that they provide insight or explanation. A well-grounded suspicion of sound-bite explainer culture should not generally be placed in dichotomy with deep engagement with original works on grounds other than artistic appreciation, because that implies that the original work’s value is irreducible in a way that frankly implies a deep lack of confidence in the field’s own capacity to understand and express itself.

“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.”

Okay, that was unnecessarily mystical and buck-passing, so let’s try again.

There’s a difference between declarative knowledge and practical or procedural knowledge. Declarative knowledge is “knowledge that”, and consists of facts or information; it can be fully encoded in sentences, and can (in theory) be effectively summarized.  The encyclopedia is full of declarative knowledge.

Procedural knowledge is “knowledge how”, and consists of skills.  Classic examples are things like sports and musical performances: you can’t learn how to play guitar just by reading a book on guitar-playing.  At some point you have to actually pick up a guitar and play it.  (Badly.  And then less badly.  And then less badly still.)

As a general rule, people tend to overestimate how much knowledge is declarative.  Most students think of most academic courses as being full of declarative knowledge, which is why they want to memorize things and cram for the test.  But in fact many courses (and in particular math courses, which I know best) are full of procedural knowledge, learning how to execute certain tasks and master certain skills.

And this is why math books have exercises.  You can learn declarative knowledge just by reading a book, or an essay, or whatever.  If you read a pop history book and have a good memory, you’ll walk away with dozens or hundreds of new declarative facts.  But you can’t learn procedural knowledge without practicing it, and so you have to do the exercises in the book to actually learn.

And plausibly some philosophy falls into this category, too.  If you want to convey some declarative facts (or declarative factual claims), you can summarize them.  But if what you’re trying to convey is a way of thinking, that’s much trickier.  It’s not summarizable.  And the entire book is an effort to help people shift the way in which they think, the how. 

That might not be efficiently extractable.  And the clunkiness of the writing might even be a feature: it is clunky to engage with in the normal way, so you have to develop new ways of engaging, which are the point.

This is an important distinction and I agree with it up until “that might not be efficiently extractable.” I fhink if you step away from philosophy and look at cases that are unambiguously “procedural knowledge”, it’s clear there very few cases where the source that originally introduced the knowledge has remained the canonical place to learn it, and that the few places where this has happened are limited to very new procedures or to procedures whose first expression was famous for its clarity.

That is to say, it seems clear from real-world examples that while it’s not as readily condensible into bullet lists or pithy articles as declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge is subject to the same incentives: the framework for teaching or expressing it can be improved on, and having done so we almost always displace the original (the work that invented or popularized the thing at issue), consigning it to the discipline of history, specifically because there is little association between the ability to come up with a good idea and the ability to communicate it well, even when the idea is expressed as a practice rather than a proposition.

This is true, but it’s much harder to “distill” procedural knowledge, because students still have to do the thing. You can improve and streamline practice somewhat, but there are real serious limits there. (And of course I’m arguing that learning math is largely procedural knowledge and we’ve definitely improved on that!) But I was making a slightly different point, which is that the procedure being learned may sort of be inextricable from “grappling with a long and weird text”. Like, we’ve streamlined math education, but we can’t streamline “doing exercises” out of it. To learn to philosophize, you have to grapple with big philosophy texts. And that oculd be updated in various ways. But since philosophies are incredibly complicated, each text will give you a _different one_. Now in the model we bring in from learning math, or guitar, we maybe iterate towards better or more streamlined philosophies. But if you think that a more streamlined philosophy is not necessarily better, you’re inherently losing something by streamlining it; the philosophy itself is changed by that process.

I mean, the notable thing about “doing the exercises” that you can’t steamline out is that doing the exercises is separate from reading the book. So it seems kinda weird to claim that the philosophy equivalent of “doing the exercises” is, like, reading a longer book.

I will acknowledge that “grappling with a long and weird text” is itself a procedural skill that can be learned. But surely grappling with books (though it might be instrumentally useful) is not what philosophy is about.

(If anything, it seems like you would be on firmer ground if you were *more* exclusionary, and to say that understanding a philosophy requires *writing* about that philosophy. Or even living by the precepts of that philosophy, though that might run into a problem with actually existing scholars of philosophy).

The practical skill I’m talking about isn’t, like, “doing philosophy”. Or even “grappling with a long and weird text”.

The practical skill is thinking like Immanuel Kant. You spend a bunch of time embedded in Kant-thought, and that helps you learn how to create Kant-thought on your own. If you go read Christine Korsgaard, you’re not marinating in Kant-thought; you’re marinating in Korsgaard-thought.

Now Korsgaard-thought has a lot in common with Kant-thought, because Korsgaard has spent a lot of time marinating in Kant-thought. But it’s still different.

And this is why, like, if you take a test in a philosophy class, the questions aren’t “What do you think about X?” so much as “What would Kant/Hume/Bentham/whoever think about X?”

And then from this perspective, the point of a philosophy text is to guide you to think like the author. In much the same way that poetry wants to make you feel a certain way, philosophy wants to make you Or think a certain way. (And those two things aren’t that different.) If you read a summary of a poem, you may get the “content” but you won’t get the feeling it’s trying to engender; philosophy I think works much the same way.

Now this is not how a lot of people doing philosophy think about what they’re doing. But people can be wrong about what they’re doing!

OK, I’d buy that.

But the implications of saying that’s what philosophy is are pretty significant! Probably even more so than the philosophy as literature/poetry/art argument.

transgenderer:

transgenderer:

i feel like theres gotta be some sense in which the US has the largest population of people who are very far from its border. there are other bigger countries but theyre all mostly along the edge i think? if i wanted to rig this in the US’ favor id pick maybe… 200 miles? like, “largest population more than 200 miles from its border”. like 80% of countries cant even fit a 200 mile radius circle in them

@st-just said:

this is just kind of saying ‘the US is very big’, isn’t it?

like in terms of depth

KIND OF but canada, china, and russia are all very big without a lot of inner people. i think

(In)famously, 2/3s of the US population live in the “border control zone”, and that’s only 100 miles. That does include a few place one might dispute are actually close to the border (notably Chicago, because it’s reasonable to say Lake Michigan is not really a US border). But bumping to 200 miles presumably adds a bunch more, too. The US is in the same general position as China with most of its population living on the coast and a relatively empty interior.

But China is overall much larger, so I’m pretty sure the relatively empty interior ends up with more total. Like, just Chongqing and Hubei are 90 million, which almost gets you to 1/3 of the US population before you starting counting the parts of other provinces that qualify.

jadagul:

discoursedrome:

jadagul:

discoursedrome:

tsarina-anadyomene:

Okay, I am just going to vague about this. The suggestion that you should just read Lord Scott’s blog post summaries instead of reading the actual books is almost a living parody of the things I criticize about rats. In my experience, it is very easy to be underwhelmed with the views of a philosopher from 1000 feet. It is much harder to be underwhelmed by sustained engagement with a philosopher. Hume is not a philosopher I particularly like. But I read most of his work, and there are a lot of things in there that are quite novel and exciting when you dig into it. Reading a primary text of any of the greats has consistently been an incredibly rewarding experience for me, and I feel like I gain infinitely more insight by combing through the details for myself than from just hitting the highlights.

@kata4a was saying in the comments:

this is actually one of the things that is the hardest for me to get about philosophy i think

like it’s an attitude that makes sense to me to have toward literature or poetry but not for something with ambitions of truth seeking so I feel like maybe there’s something i’m not getting about the whole thing

and I sort of have to agree with this. like no, you aren’t going to get the same level of quality from a blog post unless it’s written extremely well, but if you can’t get most of the value of the philosopher’s work from reading, say, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or a textbook overview or the best-written rewrite/distillation available, then it suggests that the value of that work fundamentally does not lie in the insights it provides about the world, it’s something else, something that’s artistic and amorphous and textured and inexplicable. to say that philosophers’ contributions to human life and understanding of the world are equivalent to their work in such a way that one can’t circumvent the original work while deriving the insight is equivalent to saying that philosophers are producing art, not knowledge or wisdom, and that the benefit of reading philosophy is more experiential then in terms of improving your understanding or enlightenment.

people like to talk around this, to suggest that no it is doing all that other stuff, it’s just that you can only get it througn a deep engagement with the work in question, but literally nothing else works this way and it’s hard to imagine how something even could work this way. it attributes an almost quranic level of deep canonicity to works that are, in many cases, notorious clumsy writing. The suggestion that a work can’t be meaningfully distilled even in theory is tantamount to saying that every part of it is the most efficient possible expression of its value proposition, which is an audacious claim to make even about works of pure art. It’s astonishing to make this claim about works whose purported value claim is that they provide insight or explanation. A well-grounded suspicion of sound-bite explainer culture should not generally be placed in dichotomy with deep engagement with original works on grounds other than artistic appreciation, because that implies that the original work’s value is irreducible in a way that frankly implies a deep lack of confidence in the field’s own capacity to understand and express itself.

“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.”

Okay, that was unnecessarily mystical and buck-passing, so let’s try again.

There’s a difference between declarative knowledge and practical or procedural knowledge. Declarative knowledge is “knowledge that”, and consists of facts or information; it can be fully encoded in sentences, and can (in theory) be effectively summarized.  The encyclopedia is full of declarative knowledge.

Procedural knowledge is “knowledge how”, and consists of skills.  Classic examples are things like sports and musical performances: you can’t learn how to play guitar just by reading a book on guitar-playing.  At some point you have to actually pick up a guitar and play it.  (Badly.  And then less badly.  And then less badly still.)

As a general rule, people tend to overestimate how much knowledge is declarative.  Most students think of most academic courses as being full of declarative knowledge, which is why they want to memorize things and cram for the test.  But in fact many courses (and in particular math courses, which I know best) are full of procedural knowledge, learning how to execute certain tasks and master certain skills.

And this is why math books have exercises.  You can learn declarative knowledge just by reading a book, or an essay, or whatever.  If you read a pop history book and have a good memory, you’ll walk away with dozens or hundreds of new declarative facts.  But you can’t learn procedural knowledge without practicing it, and so you have to do the exercises in the book to actually learn.

And plausibly some philosophy falls into this category, too.  If you want to convey some declarative facts (or declarative factual claims), you can summarize them.  But if what you’re trying to convey is a way of thinking, that’s much trickier.  It’s not summarizable.  And the entire book is an effort to help people shift the way in which they think, the how. 

That might not be efficiently extractable.  And the clunkiness of the writing might even be a feature: it is clunky to engage with in the normal way, so you have to develop new ways of engaging, which are the point.

This is an important distinction and I agree with it up until “that might not be efficiently extractable.” I fhink if you step away from philosophy and look at cases that are unambiguously “procedural knowledge”, it’s clear there very few cases where the source that originally introduced the knowledge has remained the canonical place to learn it, and that the few places where this has happened are limited to very new procedures or to procedures whose first expression was famous for its clarity.

That is to say, it seems clear from real-world examples that while it’s not as readily condensible into bullet lists or pithy articles as declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge is subject to the same incentives: the framework for teaching or expressing it can be improved on, and having done so we almost always displace the original (the work that invented or popularized the thing at issue), consigning it to the discipline of history, specifically because there is little association between the ability to come up with a good idea and the ability to communicate it well, even when the idea is expressed as a practice rather than a proposition.

This is true, but it’s much harder to “distill” procedural knowledge, because students still have to do the thing. You can improve and streamline practice somewhat, but there are real serious limits there. (And of course I’m arguing that learning math is largely procedural knowledge and we’ve definitely improved on that!) But I was making a slightly different point, which is that the procedure being learned may sort of be inextricable from “grappling with a long and weird text”. Like, we’ve streamlined math education, but we can’t streamline “doing exercises” out of it. To learn to philosophize, you have to grapple with big philosophy texts. And that oculd be updated in various ways. But since philosophies are incredibly complicated, each text will give you a _different one_. Now in the model we bring in from learning math, or guitar, we maybe iterate towards better or more streamlined philosophies. But if you think that a more streamlined philosophy is not necessarily better, you’re inherently losing something by streamlining it; the philosophy itself is changed by that process.

I mean, the notable thing about “doing the exercises” that you can’t steamline out is that doing the exercises is separate from reading the book. So it seems kinda weird to claim that the philosophy equivalent of “doing the exercises” is, like, reading a longer book.

I will acknowledge that “grappling with a long and weird text” is itself a procedural skill that can be learned. But surely grappling with books (though it might be instrumentally useful) is not what philosophy is about.

(If anything, it seems like you would be on firmer ground if you were *more* exclusionary, and to say that understanding a philosophy requires *writing* about that philosophy. Or even living by the precepts of that philosophy, though that might run into a problem with actually existing scholars of philosophy).

andmaybegayer:

favourite kind of etymology is when a culture is exposed to a very narrow form of a class of thing and then uses that very narrow form for the entire class going forward.

Like the Afrikaans word for kitchen is kombuis which is the Dutch word for a ship’s galley, but of course all Afrikaners are descended from some Dutch people who spent a couple months on a ship and they just stuck with it.

Like the “Guy who has only seen…” meme, but for a language spoken by millions of people.

centrally-unplanned:

centrally-unplanned:

centrally-unplanned:

Alright lets settle this once and for all:

When did the Byzantine Empire become “doomed”; defined as having a <10% chance of surviving as a powerful state until the modern era

330 AD - Ha ha yes you are very clever

646 AD - Loss of Egypt/confirmation of defeat by the Rashidun Caliphate

1071 AD - Battle of Manzikert & loss of Anatolia to the Seljuk Turks

1204 AD - Capture of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade

1302 AD - Battle of Bapheus & the Rise of the Ottoman Empire

1371 AD - Byzantium forced into tributary status to the Ottomans

1453 AD - Constantine XI has got this baby lets GOOOO

See Results

Of course choose the answer closest to your own chosen time, I can’t cover all the options, but let me know your takes in the comments or w/e.

Reblog for the morning crowd, halfway there all!

Finally everyone, we have decided!

The Byzantine Empire was doomed to destruction in 1204 AD, as the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople

• It won by a wide margin at ~35% of the vote, and its understandable, look at this mess! Its pretty miraculous that it even came back. Its maybe not my pick, but I think it has to be an extremely solid one, you really can’t object.

• In the authentic second place at 14% was 1071 AD with the Battle of Manzikert; I like this one because I think there are decent odds in the crisis of the 1070’s that the Byzantine Empire gets reduced to near irrelevancy; the Komnenian Restoration was itself a complex process that had several alternative paths to failure. Still, the fact that Byzantine Empire had so many “miraculous” recoveries should tell you something about its staying power and inherent advantages; Manzikert was a huge blow and established a strong rival in the Turks, but I don’t think they are at 10% yet.
• Also of note is that 16% of are choosing die to under the banner of the Marble Emperor amid the crumbling stones of the Theodosian Walls. I salute your honour, and lament the inevitability of your demise.

Thank you all for advancing the discipline of history, and make sure to factor these results into your future EU4 and CKII mods.

If you just look at a map, things look pretty bad in 1204, but the Latin Empire was dysfunctional and probably doomed from the start. Admittedly, it was substantially less certain that a reunified Byzantine State would emerge. But >10%, I think.

I initially voted 1071, but I think I’ve talked myself out of it now. If I wanted to defend 1071, I’d point to not just the loss against the Seljuks itself, but that loss as a symptom of the underlying dysfunction of the Byzantine state (eg, Constantine X seizing power, and then undermining the army in the process of securing it, leading not only to the loss to the Seljuks in Anatolia but also the loss to the Normans in Italy and the revolt of Bulgaria).

But I think that’s probably too cute, and if I’m going to blame dysfunctional Byzantine succession, I should just choose 330 (or 235, or 82 BC). I think the straightforward answer is better: it’s the Ottomans that did them in.

Of the dates to pick for the rise of the Ottomans, I think I have to go for 1371. Osman I was a pretty good ruler, but I don’t think you can hang your hat on one good ruler; there’s too much that could have gone wrong with his successors (or succession) to pick 1302.

Most Dangerous to Least Dangerous

Delve >> Phyrexian Mana > Affinity for Artifacts >>>>>> Convoke

Note that I’m not play designer.

canmom:

centrally-unplanned:

rollforfelicity:

Why Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves Didn’t Use D&D Combat Rules (And Why They Were Right Not To)

The D&D movie was really fun, and since at this point most of my friends play D&D (or at the very least other TTRPGs), almost everyone I talk to on a regular basis has also seen it and liked it. The consensus is that even though there’s no “meta” that the characters are controlled by players sitting around a table, or jokes about the DM, the movie feels like D&D. The jokes feel like jokes people would make while playing. The constant pivoting from Plan A to Plan B to Plan C feels familiar to anyone who has spent an hour at a table deciding what to do, only to have a roll go sideways and screw things up. Before I get too far, I should say this post contains some mild spoilers for Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.

Keep reading

This is one of those posts that is correct in a lot of ways about all of the details that is describing - but we should be honest that nothing about the mechanics of D&D versus other tabletop games is why the D&D movie didn’t use combat mechanics. It didn’t use them because they would have been an awful fit for the movie they were trying to tell. It would have required ‘teaching the audience’ - which is a mainstream audience the film is presuming knows nothing about D&D - those mechanics and how they work, which is something the movie was uninterested in doing.

And by 'uninterested’ in that we mean it absolutely did do a bunch of that! It taught you how Time Stop works, and how Counterspell works, how Wild Shape works, how its big necro ritual works, etc. It taught you so much - just you know, organically, in way that fits how people actually living in a world would do things. Stacking anything approximating a dice roll or a skill tree onto that would be pointless, tonally contradictory, and a bridge too far for the audience that is already having a bunch asked of it.

The writers of the D&D movie did not evaluate the merits of D&D’s combat system - they evaluated the merit of having any system at all on screen and threw it out. It was probably a very easy decision.

I haven’t seen the movie, but the OP is less about the movie and more about preaching the Story Games way of doing things, and I think that discussion is worth following.

(As far as that goes - stories where roleplaying game mechanics apply diegetically are usually extremely nerdy comedies such as The Order of the Stick, because it’s inherently quite a silly concept. Even in OotS, the rules apply only when it makes for a good joke, and it will play loose with the rules at other times. As Ash says, that is less to do with the specific flaws of D&D as a game. A story written to conform to the rules of Apocalypse World would also feel quite awkward, I suspect.)

I love Apocalypse World, which was one of the most ingenious and coherent games to come out in the last decade. I like many of its spinoffs and offshoots. However, having returned to playing D&D after a long time playing exclusively story games of the PbtA-and-friends lineages, I think it’s worth discussing what D&D does offer, which those games broadly do not - to identify the design tradeoffs that were made, and try and figure out what else lies in the possibility space…

Keep reading

I think part of squaring the circle on narrative versus problem solving(/tactical) is recognizing the problem solving RPGs lend themselves to a particular kind of narrative. Not to say you have roleplay as a shonen protagonist specifically, but you probably want the characters to be people who treat whatever adventure you’re doing as serious business and are willing to think tactically and apply their personal abilities towards completing it.

(Not personally familiar with Lancer, but reading about it, it seems like it’s explicit about wanting to tell a specific kind of story with specific kinds of characters.)

Of course, this runs into the problem of people treating D&D as THE tabletop game. The perennial call for people to try other systems isn’t because D&D is bad, but because *all* roleplaying systems are good for some things and bad for others. Let D&D be good at what it’s good at, and let other systems be good at other things.

rustingbridges:

fnord888:

rustingbridges:

til: transformers do not transform, they convert, with the reasoning being that if transformers could transform this would risk genericizing the trademark. clown world

And MTG got Worlds Beyond Transformers, and it already had double-faced cards that “transform”, but they can’t have that. So therefore double-faced cards that flip while in play “transform” *except for the transformers cards* which “convert”. Which is mechanically identical but presumably legally distinct.

affirming the clown world theory I’ll admit that this is how I know this

The good news is that I’ve double-checked the comprehensive rules, and it turns out you can transform a Transformer.

Equip Runed Stalactite to a Transformers card to make it all creature types, including Human. Play Moonmist, which transforms all Humans. Congratulations, you’ve transformed a Transformer.

(Only transforming double-faced cards are transformed by Moonmist, but cards that can convert *are* transforming double-faced cards; that’s specifically called out in rule 712.2)

centrally-unplanned:

szhmidty:

centrally-unplanned:

vioqueenofmushrooms:

In general, are you aware of where north is at most times?

Yes, I’m typically aware which direction north is

No, I’m not typically oriented on a compass

See Results

My friend just. Didn’t know where north was???

This was one of my “wait isn’t everyone like this” moments of discovery growing up; I assumed everyone instinctively tracked what direction they were facing more-or-less at most times, and it turns out that just isn’t true.

I always assumed this was a grid city vs everyone else thing. When I’m in a city that’s layed out in streets following the compass directions, I lock onto which way is which fairly quickly and keep it in mind. But everywhere else it just doesn’t matter and I have to translate the sun’s path into cardinal directions if for some reason I need to know.

Grid cities certainly help - but I pretty instinctively will identify certain landmarks, a mountain or a tower or a river or w/e, orient myself around that, and then as you turn left and right you just sort of…track how much you turned, oh that 90 degree turn means I am going west now, etc. Certainly its not perfect and you loose track in like dense back alleys with high walls or dark woods, but overall it works.

I was like this growing up, but then I moved around a lot for a while, and now I don’t anymore, even though I’ve now lived in my current location for a number of years.

I don’t think I made an effort to learn the cardinal directions relative to landmarks as a kid, and furthermore I do know the cardinal directions now well enough that I can *figure out* north with moment’s thought (while I’m in my home). But somewhere along the way (I don’t remember exactly when) I lost the instinctiveness.

rustingbridges:

til: transformers do not transform, they convert, with the reasoning being that if transformers could transform this would risk genericizing the trademark. clown world

And MTG got Worlds Beyond Transformers, and it already had double-faced cards that “transform”, but they can’t have that. So therefore double-faced cards that flip while in play “transform” *except for the transformers cards* which “convert”. Which is mechanically identical but presumably legally distinct.

phaeton-flier:

official-kircheis:

> The strike price the client received on the equity leg, however, was at least 60 basis points below market at or around the time of the agreement. As a result, Goldman traders estimated that they had earned a $1,620,000 profit that day on this swap and the corresponding index proxy trades alone. The client, for its part, thought it was getting a good deal; it did not understand why Goldman was offering the high interest rate.

The client thought it was getting a good deal, eh? Thought Goldman was just paying a little extra interest out of the goodness of its heart?

yeah if Goldman Sachs comes to you with a deal that seems to good to be true… I mean come on. will you let the fae have your name, too?

I do find the whole situation funny, but I think this post shows a little more of the “Matt Levine is often more sypathetic to scammers than the scammed in Finance” that people talked about wrt the Dumb Investment Certificate. It’s not that unreasonable to expect your trading partner to not be acting on special information.

Yes, they should’ve been suspicious at Goldman offering a free lunch. But this is like offering a free lunch so your customer is away from the house for an hour and you can fuck their wife. You’re can’t say you’re acting in good faith, here.

I don’t know, maybe I’m being dismissive here, but it does not seem like a particularly great or devious deception was done.

In a June 24, 2016, communication to one particular client, a Goldman personnel stated: “we’re bidding wayyy above our PTMMMs today”—indicating that Goldman was offering the client great deal…This was not actually the case.

What’s that, a salesperson phrased their offer in such a way that it sounded like a good deal even though it in fact was not? They advertised a great sticker price but attempted to conceal the real cost from easy comparison?

Yeah, I hate it when companies do that to me, every time I buy plane tickets.

I mean, to the extent that Goldman was in fact violating regulations, by all means fine them. But I also have extremely limited sympathy for supposed professionals seemingly doing multimillion dollar financial transactions with less due diligence than I exercise for ordinary consumer purchases.

max1461:

that1betch:

max1461:

Why are prenups like a thing? Why is “if we get divorced, I keep whatever assets I came in with (or an equivalent proportion of our wealth, or whatever)” not just… how marriage works by default? That seems obviously superior to the way divorce currently works.

Because a housewife is an employee of the husband, she sacrifices her independence and her future in order to provide him with the support to advance his own. She invests the best years of her life in to him.

If you were married 10 years and were a housewife and stay at home mom, and you provided him with children (which he will have for the rest of his life), how will you support yourself after divorce? Nobody will hire you. You’re destitute.

This means that if you’re a woman with no economic power of your own, and you depend entirely on the man, he has the ability to abuse you and your only alternative is homelessness.

But even today there are communities that groom girls in to thinking it’s a good idea to throw your life away in to taking care of a man and providing him with comfort and ease so he can focus on his career with his time instead of everything else.

Women’s work is invisible.

Honestly though, in my opinion, motherhood should be a job fully funded by the government. Mothers should get paid, and paid well, to raise children.

I agree with you that full time parents should be paid—in addition to rightly compensating people for the labor of child care, this might do a fair bit to offset the birthrate decline associated with increases in societal wealth. It seems like a good policy. To preempt a possible objection to this from others: yes, paying people a significant amount to raise children creates a potential perverse incentive to take on many children and then raise them neglectfully for financial gain; my intuition is that the best bulwark against this is a strong set of policies towards child liberation, that allow children to easily leave abusive households. And furthermore the end goal (for the good of both parents and children) should be far more communal child rearing that eliminates many of these problems at the root. Anyway, on this point basically agreed.

But… the rest of this doesn’t really answer my question? Like, sure, divorce law as it exists today might do some good in compensating people (especially mothers) for the labor of child care. But there’s no reason this can’t also be accomplished while also guaranteeing that anyone can leave a marriage with the assets they came in with (or an equivalent sum to their value at the time, or whatever such policy works best). You could also have an exception to this whereby e.g. some minimum proportion of the wealth is given to the less-wealthy partner by the more wealthy one, in order to prevent wealthier partners from praying on financially vulnerable people who cannot leave. The current policy is like if you just set this proportion to 50%, which I do get (it maximizes the potential for wealth redistribution!), but I think doing it this way also encourages rather than discourages the financialization of marriage.

Like, you say “a housewife is an employee of her husband”, and while I think you elide the fact that not all women are housewives (and indeed, a lesser and lesser proportion each year), I agree with you! A housewife is an employee of her husband! But do you want that to be true? I don’t. I want the whole dynamic of heterosexual marriage to be unmade. And my impression is that divorce as it currently exists, because everyone involved has wealth at stake, encourages people to think of marriage in this financialized way—it strengthens the basic conceit of the patriarchal marriage, which is that it’s an employment contract. It seems to me like making wealth as small a factor as possible in marriage is the reformist path to eliminating the marriage contract all together. Which is what I want. But, like, I don’t know! I’m definitely open to arguments that 50/50 divorce splits are better for this purpose! Anyone got one?

I think “50/50 split” is at best an oversimplification of existing law, but leave that aside.

Surely, *whatever* system the government choses to implement by default, it will sometimes make sense for the participants to alter that default? Hence, prenuptial agreements.

(Also, almost any system of resolution is going to involve some level of fact-finding and balancing of interests, and certainly the existing system does. Which is to say, potentially a lot of expensive litigation, if contested. Laying out the results clearly ahead of time can save both sides a lot of money and effort even if it doesn’t change the ultimate result.)

samueldays:

Retrospective: D&D 3e class feature advancement and design

Of the editions of D&D that I’ve played, I think Third Edition is my favorite. It’s imbalanced, sure, but part of what differentiates D&D from videogames is that there’s a DM on hand to say “let’s change that”. Much of the general success of 3rd was probably due to the Open Gaming License that you may recall a recent fuss about, and two specific impacts of the OGL were 1) explosion of fan content to add on and change stuff, 2) fanmade polish of the System Reference Document (SRD), such as this hyperlinked and crosslinked version where just about everything is accessible in one click. Much less searching for rules!

I also personally liked it for the unusual way it tried hard to put player characters and monsters in the same mechanical framework using the same scale, unlike far too many games, video or tabletop, where the PC has 138 HP but does 9999 damage. (This was to some extent present in earlier editions, but 2e’s Monstrous Manual fails to give a creature’s Strength score, only specifying its damage directly.) D&D in general was unusually fair and honest about letting you loot Lord Mega-Evil’s Mega-Sword instead of doing “2% drop chance” shenanigans. 3e went a step further to making the bugbear playable out of the box, if you wanted to play a bugbear. Bugbears were now real creatures in a sense, not simply bags of HP you popped for XP.

If you’re waiting for me to get to the subject announced in the title, just keep waiting, this is a twenty year old game and I’m a grognard with a pet topic. ;-)

Keep reading

you calculate multiclass initiator level by taking your main initiator class’s class level and adding half the levels in other classes, whether or not they are initiator classes. A Swordsage 6/Fighter 6 character counts as Swordsage 9 for purposes of the Swordsage’s primary class feature: initiator level and martial maneuvers.

This sort of worked to encourage a moderate amount of multiclassing on occasion by reducing the cost, but not really, because of nonlinear scaling. The low-level Swordsage abilities are on the order of “Fighter but with 1d6+1 fire damage”.
The high-level Swordsage abilities are like “Enemy has to make a Fortitude save or die. On a successful save, enemy still takes 20d6 extra damage on top of your regular damage” and “Quasi-timestop: you get 10 opportunities in a row to pick up a nearby enemy and throw him. Your choice whether you want to throw 10 guys off a cliff, or bounce 1 guy against the wall until he dies.”

I mean, Swordsage 6/Fighter 6 didn’t work great, but as I recall it seemed to work pretty well for Fighter 19*/Swordsage 1, and I think that was valuable.

*I mean, as you note Fighter 19 didn’t really work in and of itself, but you get the point.

tanadrin:

fnord888:

necarion:

necarion:

necarion:

jadagul:

fnord888:

rustingbridges:

necarion:

The US Constitution (and others in general) make it too hard to remove elected figures. In part that is because the goal is to have notional “independence”, but that always cuts against the idea of “accountability” (As @jadagul noted, what the hell does it even mean to be accountable and independent?)

One solution here is to have some separation between the idea of policy-drivers and the individuals themselves. If presidential impeachment is really easy, but the line of succession is always largely driven by the president, you can more easily use impeachment to get rid of a bad/disliked/criminal president without changing policy. (right now impeaching Biden gives you President Harris, and impeaching Harris gives you Kevin McCarthy, which is a wild swing. If it went to the secretary of state, or maybe governor of California, the ideological stakes would be lowered). (Also give a cool down period of sorts. If you don’t wait 3 months, the threshold for the next impeachment in line goes up. So Congress couldn’t just impeach the entire line of succession and change the parties.)

The same thing should happen for the Supreme Court. Right now, Clarence Thomas needs to go. Probably many years ago. But Clarence Thomas could currently probably get away with murder on live television without removal because Biden would replace him with a liberal. But if there was some sort of replacement that Thomas could pick in advance, who could serve until the next election (or whatever), you could get rid of Thomas immediately and not change more than a few idiosyncratic votes.

I feel like “accountability” and “independence” require that the *people* are subject to much more discipline than currently affects them, but with the understanding that using it to get your way on policy will be very hard.

in the case of the supreme court they are simply too unaccountable, there really ought to be some term limits or provisions for firing

As far as I can tell, everyone who’s given the idea any serious thought thinks having the Speaker of the House and President Pro Tempore of the Senate in the presidential line of succession is a bad idea. And it’s certainly reasonable to think that impeachment overall should be easier.

But I’m not sure lines of succession chosen by the incumbent make much sense.

Like, take the Thomas situation. The politics of the Supreme Court mean that each party wants someone who not only agrees with them, but is young. This is such a powerful effect that I honestly suspect that Biden probably could push through an impeachment of Thomas if he promised to nominate someone who was just as conservative but 30 years younger. But then it’s not just “a few idiosyncratic votes”, because that person will serve a lot longer, so it’s effectively against Biden’s political interest to do a deal like that.

But if Thomas could choose a successor, that’s exactly the sort of person he’d pick. So we’d be back in the situation where you can only impeach someone if they’re so obviously criminal that everybody agrees they’ve got to go regardless of the politics.

That would at least flip the valence, so that the people most likely to be angry at the guy are the ones who would benefit from keeping him in. :P

But I think @necarion​‘s original pitch (to me) suggested they should get to choose a lineup of like three handpicked successors—at the time of their appointment.  So the successors will all be roughly the same age they are.

The other detail is that the handpicked successor doesn’t remain on the court. Their term expires at the next congressional election, regardless.

I think the rule would have to be different for deaths or voluntary retirements, or you get the dynamic listed above. But if you want to make judges accountable for bad behavior, it has to be fairly easy for both parties to have them gone. The 2 year time limit means the next election becomes kinda crazy with regard to the courts.

The other detail is that the handpicked successor might have to be among the chief judges of the circuit courts.

As for lines of succession chosen by the incumbent, we already do that for President, except that the Speaker and President Pro Tem are in there as well. Everybody else is either (a) hand chosen and then voted on in a national election (VP) or (b) hand chosen and then confirmed by the Senate. The proposal I read from the Continuity of Government project suggested that there be a set order, but also that the president could submit a new one subject to confirmation by the Senate. As long as the order involved only confirmed executive branch cabinet positions and state governors. The suggestion was that the default order would be something like President, VP, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of the Treasury, and then the governors of the states in decreasing order of population, matching the president’s party. But if Biden instead wanted to do VP, Sec State, Governor of Deleware, Sec Education, etc, he would submit the list to the senate for approval.

Other option for the Supreme Court, of course, is to have 18 year terms, and the handpicked successor among the Circuit Chief Judges finishes out the term. (Subject to a retention vote in the House and Senate that needs like a 3/5 to *reject*). This means that the ideology of a seat basically cannot be flipped by impeachment, death, or even sudden retirement.

Elections are decided by tons of random chance, and you can’t get around that. But the proper and continuous functioning of government should not be.

@fnord888​

#that could do it#not sure limiting it to chief judges matters a ton#they’re not appointed separately it’s just seniority#but a bit of basically-sortition is honestly not a bad idea#us politics#governance 

Agreed that limiting it to chief judges isn’t necessary, per se. It depends on which version of this we’re talking about, right? If it’s just the two year replacement, then going with chiefs would be really important for the structural legitimacy. And honestly for their careers as well.  How weird would it be, considering the supremacy of SCOTUS, going from the Supreme Court back down, and then being a random junior juror. When it comes to complete replacement for an entire term, then you’d probably want someone younger anyway.

Sortition might also not a be bad idea here. Eg., each justice gets three, non-overlapping, choices among the circuit court judges, and then one of them is drawn by lots. It keeps the system from having a “hand-picked successor” problem. The other thing that can be done here is allow the president a way past the weird confirmation problems. The president can either pick someone and get them Senate confirmation, or they can pick 5 circuit judges and one of them gets drawn by lots.

The other thing a term-limited system does for judges is changes the age distribution. Long-term judges are one area in which I think we maybe shouldn’t have people in their 30s. So if one gets chosen, it’s because they’re unusually desirable choice on their own merits. And you wouldn’t have older judges chosen as “compromises” due to their age and short time on the courts (like Merrick Garland was proposed by Obama).

Basically, the system would have to be that every presidential term appoints two Supreme Court justices. If your party wins the white house for 3 terms in a row, your party takes control of the Supreme Court.  But not through random chance.

(Oh, this sort of system also allows you to do stuff like have alternative justices for any cases personally involving the president who nominated them. Mandatory recusal just isn’t an issue of the case still has 9 votes.)

While explicit sortition is not a bad idea either, what I meant is that limiting replacements to chief judges is “basically sortition”. While not actually random, because they’re chosen according to non-ideological and not-particularly-gameable criteria, it serves much the same purpose as narrowing the pool of candidates by sortition.

I don’t think it’s a problem to use chief judges as replacements for the 18 year term. The rule is the most years of service among judges who are under 64, so worst case they’d be finishing out their term at 81, which is pretty old but not, I think, inherently disqualifying. Souter and Kennedy were older than that when they retired. Of course, if health becomes an issue, they could be replaced in much the same way; making it easier to replace justices for health reasons is also a benefit of this system.

(And I agree, an 18 year term limit for Justices definitely has advantages even without impeachment reforms)

this isn’t really relevant to the SCOTUS thing (and SCOTUS is terribly designed in a lot of ways), but one think that’s kind of bonkers in the US political structure is that when a president is removed from office or resigns, you don’t have an election. the idea of a monarchy-like succession (i guess to keep the election schedule on track?) seems deeply suboptimal to me–even if you remove a president for corruption, why can’t he appoint someone who will just pardon him, like Gerald Ford did with Nixon?

would be much better IMO to explicitly have the role be filled by a caretaker acting president, and have an election ASAP. if you want to keep the federal election schedule consistent, you could have whoever is elected just serve an abbreviated term, and resume the normal elections schedule when the ousted president’s term would have expired anyway

Leaving aside any logistical issues, forcing a rerun of specifically the presidential election is still a partisan issue. You could maybe do a parliament-style “dissolve the government” where legislators have to stand for re-election too, but at some point you’re saying less “here’s a good way to reform impeachment” and more “parliamentary republic is better than presidential republic” (which, you know, yes, but kind of a different thing).

necarion:

necarion:

necarion:

jadagul:

fnord888:

rustingbridges:

necarion:

The US Constitution (and others in general) make it too hard to remove elected figures. In part that is because the goal is to have notional “independence”, but that always cuts against the idea of “accountability” (As @jadagul noted, what the hell does it even mean to be accountable and independent?)

One solution here is to have some separation between the idea of policy-drivers and the individuals themselves. If presidential impeachment is really easy, but the line of succession is always largely driven by the president, you can more easily use impeachment to get rid of a bad/disliked/criminal president without changing policy. (right now impeaching Biden gives you President Harris, and impeaching Harris gives you Kevin McCarthy, which is a wild swing. If it went to the secretary of state, or maybe governor of California, the ideological stakes would be lowered). (Also give a cool down period of sorts. If you don’t wait 3 months, the threshold for the next impeachment in line goes up. So Congress couldn’t just impeach the entire line of succession and change the parties.)

The same thing should happen for the Supreme Court. Right now, Clarence Thomas needs to go. Probably many years ago. But Clarence Thomas could currently probably get away with murder on live television without removal because Biden would replace him with a liberal. But if there was some sort of replacement that Thomas could pick in advance, who could serve until the next election (or whatever), you could get rid of Thomas immediately and not change more than a few idiosyncratic votes.

I feel like “accountability” and “independence” require that the *people* are subject to much more discipline than currently affects them, but with the understanding that using it to get your way on policy will be very hard.

in the case of the supreme court they are simply too unaccountable, there really ought to be some term limits or provisions for firing

As far as I can tell, everyone who’s given the idea any serious thought thinks having the Speaker of the House and President Pro Tempore of the Senate in the presidential line of succession is a bad idea. And it’s certainly reasonable to think that impeachment overall should be easier.

But I’m not sure lines of succession chosen by the incumbent make much sense.

Like, take the Thomas situation. The politics of the Supreme Court mean that each party wants someone who not only agrees with them, but is young. This is such a powerful effect that I honestly suspect that Biden probably could push through an impeachment of Thomas if he promised to nominate someone who was just as conservative but 30 years younger. But then it’s not just “a few idiosyncratic votes”, because that person will serve a lot longer, so it’s effectively against Biden’s political interest to do a deal like that.

But if Thomas could choose a successor, that’s exactly the sort of person he’d pick. So we’d be back in the situation where you can only impeach someone if they’re so obviously criminal that everybody agrees they’ve got to go regardless of the politics.

That would at least flip the valence, so that the people most likely to be angry at the guy are the ones who would benefit from keeping him in. :P

But I think @necarion​‘s original pitch (to me) suggested they should get to choose a lineup of like three handpicked successors—at the time of their appointment.  So the successors will all be roughly the same age they are.

The other detail is that the handpicked successor doesn’t remain on the court. Their term expires at the next congressional election, regardless.

I think the rule would have to be different for deaths or voluntary retirements, or you get the dynamic listed above. But if you want to make judges accountable for bad behavior, it has to be fairly easy for both parties to have them gone. The 2 year time limit means the next election becomes kinda crazy with regard to the courts.

The other detail is that the handpicked successor might have to be among the chief judges of the circuit courts.

As for lines of succession chosen by the incumbent, we already do that for President, except that the Speaker and President Pro Tem are in there as well. Everybody else is either (a) hand chosen and then voted on in a national election (VP) or (b) hand chosen and then confirmed by the Senate. The proposal I read from the Continuity of Government project suggested that there be a set order, but also that the president could submit a new one subject to confirmation by the Senate. As long as the order involved only confirmed executive branch cabinet positions and state governors. The suggestion was that the default order would be something like President, VP, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of the Treasury, and then the governors of the states in decreasing order of population, matching the president’s party. But if Biden instead wanted to do VP, Sec State, Governor of Deleware, Sec Education, etc, he would submit the list to the senate for approval.

Other option for the Supreme Court, of course, is to have 18 year terms, and the handpicked successor among the Circuit Chief Judges finishes out the term. (Subject to a retention vote in the House and Senate that needs like a 3/5 to *reject*). This means that the ideology of a seat basically cannot be flipped by impeachment, death, or even sudden retirement.

Elections are decided by tons of random chance, and you can’t get around that. But the proper and continuous functioning of government should not be.

@fnord888​

#that could do it#not sure limiting it to chief judges matters a ton#they’re not appointed separately it’s just seniority#but a bit of basically-sortition is honestly not a bad idea#us politics#governance 

Agreed that limiting it to chief judges isn’t necessary, per se. It depends on which version of this we’re talking about, right? If it’s just the two year replacement, then going with chiefs would be really important for the structural legitimacy. And honestly for their careers as well.  How weird would it be, considering the supremacy of SCOTUS, going from the Supreme Court back down, and then being a random junior juror. When it comes to complete replacement for an entire term, then you’d probably want someone younger anyway.

Sortition might also not a be bad idea here. Eg., each justice gets three, non-overlapping, choices among the circuit court judges, and then one of them is drawn by lots. It keeps the system from having a “hand-picked successor” problem. The other thing that can be done here is allow the president a way past the weird confirmation problems. The president can either pick someone and get them Senate confirmation, or they can pick 5 circuit judges and one of them gets drawn by lots.

The other thing a term-limited system does for judges is changes the age distribution. Long-term judges are one area in which I think we maybe shouldn’t have people in their 30s. So if one gets chosen, it’s because they’re unusually desirable choice on their own merits. And you wouldn’t have older judges chosen as “compromises” due to their age and short time on the courts (like Merrick Garland was proposed by Obama).

Basically, the system would have to be that every presidential term appoints two Supreme Court justices. If your party wins the white house for 3 terms in a row, your party takes control of the Supreme Court.  But not through random chance.

(Oh, this sort of system also allows you to do stuff like have alternative justices for any cases personally involving the president who nominated them. Mandatory recusal just isn’t an issue of the case still has 9 votes.)

While explicit sortition is not a bad idea either, what I meant is that limiting replacements to chief judges is “basically sortition”. While not actually random, because they’re chosen according to non-ideological and not-particularly-gameable criteria, it serves much the same purpose as narrowing the pool of candidates by sortition.

I don’t think it’s a problem to use chief judges as replacements for the 18 year term. The rule is the most years of service among judges who are under 64, so worst case they’d be finishing out their term at 81, which is pretty old but not, I think, inherently disqualifying. Souter and Kennedy were older than that when they retired. Of course, if health becomes an issue, they could be replaced in much the same way; making it easier to replace justices for health reasons is also a benefit of this system.

(And I agree, an 18 year term limit for Justices definitely has advantages even without impeachment reforms)

necarion:

necarion:

jadagul:

fnord888:

rustingbridges:

necarion:

The US Constitution (and others in general) make it too hard to remove elected figures. In part that is because the goal is to have notional “independence”, but that always cuts against the idea of “accountability” (As @jadagul noted, what the hell does it even mean to be accountable and independent?)

One solution here is to have some separation between the idea of policy-drivers and the individuals themselves. If presidential impeachment is really easy, but the line of succession is always largely driven by the president, you can more easily use impeachment to get rid of a bad/disliked/criminal president without changing policy. (right now impeaching Biden gives you President Harris, and impeaching Harris gives you Kevin McCarthy, which is a wild swing. If it went to the secretary of state, or maybe governor of California, the ideological stakes would be lowered). (Also give a cool down period of sorts. If you don’t wait 3 months, the threshold for the next impeachment in line goes up. So Congress couldn’t just impeach the entire line of succession and change the parties.)

The same thing should happen for the Supreme Court. Right now, Clarence Thomas needs to go. Probably many years ago. But Clarence Thomas could currently probably get away with murder on live television without removal because Biden would replace him with a liberal. But if there was some sort of replacement that Thomas could pick in advance, who could serve until the next election (or whatever), you could get rid of Thomas immediately and not change more than a few idiosyncratic votes.

I feel like “accountability” and “independence” require that the *people* are subject to much more discipline than currently affects them, but with the understanding that using it to get your way on policy will be very hard.

in the case of the supreme court they are simply too unaccountable, there really ought to be some term limits or provisions for firing

As far as I can tell, everyone who’s given the idea any serious thought thinks having the Speaker of the House and President Pro Tempore of the Senate in the presidential line of succession is a bad idea. And it’s certainly reasonable to think that impeachment overall should be easier.

But I’m not sure lines of succession chosen by the incumbent make much sense.

Like, take the Thomas situation. The politics of the Supreme Court mean that each party wants someone who not only agrees with them, but is young. This is such a powerful effect that I honestly suspect that Biden probably could push through an impeachment of Thomas if he promised to nominate someone who was just as conservative but 30 years younger. But then it’s not just “a few idiosyncratic votes”, because that person will serve a lot longer, so it’s effectively against Biden’s political interest to do a deal like that.

But if Thomas could choose a successor, that’s exactly the sort of person he’d pick. So we’d be back in the situation where you can only impeach someone if they’re so obviously criminal that everybody agrees they’ve got to go regardless of the politics.

That would at least flip the valence, so that the people most likely to be angry at the guy are the ones who would benefit from keeping him in. :P

But I think @necarion​‘s original pitch (to me) suggested they should get to choose a lineup of like three handpicked successors—at the time of their appointment.  So the successors will all be roughly the same age they are.

The other detail is that the handpicked successor doesn’t remain on the court. Their term expires at the next congressional election, regardless.

I think the rule would have to be different for deaths or voluntary retirements, or you get the dynamic listed above. But if you want to make judges accountable for bad behavior, it has to be fairly easy for both parties to have them gone. The 2 year time limit means the next election becomes kinda crazy with regard to the courts.

The other detail is that the handpicked successor might have to be among the chief judges of the circuit courts.

As for lines of succession chosen by the incumbent, we already do that for President, except that the Speaker and President Pro Tem are in there as well. Everybody else is either (a) hand chosen and then voted on in a national election (VP) or (b) hand chosen and then confirmed by the Senate. The proposal I read from the Continuity of Government project suggested that there be a set order, but also that the president could submit a new one subject to confirmation by the Senate. As long as the order involved only confirmed executive branch cabinet positions and state governors. The suggestion was that the default order would be something like President, VP, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of the Treasury, and then the governors of the states in decreasing order of population, matching the president’s party. But if Biden instead wanted to do VP, Sec State, Governor of Deleware, Sec Education, etc, he would submit the list to the senate for approval.

Other option for the Supreme Court, of course, is to have 18 year terms, and the handpicked successor among the Circuit Chief Judges finishes out the term. (Subject to a retention vote in the House and Senate that needs like a 3/5 to *reject*). This means that the ideology of a seat basically cannot be flipped by impeachment, death, or even sudden retirement.

Elections are decided by tons of random chance, and you can’t get around that. But the proper and continuous functioning of government should not be.