Nov 26 JDN 2460275

The basic precepts of reason seem obvious and irrefutable:

Believe what’s most likely to be true.

Do what’s most likely to work.

How are you going to argue with that? In fact, it seems like by the time you try to argue at all, you’ve already agreed to it. These principles may be undeniable—literally impossible to coherently deny.

Even when expressed a little more precisely, the principles of reason still seem pretty obvious:

Beliefs should be consistent with each other and with observations.

The best action is the one with the best expected outcome.

And you really can get surprisingly far with this. A few more steps of mathematical precision, and you basically get the scientific method and utilitarianism:
Beliefs should be assigned consistent Bayesian probabilities according to the observed evidence.

The best action is the one that maximizes expected utility.

Why, then, did it take humanity 99.9% of its existence to figure this out? Why did a species that has lived for 300,000 years only really start getting this right in about the past 300?

In fact, even today, while most people would at least assent to the basic notion of rationality, a large number don’t really follow it well, and only a small fraction really understand it at the deepest level.

Reason just seems obvious if you think about it. How do so many people miss it?

Because most people really don’t think about it that much.

In fact, I’m going to make a stronger claim:

Most people don’t think about anything that much.

Remember: To a first approximation, all human behavior is social norms.

Most human beings go through most of their lives behaving according to habits and social norms that they may not even be consciously aware of. They do things how they were always done; they believe what those around them believe. They adopt the religion of their parents, cheer for the sports team of their hometown, vote for the political party that is popular in their community. They may not even register these things as decisions at all—they simply did not consider the alternatives.

It’s not that they are incapable of thinking. When they really need to think hard about something, they can do it. But hard thinking is, well, hard. It’s difficult; it’s uncomfortable; for most people, it’s unfamiliar. So, they avoid it when they can. (There is even a kind of meta-rationality in that: Behavioral economists call it rational inattention.)

Few would willingly assent to the claim “I believe a lot of things that aren’t true.” People generally believe that their beliefs are true.

I doubt even most people in ancient history would agree with a statement like that. People who wholemindedly believed in witches, werewolves, ghosts, and sympathetic magic still believed that their beliefs were true. People who thought that a giant beetle rolled the sun across the sky still thought they had a good handle on how the world works.

In fact, the few people I know who would agree with a statement like that are very honest, introspective Bayesians who recognize that the joint probability of all their beliefs being true must be quite small. Agreeing that some of your beliefs are false is a sign not that you are irrational, but that you are extremely rational. (In fact, I would agree with a statement like that: If I knew what I’m wrong about, I’d change my belief; but odds are, I’m wrong about something.)

But most people simply don’t even bother to evaluate the truth of many of their beliefs. If something is easy to check and directly affects their lives, they’ll probably try to gather evidence for it. But if it’s at all abstract or difficult to evaluate, they’ll more or less give up and believe whatever seems to be popular. (This explains Carlin’s dictum: “Tell people there’s an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure.“)

This can also help to explain why so many people—mostly, but not exclusively right-wing people—complain that scientists are “elitist” while worshipping at the feet of clergy and business executives (the latter only—so far—figuratively, but the former all too literally).

What could be more elitist than clergy? They are basically claiming a special, unique connection to the ultimate truths of the universe that is only accessible to them. They claim to be ordained by the all-powerful ruler of the universe with the absolute to right adjudicate all truth and morality.

For goodness’ sake, one of the most popular and powerful ones literally claims to be infallible.

Meanwhile, basically all scientists agree that anyone who is reasonably smart and willing to work hard, either making their own observations, running their own experiments, or just reading the work of a lot of other people’s observations and experiments, can become a scientist. Some scientists are arrogant or condescending, but as an institution and culture, science is fundamentally egalitarian.

No, what people are objecting to among scientists is not elitism. Part of it may be the condescension of telling people: “This is obvious. If you thought about it, you would see that it has to be right.”

Yet the reason we keep saying that is… it is basically true. The precepts of rationality are obvious if think about them, and they do lead quite directly to rejecting a lot of mainstream beliefs, particularly about religion. I’m sure it feels insulting to be told that you just aren’t thinking hard enough about important things… but maybe you aren’t?

We may need to find a gentler way to convey this message. There’s no point in saying it if nobody is going to listen. Yet that doesn’t make it any less true.

It’s not that quantum mechanics is intuitively obvious (quite the opposite is still a terrible understatement), nor even that Darwinian natural selection or comparative advantage are obvious (though surely they’re less counter-intuitive than quantum mechanics). The conclusions of science are not obvious. They took centuries to figure out for good reason.

But the principles of science really are: Want to know if something is true? Look! Find out!

Yet historically this has not in fact been how human beings formed most of their beliefs. Indeed, I am often awed by just how bad most people throughout history have been at thinking empirically.

It’s not just that people throughout history believed in witches without ever having seen one, or knowing anyone who had seen one. (I’ve never seen a platypus or a quasar, and I still believe in them.) It’s that they were willing to execute people for being witches—killing people as punishment for deeds that not only they did not do, but could not possibly have done. Entire civilizations for millennia failed to realize that this was wrong.

Aristotle believed that men’s body temperature was hotter than women’s, and that this temperature difference determined the sex of children. That’s Aristotle, a certifiable genius living in the culture that pioneered rationalist philosophy. (Ironically—and by pure Stopped Clock Principle—he’d almost be right about certain species of reptiles.) It never occurred to him to even try to measure the body temperatures of lots of people and see if this was true. (Admittedly they didn’t have very good thermometers back then.)

Aristotle did get a lot of things right: In particular, his trichotomy of souls is basically accurate, with “vegetative soul” renamed “homeostatic metabolism and reproduction”, “sensitive soul” renamed “limbic system”, and “rational soul” renamed “prefrontal cortex”. The vegetative soul is what makes you alive, the sensitive soul is what makes you sentient, and the rational soul is what makes you a person. He even recognized a deep truth that the majority of human beings today do not: The soul is a function of the body, and dies when the body dies. For his time, he was absolutely off the charts in rationality. But even he didn’t really integrate rationality and empiricism fully into his way of thinking.

Even today there are a shocking number of common misconceptions that could be easily refuted by anyone who thought to check (or look it up!):

Wolves howl at the full moon? Nope, wolves don’t care about the phase of the moon, and if you live near any, you’ll hear them howl all year round. Actually, wolf howling is more like that “Twilight Bark” from 101 Dalmations; it’s a long-distance communication and coordination signal.

Eggs can only balance on the equinox? Nope, it’s tricky, but you can balance an egg just as well any day of the year.

You don’t lose most of your heat through your head: Try going outside in the cold wearing a t-shirt and shorts with a hat, and then again with snow pants and a heavy coat and no hat; you’ll see which feels colder.

“Beer before liquor, never sicker” is nonsense: It matters how much alcohol you drink (and how much you eat), not what order you do it in, and you’d know that if you just tried it both ways a few times.

Taste on your tongue is localized to particular areas? No, it’s not, and you can tell by putting foods with strong flavors on different parts of your tongue. (Indeed, I did when they did that demonstration in elementary school; I wondered if that meant my tongue was somehow weird.)

I can understand not wanting to take the risk with fan death yourself, but maybe listen to all the other people—including medical experts—who tell you it’s not real? I keep a fan in my bedroom every night and it hasn’t killed me yet.

Even the gambler’s fallacy is something you could easily disabuse yourself of by rolling some dice for awhile and taking careful notes. Am I more likely to roll snake eyes if I haven’t in awhile? Nope; the odds on any given roll are always exactly the same.

But most people simply don’t think to check.

Indeed, most people get a lot of their beliefs—particular those about complex, abstract, or distant things—from authority figures. While empiricism doesn’t come very naturally to humans, hierarchy absolutely does. (I think it’s a primate thing.) Another reason scientists may seem “elitist” is that people think we are trying to usurp that authority. We’re telling you that what your religious leaders taught you is false; that must mean that we are trying to become religious leaders ourselves.

But in fact we’re telling you something far more radical than that: You don’t need religious leaders. You don’t need to take things on faith. If you want to know whether something is true, you can look.

We are not trying to usurp control over your hierarchy. We are trying to utterly dismantle it. We dethrone the king, not so that we can become kings ourselves—but so that the world can have kings no longer.

Granted, most people aren’t going to be able to run particle accelerator experiments in their garages. But if you want to know how particle physics works, and how we know what we know about it, go to your nearest university, find a particle physicist, and ask: I guarantee they’ll be more than happy to tell you whatever you want to know. You can even do this via email from anywhere in the world.

That is, we do need expertise: People who specialize in a particular field of knowledge can learn it much better than others. But we do not need authority: You don’t just have to take their word for it. There’s a difference between expertise and authority.

And sometimes, really all you need to do is stop and think. People should try that more often.

Jun 19 JDN 2459780

There’s something odd about the debate in evolutionary theory about multilevel selection (sometimes called “group selection”). On one side are the mainstream theorists who insist that selection only happens at the individual level (or is the gene level?); and on the other are devout group-selectionists who insist that group selection is everywhere and the only possible explanation of altruism.

Both of these sides are wrong. Selection does happen at multiple levels, but it’s entirely possible for altruism to emerge without it.

The usual argument by the mainstream is that group selection would require the implausible assumption that group live and die on the same timescale as individuals. The usual argument by group-selectionists is that there’s no other explanation for why humans are so altruistic. But neither of these things are true.

There is plenty of discussion out there about why group selection isn’t necessary for altruism: Kin selection is probably the clearest example. So I’m going to focus on showing that group selection can work even when groups live and die much slower than individuals.

To do this, I would like to present you a model. It’s a very pared-down, simplified version, but it is nevertheless a valid evolutionary game theory model.

Consider a world where the only kind of interaction is Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemmas. For the uninitiated, an Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma is as follows.

Time goes on forever. At each point in time, some people are born, and some people die; people have a limited lifespan and some general idea of how long it is, but nobody can predict for sure when they will die. (So far, this isn’t even a model; all of this is literally true.)

In this world, people are randomly matched with others one on one, and they play a game together, where each person can choose either “Cooperate” or “Defect”. They choose in secret and reveal simultaneously. If both choose “Cooperate”, everyone gets 3 points. If both choose “Defect”, everyone gets 2 points. If one chooses “Cooperate” and the other chooses “Defect”, the “Cooperate” person gets only 1 point while the “Defect” person gets 4 points.

What are these points? Since this is evolution, let’s call them offspring. An average lifetime score of 4 points means 4 offspring per couple per generation—you get rapid population growth. 1 point means 1 offspring per couple per generation—your genes will gradually die out.

That makes the payoffs follow this table:

	C	D
C	3, 3	1, 4
D	4, 1	2, 2

There are two very notable properties of this game; together they seem paradoxical, which is probably why the game has such broad applicability and such enduring popularity.

1. Everyone, as a group, is always better off if more people choose “Cooperate”.
2. Each person, as an individual, regardless of what the others do, is always better off choosing “Defect”.

Thus, Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemmas are ideal for understanding altruism, as they directly model a conflict between individual self-interest and group welfare. (They didn’t do a good job of explaining it in A Beautiful Mind, but that one line in particular was correct: the Prisoner’s Dilemma is precisely what proves “Adam Smith was wrong.”)

Each person is matched with someone else at random for a few rounds, and then re-matched with someone else; and nobody knows how long they will be with any particular person. (For technical reasons, with these particular payoffs, the chance of going to another round needs to be at least 50%; but that’s not too important for what I have to say here.)

Now, suppose there are three tribes of people, who are related by family ties but also still occasionally intermingle with one another.

In the Hobbes tribe, people always play “Defect”.

In the Rousseau tribe, people always play “Cooperate”.

In the Axelrod tribe, people play “Cooperate” the first time they meet someone, then copy whatever the other person did in the previous round. (This is called “tit for tat“.)

How will these tribes evolve? In the long run, will all tribes survive, or will some prevail over others?

The Rousseau tribe seems quite nice; everyone always gets along! Unfortunately, the Rousseau tribe will inevitably and catastrophically collapse. As soon as a single Hobbes gets in, or a mutation arises to make someone behave like a Hobbes, that individual will become far more successful than everyone else, have vastly more offspring, and ultimately take over the entire population.

The Hobbes tribe seems pretty bad, but it’ll be stable. If a Rousseau should come visit, they’ll just be ruthlessly exploited and makes the Hobbes better off. If an Axelrod arrives, they’ll learn not to be exploited (after the first encounter), but they won’t do any better than the Hobbeses do.

What about the Axelrod tribe? They seem similar to the Rousseau tribe, because everyone is choosing “Cooperate” all the time—will they suffer the same fate? No, they won’t! They’ll do just fine, it turns out. Should a Rousseau come to visit, nobody will even notice; they’ll just keep on choosing “Cooperate” and everything will be fine. And what if a Hobbes comes? They’ll try to exploit the Axelrods, and succeed at first—but soon enough they will be punished for their sins, and in the long run they’ll be worse off (this is why the probability of continuing needs to be sufficiently high).

The net result, then, will be that the Rousseau tribe dies out and only the Hobbes and Axelrod tribes remain. But that’s not the end of the story.

Look back at that payoff table. Both tribes are stable, but each round the Hobbeses are getting 2 each round, while the Axelrods are getting 3. Remember that these are offspring per couple per generation. This means that the Hobbes tribe will have a roughly constant population, while the Axelrods will have an increasing population.

If the two tribes then come into conflict, perhaps competing over resources, the larger population will most likely prevail. This means that, in the long run, the Axelrod tribe will come to dominate. In the end, all the world will be ruled by Axelrods.

And indeed, most human beings behave like Axelrods: We’re nice to most people most of the time, but we’re no chumps. Betray our trust, and you will be punished severely. (It seems we also have a small incursion of Hobbeses: We call them psychopaths. Perhaps there are a few Rousseaus among us as well, whom the Hobbeses exploit.)

What is this? It’s multilevel selection. It’s group selection, if you like that term. There’s clearly no better way to describe it.

Moreover, we can’t simply stop at the reciprocal altruism as most mainstream theorists do; yes, Axelrods exhibit reciprocal altruism. But that’s not the only equilibrium! Why is reciprocal altruism so common? Why in the real world are there fifty Axelrods for every Hobbes? Multilevel selection.

And at no point did I assume either (1) that individual selection wasn’t operating, or (2) that the timescales of groups and individuals were the same. Indeed, I’m explicitly assuming the opposite: Individual selection continues to work at every generation, and groups only live or die over many generations.

The key insight that makes this possible is that the game is iterated—it happens over many rounds, and nobody knows exactly how many. This results in multiple Nash equilibria for individual selection, and then group selection can occur over equilibria.

This is by no means restricted to the Prisoner’s Dilemma. In fact, any nontrivial game will result in multiple equilibria when it is iterated, and group selection should always favor the groups that choose a relatively cooperative, efficient outcome. As long as such a strategy emerges by mutation, and gets some chance to get a foothold, it will be successful in the long run.

Indeed, since these conditions don’t seem all that difficult to meet, we would expect that group selection should actually occur quite frequently, and should be a major explanation for a lot of important forms of altruism.

And in fact this seems to be the case. Humans look awfully group-selected. (Like I said, we behave very much like Axelrods.) Many other social species, such as apes, dolphins, and wolves, do as well. There is altruism in nature that doesn’t look group-selected, for instance among eusocial insects; but much of the really impressive altruism seems more like equilibrium selection at the group level than it does like direct selection at the individual level.

Even multicellular life can be considered group selection: A bunch of cells “agree” to set aside some of their own interest in self-replication in favor of supporting a common, unified whole. (And should any mutated cells try to defect and multiply out of control, what happens? We call that cancer.) This can only work when there are multiple equilibria to select from at the individual level—but there nearly always are.

Dec 12 JDN 2459561

I’ve been seeing this meme go around lately, and I felt a need to respond:

Economics: “Humans only value things monetarily.”

Sociology: “Uh, I don’t…”

Economics: “Humans are always rational and value is calculated by complex internal calculus.”

Sociology: “Uhhh, Psy, can you help?”

Psychology: “That’s not how humans…”

Economics: “ALSO MY SYSTEM WILL GROW EXPONENTIALLY FOREVER!”

Physics: drops teacup

I have plenty of criticisms to make of neoclassical economics—but this is clearly unfair.

Economists aren’t that crazy.

Above all, economists don’t actually believe in exponential growth forever. I literally have never met one who does. The mainstream, uncontroversial (I daresay milquetoast)neoclassical growth model, the Solow-Swan model, predicts a long-run decline in the rate of economic growth. Indeed, I would not be surprised to find that long-run per-capita GDP growth is asymptotic, meaning that there is some standard of living that we can never expect the world to exceed. It’s simply a question of what that limit is, and it is most likely a good deal better than how we live even in First World countries.

It’s nothing more than a strawman of neoclassical economics to assert otherwise. Yes, economists do believe that current growth can and should continue for some time yet—though even among them it is controversial how long it will continue. But they absolutely do not believe that we can expect 3% annual growth in per-capita GDP for the next 1000 years. And indeed, it is precisely their mathematical sophistication that makes this so: They would be the first to recognize that this implies a 6.8 trillion-fold increase in standard of living, which is obviously ludicrous. A much more plausible figure for that timescale is something like 0.2%, which would be only a 7-fold increase over that same interval. And if you really want to extrapolate to millions of years, the only plausible long-run economic growth rate over that period is basically 0%. Yet billions of lives hinge upon whether it is actually 0.0001%, 0.0002%, or 0.0003%—if indeed human beings don’t go extinct long before then.

What about the other two claims? Well, neoclassical economists do have a habit of assuming greater rationality than human beings actually exhibit, and of trying to value everything in monetary terms. And economists are nothing if not arrogant in their relationship to other fields of social science. So here, at least, there is a kernel of truth.

Yet that makes this at best hyperbole for comedic effect—and at worst highly misleading as to what actual economists believe. You can find a few fringe economists who might seriously assent to the claim “humans are always rational”, and you can easily find plenty of amoral corporate shills who are paid to say such things on TV. (Krugman refers to them as “professionally conservative economists”.)

Moreover, I think the behavioral economics paradigm still hasn’t penetrated fully enough—most economists will give lip service to the idea of irrational behavior without being willing to seriously face up to how frequent it is or what this implies for policy. But no serious mainstream economist actually believes that all human beings are always rational.

And while there is surely a tendency to over-emphasize monetary costs and try to put everything in monetary terms, I don’t think I’ve ever met an economist who genuinely believes that all humans value everything monetarily. At most they might think that everyone should value everything monetarily—and even then the only ones who say things like this are weird fringe figures like that guy who hates Christmas.

Am I reading too much into a joke? Maybe. But given how poorly most people understand economics, this kind of joke can do real damage. It’s already a big problem that (aforementioned) corporate shills can present themselves as economic experts, but if popular culture is accustomed to dismissing the claims of actual economic experts, that makes matters much worse. And rather than the playful ribbing that neoclassical economists well deserve (like Jon Stewart gave them: “People are screwy.” “You’re just now figuring this out?”), this meme mocks economists aggressively enough that it seems to be trying to actively undermine their credibility.

If COVID taught us anything, it should be that expertise matters. Trusting experts more than we did would have saved thousands of lives—and trusting them less would have doomed even more.

So maybe a joke that will make people trust economic experts less isn’t so harmless after all?

Jul 26 JDN 2459057

Imagine for a moment what this would feel like:

Your girlfriend, who works as an EMT, just got home and went to bed after a long shift. Suddenly you hear banging on your door. “Who is it?” you shout; no answer. “Who is it?” you ask again; still no answer. The banging continues.

You know there is a lot of crime in your neighborhood, so you bought a handgun to protect your family. Since it seems like someone is about to invade your home, now seems like the obvious time to use it. You get the gun, load it, and aim it at the doorway. You hesitate; are you really prepared to pull that trigger? You know that you could kill someone on the other side. But you need to protect your family. So you fire a few shots at the doorway, hoping it will be enough to scare them away.

The response is a hail of bullets from several different directions, several of which hit your girlfriend and kill her while she is asleep.

Then, the door breaks down and several police officers barge in, having never announced themselves as police officers. They arrest you. You learn later that they were serving a so-called “no knock warrant”, which was intended for someone who wasn’t even there. They were never supposed to be in your home in the first place. Your girlfriend is now dead. And then, to top it all off, they have the audacity to charge you with attempted murder of a police officer because you tried to defend your home.

Now imagine what this would feel like as well:

In the evening you joined a protest. It was a peaceful protest, and there were hardly even any police officers around. There was no rioting, no vandalism, no tear gas or rubber bullets; just people holding signs and chanting. It’s now about 2:00 AM, and the protest is ending for the night, so you begin walking home.

Suddenly a van pulls up next to you. It’s completely unmarked; it just looks like a rental car that anybody could have rented. The door slides open and men in tactical body armor leap out of it, pointing rifles at you. They demand that you get in the van with them, and since you think they’re likely to shoot you if you don’t, you comply.

They handcuff you, cover your eyes with your hat, and drive you somewhere. They unload you into a building, then frisk you, photograph you, and rummage through your belongings. Then, they put you into a cell. They have not identified themselves. They have not explained why they abducted you.

Only after they have put you into a cell do they identify themselves as federal agents and start reading you your Miranda rights. They still won’t tell you why you were arrested. They ask you to waive your right to counsel; when you refuse, they leave you there for an hour and a half and then release you. Only as you walk outside do you realize that you had been taken to a federal courthouse.

These stories did not happen in Zimbabwe or Congo or Nicaragua. They did not happen in Russia or China or Venezuela. They happened right here in the United States of America. The first one is the story of Kenneth Walker in Louisville, whose girlfriend Breonna Taylor was murdered by police who didn’t announce that they were police and were never supposed to be in his home. It wasn’t a completely random error; the intended target was someone Breonna Taylor knew. So yes, it was possible that the intended target—who did have a legitimate warrant out for his arrest—might have been present. But how does that justify not even announcing themselves as police?

The second is the story of Mark Pettibone in Portland, who was abducted by anonymous paramilitary forces in an unmarked van. The Department of Homeland Security (an Orwellian name for an agency if ever there were) released a report on the incidents of “violent anarchists” that justified their use of such extreme measures: Most of them are graffiti or vandalism. There are a few genuinely violent incidents in there: Some throwing rocks, some pointing laser pointers at police officers’ eyes, and at least one alleged pipe bomb; but in the whole report there is only one incident listed in which any police officers were injured.

This is authoritarianism. It is not like authoritarianism; it is not moving toward authoritarianism. It is authoritarianism. Secret police in unmarked vehicles abducting people off the street is simply something that should not be allowed to happen in a liberal democracy. Right now it is rare, and for this we should be grateful; but it should not be rare, it should be non-existent. And we should continue fighting until it is. This is not a utopian dream, like imagining that we could make rape or murder non-existent. This is a policy choice. No other First World country does this. (Indeed, are we even a First World country anymore? We were supposed to be the paragon of the First World, but I’m not so sure we even belong in the category anymore.) What we have made rare they have managed to avoid entirely.

While arrest warrants are a necessary part of law enforcement, “no-knock” warrants are inherently authoritarian. Police should be required to identify themselves: Not simply that they are law enforcement, but what agency they work for, their own names and badge numbers, and the reason they are conducting the arrest. A “no-knock” warrant would already be unjust even applied in the best of circumstances (capturing an organized crime boss, perhaps); but typically they are used for drug raids (is criminalizing drugs is even right in the first place?), and in this case the person they wanted wasn’t even there.

Pettibone was at least promptly released. Walker will grieve the loss of his girlfriend for the rest of his life. Jonathan Mattingly, Brett Hankison, and Myles Cosgrove, the officers who shot Breonna Taylor, have still not been charged.

I wish that I could blame Trump for all of this and promise that it will go away when he loses the election in November (as statistical forecasts strongly predict he will). But while Trump and those who enable him have clearly accelerated and exacerbated this problem, the roots run much deeper.

For many people, particularly Black people, the United States is a de facto police state, and more or less always has been. (In fact, in most ways it’s probably better than it used to be—which isn’t to say that it is remotely acceptable right now, but to point out just how horrific it once was.) Harassment and abuse by police are commonplace, and death at the hands of police is a constant fear. Many of us are blissfully unaware of this, because we live in places where it doesn’t happen. This violence is highly concentrated: Major US cities vary in their races of police homicide by nearly a full order of magnitude.

The power of our government is unmatched. We have the third-largest standing army (after China and India, each of which has four times our population), the fourth-largest police force (in addition to China and India, add Russia to the list—though their population is less than half ours), and the largest incarcerated population in the world. Our military spending is higher than the next ten countries combined. Our intelligence services are not simply the largest in the world; the CIA alone accounts for nearly two-thirds of all worldwide intelligence spending. And while by the CIA is by far the largest, the US has over a dozen other intelligence agencies. When this power is abused—as it all too often is—the whole world feels the pain. We cannot afford to tolerate such abuses. We must stamp them out while we still can.

Getting Trump out won’t fix this. We must get him out, for a hundred thousand reasons, but that will not be nearly enough. Like hairline fractures in a steel beam that become wide gashes when the bridge is loaded, there are deep, structural flaws in our society and our system of government that are now becoming visible under the strain of crisis. I for one believe that these flaws can still be mended. But the longer we wait, the closer we come to a total collapse.