It started, like so many overwrought home optimization projects, during the pandemic.

My wife and I, like many people stuck inside, were ordering takeout more frequently. We wanted to support local restaurants, reduce the dish load, and live a little. It became clear early on that app-based delivery services like DoorDash and Uber Eats were not the best way to support local businesses. If a restaurant had its own ordering site or a preferred service, we wanted to use that—or even, heaven forfend, call the place.

The secondary issue was that we kept ordering from the same places, and we wanted to mix it up. Sometimes we'd want to pick something up nearby. Sometimes we wanted to avoid an entire category ("Too many carbs this week, no pasta") or try the newest places we knew about, or maybe a forgotten classic. Or just give me three places randomly, creative constraints, please—it's Friday.

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This holiday season, thousands of foreign-born religious workers find themselves unsure whether they'll be allowed to continue serving their communities in the coming years thanks to a backlog in green card applications. Religious leaders are pushing for solutions as the Trump administration prepares to take office next month.

Many churches and other places of worship rely on foreign-born religious workers to provide services, particularly as fewer native-born Americans enter the vocation. "From 1970 to 2020, the number of priests in the U.S. dropped by 60%, according to data from the Georgetown [University Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate]," reported the Associated Press in 2021. "This has left more than 3,500 parishes without a resident pastor."

Foreign religious workers come to the U.S. on R-1 visas, which provide a temporary pathway for "ministers and non-ministers in religious vocations and occupations." The R-1 visa is valid for five years, at which point the holder must either petition for permanent residence status or leave the country for at least a year and apply for a new R-1 visa.

Following a spring 2023 State Department change in green card allocation, religious workers began facing long wait times. The Biden administration started processing neglected and abused immigrant kids in the same green card queue as religious workers, meaning they were competing for the same limited number of green cards—just 10,000 per year. Roughly 100,000 immigrant kids joined the pool. As of this August, the A.P. noted, the backlog "stands at more than 3.5 years and could increase"—potentially up to a decade or more.

Five foreign-born priests and the Catholic Diocese of Paterson, New Jersey, sued the federal government in August over the 2023 change and the long wait times it created. Without relief, the lawsuit argued, the priests would have to "remain unlawfully in the United States" or leave the country and "abandon thousands of Roman Catholics that each Individual-Plaintiff spiritually guides." They would then have to "wait years, if not decades, outside of the United States" before seeking another R-1 visa "to return to their religious calling."

Earlier this month, several anonymous sources told The Pillar, a news site that covers the Catholic Church, that "bipartisan legislation is in the works to address the problem, and is expected to be introduced early next year." An interfaith group listed several potential fixes in a letter to the Department of State and the Department of Homeland Security last year, such as increasing the number of available visas, reducing the amount of time an R-1 holder must spend outside the U.S. before applying for a new R-1 visa, and extending the term of an R-1 visa beyond five years. The letter also called for Congress to exempt neglected and abused immigrant kids from visa limitations.

"Religious workers provide innumerable services to American communities, including culturally competent religious instruction and rituals, as well as direct social services to those in need," wrote Rev. Mark J. Seitz, bishop of El Paso and chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Committee on Migration, in a letter to Congress last summer.

"Unfortunately," he continued, "the current situation violates both Congress' intent to provide religious organizations and our communities with needed workers and its express desire to protect vulnerable immigrant youth."

The post Foreign-Born Religious Workers Are Trapped in a Green Card Backlog appeared first on Reason.com.

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Don't at me, history of international politics scholars!

American media is abuzz with news of President-elect Donald Trump's nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be the head of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Seemingly every story mentions his controversial views on topics from vaccines to fluoride in the water to raw milk—a longtime libertarian cause célèbre. Though it's hard to envision a more unlikely catalyst, RFK Jr.'s nomination may be the final push that gets raw milk across the legalization finish line.

Until the late 1800s, raw milk was simply known as "milk" and was the only game in town for Americans desiring a delicious dairy beverage. But when it was discovered that heating up products like milk could reduce the presence of potentially harmful bacteria, the pasteurization craze was underway. Given reports of thousands of babies dying from bacteria-riddled milk around this time period, pasteurization was seen as a remarkable public health breakthrough.

This set off a wave of 20th century state and local government mandates that required milk to be pasteurized. Finally, in 1987, a federal court cemented a federal ban on all interstate raw milk sales. But not long afterward, the modern organic food movement was born, and raw milk became a cult favorite among the crunchy political left. Now, raw milk has increasingly been adopted as a sort of culture war status symbol on the political right.

"Long a fringe health food for new-age hippies and fad-chasing liberal foodies, raw milk has won over the hearts and minds of GOP legislators and regulators in the last few years," writes Marc Novicoff in Politico. In addition to its inherent deregulatory appeal, Novicoff recounts that "conservatives discovered that raw milk fit neatly inside a worldview that was increasingly skeptical of credentialed expertise."

Over the last decade, numerous states have passed laws to legalize raw milk, leading food policy expert Baylen Linnekin to declare that the "raw milk restoration is underway." Could it now be about to kick into overdrive, potentially even spreading to an overturn of the federal interstate sales ban?

Whatever one's views of RFK's potential adeptness—or lack thereof—at navigating the federal bureaucracy to pursue his agenda, he may not be the only member of Trump's cabinet to be a raw milk enthusiast. Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.), who has run a bill in Congress for the last decade to overturn the federal ban, is heavily rumored to be the next Secretary of Agriculture.

To further contribute to the momentum, there is at least some evidence that the political left may embrace raw milk again as well. Although most states that have passed recent raw milk reforms skew red, states like Colorado have seen Democratic lawmakers introduce raw milk bills this past year (with Governor Jared Polis supporting the effort). Additionally, deep-blue Delaware just became the latest state to legalize raw milk. According to the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, a majority of states have now legalized raw milk in some form and only a handful still ban it outright.

At the federal level, in addition to raw milk's ideological virtue-signaling appeal to GOP lawmakers and administration officials, Senators like Cory Booker (D–N.J.) have taken strong anticorporate agriculture stances during their time in office, thereby making it at least conceivable they could join Republican colleagues in overturning the federal ban.

The pushback, however, is still significant. Numerous studies and health experts warn of the dangers of raw milk compared to pasteurized milk. Data from the Centers for Disease Control found that between 1998 and 2018, there were 202 outbreaks of foodborne illnesses from raw milk, which led to 2,645 people becoming ill, 228 hospitalizations, and three deaths.

While few would seriously dispute that pasteurized milk reduces the chance of acquiring a food-borne illness, it raises an interesting question: What should the comparison point be for raw milk in terms of safety? Should it be compared to pasteurized milk, or is it fairer to compare it to other raw (or even non-raw) foods?

For instance, raw oysters—a delicacy enjoyed by many Americans that are not legally prohibited—kill around 100 people per year, compared to the 3 raw milk deaths the CDC found over two decades. A 2024 salmonella outbreak linked to backyard poultry—another legal activity in most jurisdictions—resulted in 125 hospitalizations and one death in less than a year. In the 12-year period from 1998 to 2010, the CDC recorded 1,345 illnesses, 104 hospitalizations, and 19 deaths
from deli meat, while even the humble fruit salad caused 1,323 illnesses, 29 hospitalizations, and 1 death during this period.

In other words, raw milk doesn't appear to be uniquely dangerous compared to other completely legal and freely available foods but is still prohibited in a handful of states and subject to a federal ban. As improbable as it may seem, RFK's nomination—with a potential Rep. Massie add-on nomination—could be what finally breaks open the raw milk legal dam.

The post Is America Finally Having Its Raw Milk Moment? appeared first on Reason.com.

I.

In 1980, game theorist Robert Axelrod ran a famous Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournament.

He asked other game theorists to send in their best strategies in the form of “bots”, short pieces of code that took an opponent’s actions as input and returned one of the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma outputs of COOPERATE or DEFECT. For example, you might have a bot that COOPERATES a random 80% of the time, but DEFECTS against another bot that plays DEFECT more than 20% of the time, except on the last round, where it always DEFECTS, or if its opponent plays DEFECT in response to COOPERATE.

In the “tournament”, each bot “encountered” other bots at random for a hundred rounds of Prisoners’ Dilemma; after all the bots had finished their matches, the strategy with the highest total utility won.

To everyone’s surprise, the winner was a super-simple strategy called TIT-FOR-TAT:

1. Always COOPERATE on the first move.

2. Then do whatever your opponent did last round.

This was so boring that Axelrod sponsored a second tournament specifically for strategies that could displace TIT-FOR-TAT. When the dust cleared, TIT-FOR-TAT still won - although some strategies could beat it in head-to-head matches, they did worst against each other, and when all the points were added up TIT-FOR-TAT remained on top.

In certain situations, this strategy is dominated by a slight variant, TIT-FOR-TAT-WITH-FORGIVENESS. That is, in situations where a bot can “make mistakes” (eg “my finger slipped”), two copies of TIT-FOR-TAT can get stuck in an eternal DEFECT-DEFECT equilibrium against each other; the forgiveness-enabled version will try cooperating again after a while to see if its opponent follows. Otherwise, it’s still state-of-the-art.

The tournament became famous because - well, you can see how you can sort of round it off to morality. In a wide world of people trying every sort of con, the winning strategy is to be nice to people who help you out and punish people who hurt you. But in some situations, it’s also worth forgiving someone who harmed you once to see if they’ve become a better person. I find the occasional claims to have successfully grounded morality in self-interest to be facile, but you can at least see where they’re coming from here. And pragmatically, this is good, common-sense advice.

For example, compare it to one of the losers in Axelrod’s tournament. COOPERATE-BOT always cooperates. A world full of COOPERATE-BOTS would be near-utopian. But add a single instance of its evil twin, DEFECT-BOT, and it folds immediately. A smart human player, too, will easily defeat COOPERATE-BOT: the human will start by testing its boundaries, find that it has none, and play DEFECT thereafter (whereas a human playing against TIT-FOR-TAT would soon learn not to mess with it). Again, all of this seems natural and common-sensical. Infinitely-trusting people, who will always be nice to everyone no matter what, are easily exploited by the first sociopath to come around. You don’t want to be a sociopath yourself, but prudence dictates being less-than-infinitely nice, and reserving your good nature for people who deserve it.

Reality is more complicated than a game theory tournament. In Iterated Prisoners’ Dilemma, everyone can either benefit you or harm you an equal amount. In the real world, we have edge cases like poor people, who haven’t done anything evil but may not be able to reciprocate your generosity. Does TIT-FOR-TAT help the poor? Stand up for the downtrodden? Care for the sick? Domain error; the question never comes up.

Still, even if you can’t solve every moral problem, it’s at least suggestive that, in those domains where the question comes up, you should be TIT-FOR-TAT and not COOPERATE-BOT.

This is why I’m so fascinated by the early Christians. They played the doomed COOPERATE-BOT strategy and took over the world.

II.

Matthew 5:

You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you . . . If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that?

Talk is cheap, but The Rise Of Christianity suggests the early Christians pulled it off. For example, even though pagan institutions would not help indigent Christians, Christians tried to give charity to Christian and pagan alike, even going so far as to help nurse pagans during the plague (when nursing a victim conferred a high risk of contagion and death). Even Emperor Julian, an enemy of Christianity, admitted it lived up to its own standards:

When the poor happened to be neglected and overlooked by the priests, the impious Galileans observed this and devoted themselves to benevolence . . . [they] support not only their poor, but ours as well, [when] everyone can see that our people lack aid from us.”

In 1 Corinthians 6, Paul is asked whether it is acceptable for one Christian to pursue a lawsuit against another Christian in a pagan court. He answers:

The very fact that you have lawsuits among you means you have been completely defeated already. Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be cheated?

We get a similar picture from the stories of the martyrs. Many of them prayed for the Romans while the Romans were in the process of torturing and killing them; Polycarp even cooked them a meal.

If the Christians had merely been TIT-FOR-TAT, it would be easy to tell a story of their victory. The Roman Empire was corrupt and decadent to the core. People were looking for a community they could trust. Christianity offered access to a better class of friends who wouldn’t immediately rob or betray you when your guard was down. By providing a superior alternative to the low-trust pagan world, it was irresistible on a purely rational economic basis.

But this story sounds more worthy of the mystery cults. Mystery cults are a great structure for mutual aid; we see this today in groups like the Freemasons (cf. Backscratcher Clubs). Everybody knows who’s on the inside (and needs to be mutually aided) and who’s on the outside (and can be ignored). The initiatory structure holds off freeloaders and makes sure the people on the inside are of approximately equal rank (so that you get as many benefits as you give) and can be held accountable if they don’t contribute.

Since Christianity did better than the mystery cults, there must have been some reason that COOPERATE-BOT beat TIT-FOR-TAT in the particular environment of Roman religion, defying all normal game theoretic logic.

III.

Is this a consistent feature of COOPERATE-BOT strategies, or was it just luck?

This is hard to say, because in all normal cases it’s impossible to follow a COOPERATE-BOT strategy at scale and for any period of time.

Consider the Quakers, who gave it a better try than most. They were persecuted by the British and fled to America (is this kosher? it sort of seems like resisting evil). There they founded the colony of Pennsylvania, intended to be a utopia of pacifism and benevolence. They were very serious about this; history records many Quakers who were arrested or even killed rather than compromise their principles, and the British Crown seized Pennsylvania from the Quakers a few times because they wouldn’t make extremely cheap gestures like pay taxes or swear oaths.

But in the end, the Crown frog-boiled the Quakers into compliance. They promised to return self-government if the Quakers would budge an inch - in one compromise, if they agreed to pay taxes that could go to non-combat functions of the military. The Quakers eventually agreed, and the British ratcheted up their demands the next time. Finally, in 1755, some Indians launched a major assault on Pennsylvania, and all the Quakers voluntarily resigned from government to let the non-Quaker Pennsylvanians (who by this time outnumbered them) conduct the war without restraint.

The Quakers performed better than most COOPERATE-BOTs. They stuck to their principles most of the time, and in the end their religion survived. But look deeper, and you see a gradual process of surrender to reality. First was the flight to America, an implicit admission that living was better than being martyred for the faith. Then came the various compromises; an implicit admission that getting to keep self-government while being 99% pure was better than being subjects while 100% pure. Finally, they gave up Pennsylvania itself rather than be wiped out, again choosing the practical option over martyrdom. My point isn’t to knock the Quakers, who may come in a close 2nd in “historical groups that stuck to their cooperative principles despite all odds” and were certainly more ethical than I am. My point is that even very committed groups of religious fanatics fail the non-violent COOPERATE-BOT strategy eventually.

Or maybe the ones who didn’t fail were wiped out? I hear good things about the Cathars, but we can’t know for sure because they were very thoroughly killed off - unrepentant to the last.

Are there any other groups who deserve mention in this section besides early Christians, Quakers, and Cathars? I think some German and Russian sects have tried similar strategies, though they mostly failed and I don’t know much about them.

Not exactly the same, but maybe rhyming: what about modern liberalism? To the monarchs and dictators of the past, free speech might seem kind of like COOPERATE-BOT in a limited domain: the idea that elites shouldn’t make any forceful/legal effort to protect their ideological and spiritual position must sound almost as crazy as them not making any forceful/legal effort to protect themselves if attacked, or to prevent themselves from getting cheated. It is, in some sense, a unilateral surrender in the war of ideas; fascists and communists will do their best to crush liberalism, but liberals cannot ban discussion of fascism or communism. The fact that this, too, has worked, makes me think early Christianity wasn’t just a one-off, but suggests some larger point.

IV.

Still, I don’t really know what it is. Here are some weak theories:

1. Advertisement: Being kind to outsiders is good PR and encourages those outsiders to join you. This effect is stronger than the corresponding disincentive (that they won’t get much better treatment than they’re getting already, and they will have to be nice to other outsiders in their turn).

2. Selecting a moral elite: The only people willing to put up with the COOPERATE-BOT strategy are hyperscrupulous saints. A movement that starts out with hyperscrupulous saints is naturally high-trust and admirable. The benefits of filtering for these people outweigh the obvious cost (namely, that most people won’t join your movement, or will burn out).

3. Overwhelm downward adjustment: If you assume all movements lie and downgrade their claims 90% out of cynicism, then a movement which merely portrays itself as helping members won’t even help members, but a movement which portrays itself as radiating universal love to all mankind might at least help its members.

4. Eliminate transaction costs from means-testing: In a typical backscratchers club, most of the social mores evolve as ways to eliminate free-riders. If you explicitly accept free-riders, you can cut a lot of red tape and present a much more accepting environment.

5. Maybe people are actually good: Maybe the liberals are right about everything, and most human evil comes from misunderstanding + a sense of being excluded. If you’re so accepting of everybody that misunderstandings don’t matter, and you don’t exclude people, then people mostly don’t try to take advantage of you or give you trouble.

6. Greater psychological appeal: Maybe “be infinitely nice all the time” is more attractive and psychologically stable than “be nice in X, Y, Z circumstances”, and the sheer endorphin rush people get from letting their moral impulses run wild is so addictive that it outweighs the obvious cost.

7. Greater heroic appeal: Similar to the above. Historians of war have remarked that you don’t just inspire soldiers by saying “don’t worry, this campaign will be easy”. You can sometimes inspire them by saying that this will be the most difficult thing they’ve ever done, and it’s heroic for them to even consider such an enterprise. In the same way, maybe “give 1% more to the worthy poor” is boring, but “devote your entire life to loving everybody including your enemies” is shocking and heroic enough to excite a certain type of person.

8. Something something limits of prediction: It’s a truism that naive consequentialism doesn’t actually have the best consequences; for example, it may seem like a good idea to steal money and then give it to the poor, but (as SBF et al discovered) this ends up being good neither for you nor for the poor, since you eventually make a miscalculation, get discovered, turn people against you, turn people against your cause, etc. Even if you try really hard to make a clever plan rather than a dumb plan, you’ll eventually make a mistake and your clever plan will crash and burn. Therefore, even if you’re a deep-seated consequentialist, you should avoid acting as a consequentialist and instead follow normal-person morality. But maybe there’s a second, deeper layer to this insight. Maybe even following normal-person morality is trying too hard to be clever and galaxy-brained in a way that never works. Maybe, it too, collapses into counterproductivity after you make your first bad prediction. Maybe you should actually be following COOPERATE-BOT morality instead.

9. Epiphenomenal: COOPERATE-BOT isn’t really a good strategy, but is an unavoidable side effect of something else valuable. For example, maybe you couldn’t have Christians who loved God so much without having them be extremely loving and charitable people. The most dramatic version of this hypothesis is that God is real, and loving thy enemy is an epiphenomenon of following the actual Divine Law.

Do I really believe any of these?

I guess that question cashes out to “if you were involved in a movement, would you recommend COOPERATE-BOT as a strategy today?” The movements I’m actually involved in (rationalists, effective altruists) occasionally have slightly related debates. One of them involves PR: a pragmatist faction wants to stay away from hit-piece-writers, network with friendly journalists to ensure positive coverage, keep our best side forward, and de-emphasize (not deny or lie about) embarrassing bad sides. A COOPERATE-BOT faction thinks that’s what the Pharisees and tax collectors are doing, but that we’re trying to be more epistemically cooperative than everyone else and it’s our responsibility to just dump the exact contents of our brains out to anybody who asks us any question, without regard for the consequences.

There’s a parallel debate in charity funding. A pragmatist faction wants to make sure everything we fund is PR-friendly and won’t make everybody hate us or be incredibly embarrassing if it fails; a COOPERATE-BOT faction thinks we have a moral duty to fund the exact object-level highest-utility projects even if everyone will hate us for it and we’ll never get another penny of funding ever again. I wrote up an allegorical history of this conflict here. I lean towards the pragmatist side of most of these fights, if only because I’ve seen enough PR disasters to know that nobody gives you any slack for having stumbled into them only because of your exceptional moral purity.

But even without endorsing the full strategy, there’s a vibe there that I really like. Whenever I discuss moral issues, people in the comments section here will do the whole post-Christian Nietzschean thing: “If you admit moral obligations to people who can’t pay you back, aren’t you just cucked? Aren’t you unilaterally surrendering in this memetic war we’re in, destined to be replaced by civilizations/ideologies with more continence in limiting their altruism to useful people bound in bilateral contracts? Who the heck cares if some foreigner or animal is suffering? Isn’t that just pathological, a proof that you don’t have the steely will that it takes to survive?”

I admit these people’s position makes rational sense. But on the deepest level, I don’t believe it. There was an old 2010s meme video about all the characters in all the comics and TV shows fighting, and in the end the one who came out on top was “Mr. Rogers, in a bloodstained sweater”. Human history is the cosmic version of that meme. After all the Vikings and steppe nomads and Spartans have had their way with each other, the leading ideology of the 21st century thus far appears to be a hyper-Christian bleeding-heart liberalism: COOPERATE-BOT in a bloodstained sweater. I don’t know why this keeps happening, but I wouldn’t count it out.