CharonY

Depends a lot on the metrics you are using. Global trade has a much higher volume than it had in past times. The current world trade volume is somewhere around 25 trillion. In the 1950 that was about 62 billion according to the world bank. So the absolute impact is much higher. Whether Trump is getting suggestions from Russia or not is probably secondary as whatever he is doing is not really distinguishable from being, you know, a moron.

I think we are about to find out. And the direction it is going is apparently to cover up stupidity, rather than trying to correct it. Probably, though even then I would think (without having any real knowledge on that matter) that for example the relative size and types of economies would matter, too. For example. the US has transitioned from a manufacturing economy to a service economy. While the latter does not ship goods, it still results in a huge amount of money influx (and in many cases more than balances deficits). Likewise, if a smaller country delivers valuable resources to a larger one, but cannot afford the higher-end products that the other economy produces, it can cause an imbalance, but as the larger economy ultimately might make profits within its borders, it is not really a loss. In other words, trade is clearly not a zero-sum game and having someone trying to control it without really understanding it, does not lead to good results. Same issue with central planning of Soviet economy.

Tariffs and trade deficits are not related to debt, however. And generally speaking most do not think that a trade deficit on its own is a meaningful indicator.

Trade wars are also an expression of nationalism and has at least some ideological foundation. Also, one should add that the idea of free trade was mostly a post WW idea. In some ways protectionism was the norm rather the exception in the olden days.

Maybe beside the point, but while this four occupations categorization goes all the back to the Zhou dynasty and while certain parts of the hierarchy tend to be fairly stable, the esteem for farmers moved a bit around. While they were placed above merchants, they were still considered part of the lower class during Tang. I think (and might misremember) the elevation of farmers coincided somewhat with the decline of aristocracy and the rise of scholar-officials in the following Song period. Merchants had always and interesting mix as they had significant practical power due their wealth (and had means for social mobility by sponsoring family and other folks to participate in Imperial exams) but despite that, or perhaps because of that, they had low social standing. I think the Chinese might see it as double insult. One, disregarding the technological standing of China, but also two, the attempt to use the term peasant as an insult. Though I suspect that the latter might be more an issue with older folks as the younger ones,

If one wanted to be systematic, one would need to 1) list out all ingredients and their respective concentrations. 2) identify all toxicological data for each ingredient and sort by level of evidence. There are different levels of evidence ranging e.g. from cell cultures, which can be fairly far away for some toxic indicators, to animal tests to evidence in humans. The latter is usually the best but they are rare as we do not purposefully harm folks (hopefully). 3) identify evidence for trickier aspects of toxicity, such as long-term use (e.g., evidence for bioaccumulation, carcinogenic effects, etc.) 4) estimate a threshold value that can be generally considered to be safe 5) compare point 1) with all these aspects and provide a best estimate of potential harm. The toxicological knowledge will evolve over time if people do more research.

It is astonishing to me that folks are talking about a constitutional crisis, yet the broader reaction to this is in the population is muted, to put it mildly. Approval rating still sit at around 40%, for example.

Not precisely my field, but I think evidence is mounting that inflammation and associated interactions with our immune system are some of the major drivers of dementia. This comes from different areas of research and is not limited to viral infections. For example, major surgery also triggers inflammation pathways and in patients with stronger responses, the likelihood of rapid dementia onset is higher.

They wrote a beautiful letter....

You and me, brother. I do some work in that area and it ain't a pretty picture I am seeing.

In a narrowly defined topic, for sure. Take medical health experts and ask them whether there is a net benefit of population-wide measles vaccination in terms of overall health burden, you will get very clear answers from actual experts. The reason is that this question is a) anchored on a set of metrics that are well defined (health burden is perhaps a bit vague but is used here as a proxy of a whole range of measures that can be used) b) is based well-understood mechanisms, and c) has a host of both, research as well as empirical data that clearly point at a conclusion. This is not a good example of an attempt at a very narrow space. The issue here is "success". You could instead ask the question: how do tariffs impact aggregate wealth? This could result in much more targeted arguments. Also, while I do not have specific expertise, I doubt that there are many economists who would argue that broad tariffs are somehow going to increase aggregate wealth. The negative impact on the economy are fairly well-known but I have not seen an honest argument how it would increase wealth. Also, things are usually not a just a simple pro and con, but about what possible mechanisms are there and what the impacts of these issues are. As mentioned already, the more we know, the easier it is to form a consensus. There is no good reason to assume that a consensus can never be formed, we have in fact many of those.

No, even worse, they equal 1. I.e. they are not doing anything. I have criticized that a bit off topic in the other tariff thread (which presumably was not really on tariffs). They had this whole page rambling on and ultimately what they say is that we calculated the trade deficit and multiplied it by 1. But to appear clever they chose add two constants which cancel each other out. I did not pick up on the fact that they might have used LLM to do that, I chose to assume stupidity. But again, it seems that we have to multiply stupid with the laziness factor. And unfortunately they do not cancel each other. That is not the case- everyone, including areas with no human populations got a flat 10%.

I think you should take a step back and take a broader view. It is a bit speciest to dismiss the work of a whole group of folks, just because they lack opposable thumbs, or articulating fingers. Also, I assume that sardines are a perfectly culturally appropriate way of compensation, even if not regurgitated. Listen, the world is global, no to ways around it and it is unfair to dismiss the ability of someone just because of SQUAWK, sorry, I mean cultural differences. Except leopard seals and orcas. Can't trust those bastards.

Considering that the majority of discussions you found point to an anti-tariff slant, doesn't it suggest that for some topics there is, in fact, consensus? I.e. if there is little contra it is likely that there are simply no good models to support it. That is ultimately how consensus look like. If that is not what you are looking for, could you elaborate?

Sounds like a plan. But please, don't blame we if you catch autism

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08800-x As the title of the study suggests, researchers found evidence that shingles vaccine might delay or prevent dementia. It is based on prior work which have found that herpesviruses might be implicated in certain forms of dementia. The study also found evidence that beyond the virus there might be some modulation of the immune response that could contribute to dementia protection.

Isn't it great? We now have an natural experiment where we got two variables in one go! I would argue that the midterms are a critical milestone. If the voters decide to keep empowering Trump, the US has truly fallen into autocracy and fascism. I would agree that the existing systems have shown to crumble by the power of not caring and this might open the door to other extremists. That being said, I suspect that being not stupid really matters if there are levers left that need to be manipulated. If, for example the GOP cruises through the midterms despite all the visible and tangible harms they have been doing, you could put a wet Mentos in charge and folks would continue to run any evil agenda they might come up with to feed the mob.

It is getting a bit off-topic here, but the tariff announcements by the administration demonstrate to me an incredibly lazy approach that basically just assumes that all trade deficits are caused by tariffs and other forms of "cheating". The way they justified their methodology is eerily close to what students do if they want to appear clever without really investing time into understanding the issue (and extensive use of LLMs). Just look at the stupid long explanation https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/reciprocal-tariff-calculations. Looking at the equation it is clear that they did nothing more than calculating the trade deficit (with constants selected to not influence the calculation, i.e. being 1). The US tariffs are therefore nothing more than half of the trade deficit, a calculation that an aide might have done in their coffee break. Going back to OP, discussing this level of stupid among experts would likely result in derision for the lazy methodology, simply because the justification is so convoluted (and ultimately wrong), just to appear clever. My guess is that a group of educated economists would just feel at least mildly insulted when faced to discuss the implementation of US tariffs. The US is crashing the world economy because of vague ideas and being too lazy to actually read up on them.

To be fair, this thread is about free speech. We should add another for trampling habeas corpus or perhaps just generally trampling on rights and the constitution. But I do agree, the outcry of vanishing someone into a foreign prison, blatantly admitting to the "error" (referring to the person who was known by ICE to be in protected status) and then refusing to remedy the situation by bringing it back is rather disheartening. There will be more "errors". Already, I have colleagues living in the US either as greencard holders, but also dual citizens who are very afraid to travel. And those are generally well-recognizable and comparatively privileged folks.

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I think it is again a situation where both elements apply. It is stupid, but there is also a vague idea behind it. On the least ideological side there is simply the desire to keep the fires of culture wars going. It has given right-wing politics a huge boost and they want to keep that in addition of other emotional issues, such as immigration, nativism, and so on. Folks like Bannon have openly mentioned that as a key strategy before the first administration. In addition, they have realized that breaking up shared realities is incredibly powerful to get rid of any accountability (fake news, luegenpresse, etc.). This effectively neuters media and public control. Institutions that are involved in fact-finding include courts (and we see ongoing assaults there) but also universities, where one of the goal of research is to understand complex and intricate issues. This can lead to political undesirable facts. This includes issues like climate change, evolution, vaccines, but also sex and gender, which is used as a wedge issue to discredit other of science. It doesn't really matter in that context whether the mice are transgenic or transgender (especially as one could manipulate hormone receptors and observe developmental changes....). There is a concerted effort to replace deep understanding with "common sense", i.e. just replace it with things that feel emotionally true and can be whatever folks want. Thus, scaring institutions involved in fact-checking into compliance provides control and further removes accountability. That is pretty much what for example the Soviets did. I am sure that they are doing that in stupid ways and many of the folks involved are genuinely stupid. But I don't think that there is no intent behind it as a whole. I think of it as an emergent property of stupid and malicious hunger for power.

And this shows that LLM are not necessarily very good in providing clarity, despite their claim of doing so. I think there are economic folks are telling him that broad tariffs generally speaking are a bad idea. However, in his inner circle there are also proponents for tariffs. Looking at Project 2025, there is for example Navarro who proposed reciprocal tariffs to balance trade and apparently he believes that it has the potential to move supply chains back to the US. I assume that TFG hears this various opinions and since he is generally not able to synthesize information well, he is going just to pick and choose parts that he likes. Which then results in a haphazard implementation that looks amateurish.

I am mostly with MigL on this one but I would add two more stipulations. One, which can be tricky in today's atmosphere, is that folks are going to discuss in good faith. This is fairly common in scientific conferences and roundtables and expert panels, where at least quasi-consensus can be reached. This does not meant that there is a singular answer that all can agree on, but rather there is a consensus regarding the current state of knowledge regarding a particular topic, frequently with a list of open questions, areas of uncertainty or disagreement and knowledge gaps to be addressed. In these contexts, experts basically outline their viewpoint and tend to calibrate it with additional information gained by the other experts on the table. However, with a random assortment of folks who just happen to have expertise in the area, but might have different motivations (e.g. if someone works for the government and doesn't want to get fired), things may be different. The second is basically what I mentioned above already, and is related to how well a system is understood and what degrees of freedom the question offers. If the question is broad (like the overall impact on the US economy) there is likely going to be a clear consensus on immediate and well-understood effects (e.g. increase in consumer pricing), probably more variability in areas with less data (e.g. how will individual companies react in the long-term) and so on. Also, the more granular the answer is supposed to be, the less consensus is likely as often detailed knowledge is needed. For example, tariffs can increase competitiveness for domestic manufacturing based on standard models, however, it might not be true in all industries which could be specialized knowledge. And again, I think that certainty depends less on the format of discussion, but how well a system is understood in relation to the question under discussion.

This might be a bit off-topic, depending on what OP had in mind, but I think the short-term effects and especially because of the way it is implemented, as you mentioned is pretty much universally seen as detrimental. I think where folks might have different opinions is what will happen if broad tariffs would be maintained for a very long time).

There are at least three factors in question. The first is regarding the knowledge of participants and having a discussion of folks with at some expertise on the topic has high potential of improving the quality of discussions. The part that I would add is some level of moderation to keep discussions on-topic. The second part that is more or less only implied is regarding certainty of of a consensus. That would be highly dependent on the topic and how complex it is. If there are knowledge gaps, more research might be needed before experts can be certain about the topic. The third factor is how well a question is defined. In this case, good or bad could mean a lot of things. A good question is critical for high quality discussions and research. One could ask specifics, such as what outcome are tariffs likely to have on specific measures. Or even broader ones, like what is the impact on the labour market? But ideally it has to be something measurable and therefore defined.