The only way to prevent sn-risk is to control the land they would come from. Either directly or by proxy. Ukraine has the last of the steppe land that is not Russian territory or a Russian puppet.
The Ukrainian Steppe Nature Reserve is in Donetsk:
I believe that is probably the situation Russian and Chinese military planners wargaming invasions of Mongolia are really concerned about. Or at least should be.
It's ironic because the original Russian state, the one centered around Moscow (a.k.a. "The City Beyond the Forest") started as enforcers and tax collectors for the Mongols of The Golden Horde. The rise of Moscow as a state was primarily due to the influence of the Tartars. They eventually becames strong enough to conquer the older Russian states of Novgorod and Kyiv.
Of course, then you'd need to hold the Polish gap to address the risk of Prussians, and Finland, and the Baltic states, and. . .
But to summarize his take on the Geopolitics of Russia, Russia is a wide swath of useful land, surrounded by a much wider swath of useless (and indefensible!) land, surrounded by defensible borders with a few gaps that inconvenient other ethnicities tend to live in. So the plan from Ivan to Peter to Catherine to Josef to Vladimir has been to expand until you control the lands surrounding those entry points that can be manned with a reasonable number of soldiers.
He called the expansion into Crimea, and subsequently Ukraine (and also a number of other conflicts) years in advance, which suggests his methodology has something to say for itself.
I don't believe that quoting Chomsky in this crowd (on any matter besides linguistics) will endear either you or your point to your audience. More to the point, as a matter of tone and presentation, that really isn't how we talk to one another here. You may have more luck being heard if you're more direct, less bombastic, and generally more polite.
Russia's geopolitical goal is to control all the access points (e.g. mountain passes) to the Eurasian Steppe which are historical invasion corridors, from the Mongols to Napoleon to Hitler. During the USSR they plugged all the gaps, now they no longer do. Two of those gaps are on the opposite side of Ukraine, controlling Ukraine would make Russia's borders more defensible.
they basically are, they defeated/conquered/integrated/conscripted them. And just like the the Chinese-steppe horde symbiotic relationship, it went both ways.
Accorting to Azar Gat's War in Human Civilization, the deciding event in the balance between established civilizations and nomadic ones was the Industrial Revolution. Prior to that, empires had trouble maintaining a hardened military that was both numerous and loyal, leaving vulnerabilities that nomads could exploit, but afterward, they could just use their massive infrastructure advantage to swamp the nomads in materiel.
According to Keith Otterbein's How War Began, the deciding event was the spread of railroads (part of the industrial revolution, of course) because it finally allowed centralized states to maintain military control over large areas of land not suitable for agriculture. Previously, any non-SN army stationed on the steppe had to be arduously supplied from home, which meant the steppe could only be conquered temporarily--the nomads would always eventually rise again.
There's a clear pattern of building fortresses (with modern weaponry) to establish military control of the key points in the area (and, these being proto-modernist planners, in gaps in between). These allow the development of industrial-society settlement in these places (basically agricultural or mining where appropriate), and these necessitate the construction of a rapid communication network, which allows the whole process to start again. This was the Roman and Persian model (due to technology limited to the edges of stepped) and the model used in the American West, so it seems pretty standard.
Railways made it easier to do the communication bit, and therefore possible to expand further into steppes.
Adam Smith has an earlier version of the argument, pointing out that in antiquity the barbarians were a threat to the civilized, now the civilized are a threat to the barbarians.
The state that we now call Russia—that evolved from the Slavic kingdom centered around Moscow—has always been expansionist in character. The excuses for this behavior may have changed over the centuries. But it's always been about controlling the wealth to benefit the aristocracy (or later for Communist leadership and the post-Communist kleptocrats), and it was backed by a pan-Slavic religious ideology. Ukraine is one of the most fertile areas in Europe, and it has outlets to the Mediterranean. That's why Putin wants it.
Your interpretation of this party was negative? It sounded like a super interesting party to me. Such visionary people. But I've lived in the US and having to do everything by car was too large a quality of life reduction for me.
So it's the Netherlands for me; the cities here are so nice that I don't understand that Dutch cities don't dominate the liveable cities indices. Perhaps it's the dark rainy winters? Because Amsterdam can easily beat Auckland (NZ) or Copenhagen in my opinion.
Yes, but the fun part is that out of 100 of these people, one will end up a billionaire, and another will end up setting the cultural agenda for the next decade. The best party game is guessing which ones.
Whatever about software, I think that most of whatever culture that originated in the Bay Area stays there. And we are probably way past peak startup era.
Wealth inequality is high enough that there's more money to be made convincing investors you have some revolutionary new thing they should dump billions into than actually selling products to people. So all the smart people in the world get filtered into coming up with business pitches that might fool investors instead of actually doing useful things.
You're not thinking the brilliance of capitalism all the way through. An investment scam is basically a way to separate idle wealth from idiots, so that it can re-enter circulation and do something useful again. It's true it has to go through a period of being spent at the French Laundry and on having the Model S detailed weekly, but think of all the wage slave waiters and buffers who are thereby acquiring their daily bread.
Well he *would* have been, had his business model been to sell the wealthy bishops who wandered through Sherwood some kind of useless status symbol. "My Lord Father Fatty! Have you thought about how freaking awesome it would be to have a demonstration of impossibly skilled archery at your next convocation by the famous Robin o' Locksley? Shooting apples clean off a serving wench's head? Everyone's doing it, I tell you, we're booked up through St. Shroom's Day -- but as an old friend I can squeeze you in for 50 gold pieces, if you pay in advance."
Wage slave if I’m not mistaken there a 20,000,001 bowl of rice a day slaves in China and everyone wants to buy their shit because it’s cheaper if that’s stopped the wage slaves might have a chance of becoming entrepreneurs
I think your use of the term Wage slave is so derogatory you might not be worth talking to
(For the record, the Manchu hordes were not really hordes by that point, and they took power by intervening in an existing Ming civil war in which quite a lot of their army was Ming deserters. It's a very good joke but it's not really historically accurate.)
Oh crap Burja is here! Seriously, Empire Theory should be illustrated (or at least made into an infographic) by people like Jessica Hagy. It is obvious but most don't know it.
A young man slides up to you. "Hey, I haven't seen you since high school!"
It's John, you haven't seen him since high school.
"You know, you were always a real self-starter. May I interest you in a business opportunity?"
"I..." you stammer.
"Here, let me 'show you the plan.'" He starts scribbling on the wall (which turns out to be a whiteboard), furiously drawing circles. "The entire financial system is setup to fundamentally reward middlemen. Rent-seekers who contribute nothing, but just impoverish the rest of us." He draws a big red X through a particularly large circle in the middle with a flourish.
"Thanks to the power of the blockchain, we can finally put a stop to this. Here's how it works. See this?" He pulls out a hardware wallet with a neon display on the front. "This is an NFT for the AmCoin catalog. You can use this to mint AmStuff NFT's for any product you would normally consume in your life -- toothpaste, shoe polish, laundry detergent -- even coca-cola! Then, you can burn those NFT's on an AmChain smart contract, and the products will be delivered to your door the next day."
"How is this a business opportunity?"
"Okay, there's the good part. We cut out the middlemen, see?"
You don't see. He continues anyways.
"Through the power of on-chain smart contracts, you can become your own distributor. Once you've bought enough products and built up enough on-chain reputation points, you will be able to mint your own AmCoin NFT catalogs. Everyone you distribute these to is cryptographically locked to minting AmStuff on your 'UpChain' until they level up to become distributors too."
"And the business opportunity...?"
"Right. So every time one of your recruits mints an AmStuff, they do that on your UpChain, and it sends a portion of their purchase to your wallet. You see? We cut out the middleman and pass the business opportunity on to you. The fat cats don't own us anymore!"
"Sounds, um, great."
"It really is. Now, after you've become a direct distributor, you're going to want to climb through the ranks so you can earn more money. Every one of your recruit's "UpChain" connecting them to you is your "DownChain" connecting you to them. Once you have enough profit-driving DownChains, you get to upgrade your AmJewel NFT. Once you've become your own distributor, it goes to Silver Tier, then Gold. As you keep grinding you'll eventually get to Ruby, then Sapphire, Emerald, and finally Diamond. Once you've gone Diamond, you've really made it."
"So you've gone Diamond?"
"No, I'm Gold tier right now, but my UpChain distributor is really great and has been sending me all these awesome tools." He slaps his forehead. "I can't believe I forgot to tell you about tools!"
"Tools?"
"Yeah!" He pulls out his phone and brings up some kind of proprietary podcast app. "This is another great innovation. You can get all your tools on AmCast. We call all our motivational and training materials 'tools' because you use them to build your own independent business. Tools are really important. Whenever you're in the car, or exercising, or sleeping, you really need to stick your airpods in and blast some tools on AmCast. If you're serious about building an independent business you really need to plug in and get this information."
"What's AmCast?"
"It's really great. AmCast has solved the problem of digital scarcity for motivational training tools. To ensure peak efficiency you need get your tools directly from an experienced advisor, your UpChain distributor. Every motivational tool they give you is cryptographically signed on the blockchain as an AmTool NFT. This makes sure nobody can pirate or plagiarize them, and this way we make sure they can only be played in the AmCast app. That's how you know it's secure."
"And you just download these AmTools from AmCast, or...?"
"Oh no, you buy them from your UpChain distributor. But it's a really great investment, because you're building a business see? And since they're NFTs, they're only going to go up in value. When you become your own distributor you can sell them to your DownChain at a profit. Here, I've got about 30 I can offload to you, I'll give you an incredible deal for them. "
"Before you do that, can you 'show me the plan' again?"
He turns back to his whiteboard and continues to furiously draw circles. You melt into the crowd while his back is turned.
I, for one, would love to go to a party where everyone had a Scott Alexander-style thought experiment ministory to introduce themselves with. I guess this is why people pay Bay Area rents.
(Reminds me - looking forward to the Boston ACX meetup next week!)
I don't think so. It's close but not exactly. Literally alpha is beating the market so metaphorically what it means is your ability to outperform the baseline. I've heard it used this way, like saying that someone's connections were their alpha.
That sounds exactly the same to me, except with "beating the market" instead of "advantage in the system" and "outperform[ing] the baseline" instead of "[being put] ahead [...of the baseline]".
This is right. In finance, beta is your systematic risk (ie, the returns you would expect to achieve based on having market exposure). Alpha, on the other hand, is your idiosyncratic risk (ie, returns above and unique to your portfolio). Generally you expect alphas to reduce over time as more investors catch on to your investing strategy. So in this context, saying there's Alpha left means there's still potential/opportunity that others have not yet discovered.
Sort of. Alpha is calculated with respect to beta (in a very simplified sense, risk). So if you have two equally performing investments with different risks then the riskier one would have lower alpha. But something can also have higher alpha despite having a higher beta. If you increase risk and increase alpha you are increases returns above the increase in risk.
Borrowed from the concept of alpha in finance, it can most simply be translated to “coolness or uniqueness as a virtue”. Sort of like being the first in on a trend before it becomes too mainstream, thus losing its cool.
I believe this refers to the expression "The second mouse gets the cheese" which is to say that the first mouse to approach a trap baited with cheese will set the trap off, and then the second mouse to approach can get the cheese because the trap is already sprung. The expression itself usually means to let someone else take the risk first.
For a context appropriate to the story, consider the case of a startup which launches before the market is ready and fails, but then another startup with the exact same concept is wildly successful a few years later.
I agree - that part was addressed in the "early bird gets the worm" comment below. In order to make sense of it, I had to assume by rebranded they meant inverted in meaning, since startups are still a high-risk enterprise. Sort of like saying that if there is no trap, then the cheese can't be very good.
Yeah - I was assuming they were referring to the "early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese", but "alpha" is generally considered a good thing, but being the "first mouse" isn't.
Man, I've never lived in SF but I've spent collectively probably over a year there (between weeks and months spent in small doses). I've lived in Boston and NYC. This seems more like a college than an industry party. Maybe I'm just lame and didn't get invited to the really weird ones?
My version would involve a bar or lounge or tech offices, no or soft music, and a lot of people drinking while playing board games or ping pong and hashing out arcane technical details of this or that. I once had a long, long discussion about video compression in a downtown Boston lounge for example. It seems like the difference is people are shooting money from their ears while in my world you needed a solid plan to get to utility. Not necessarily profitability, but widespread adoption. If you just had an idea you'd get politely given advice rather than just kind of unmitigated approval.
Is it just that the East Coast is more businesslike and less into weird rat-culture stuff like AI risk? Maybe I just gravitate towards other engineers and we're a subculture?
Define regular basis. In pre-covid times I'd go to one every 2-3 months I guess (usually 2-3 around Christmas). Since covid it's been less but I've been to a few this year (and I do lean introverted)
Sounds to me like you’re describing the South Bay Big Tech Employee parties whereas Scott’s describing (maybe?) the Berkeley Weirdo Rationalist parties.
The latter sounds like involves the people who decided they’d made enough money at Google to quit and do weird stuff, the former are those who stayed at Google to pursue more conventional life goals.
(Kinda speculative. I don’t get invited to Scott’s kind of parties, and I’m not sure I want to.)
Maybe that South Bay vibe is just more universal in the east? Because the house parties or the speculative parties weren't that different from the tech-y office ones. Including the weirdo parties where I had long philosophical tears or did some weird stuff. But it was definitely a quieter, more adult-y vibe.
Yeah, I was going to say I met the male version of Buddhist-woman on the East Coast. But that actually was in college. And alas, he did not set the cultural agenda for the next decade, I think he just got busted (after dropping out) for copious amounts of drugs.
Silicon Valley is great, but it becomes very formulaic later on. Rather than have the story line progress and have the characters grow and develop new relationships, it becomes very sitcom-y and pointless. And after TJ Miller is gone, so is a lot of the humor.
Here's another vouch. I was going to post top-level that I felt like I just read the pilot for a reboot.
Judge's background in the real Valley is a big reason why the series was on the nose. Another is that he apparently got the right consultants - people who knew the place, obsessed on it, and still knew what was off about it to a "normie". AIUI, eventually there was a critical mass where real SV insiders would approach the writers out of the blue and say "I remember this time when..." and the writers could rearrange it a bit and stick it right in.
(I think TJ Miller leaving actually saved the series, personally - Ehrlich Bachman was coming dangerously close to being the series' Homer Simpson. Nearly every episode was about him for a stretch.)
"You tell them what times and days of the week you’re available. Then if they have a need, they text you a day or two beforehand and tell you where to go. You get to eat other people’s free food, drink their free alcohol, and meet a lot of cool people. Sometimes you meet the same Partyr standby guests a few times in a row and make friends with them. Sometimes they even pay you a stipend. I got to say, it’s a pretty great deal."
having been an astroturfed guest like this at more than a few parties, it is indeed a pretty great deal
about the complicated ecosystem in which guys who are much like pimps draw attractive women to attend clubs that high status men frequent. The fascinating part is these women won't take money because that would be too meretricious; they have to be convinced to attend the clubs by a very influential man; likewise, the rich men attending the club don't want to feel like Johns either, so many subtle steps are required to get all these people together. Punishingly loud music also features in her stories about these club scenes, I forget her explanation for it but there is one.
IIRC, a lot of outdoor public occasions ("New Year's Eve Concert With Whatever-TV Channel") have a subset of guests that are paid for, so it doesn't look ridiculous when they stream it and there's 5 people attending.
You can be paid to be in TV audiences as well. Years ago I went to see a screening of Penn & Teller's Fool Us (free tickets) but the people in the row ahead of us were paid to be there and while walking around Vegas we were approached by multiple people who wanted us to watch Pilot episodes.
Yeah, I once had a temp job handing out free movie tickets for a documentary that had just come out. The guests themselves weren't paid to be there, but I was getting $18/hour for 6 hours a day just to give the tickets out to anyone who passed by the theater and was willing to go. Incredibly easy job if you don't mind standing around the same area for the whole day and hearing "no thanks" a lot. I'm guessing the filmmakers wanted to get the theater packed for the first week of showings to prove that they'd drawn in a large audience.
My late grandmother had grown up in pre-revolutionary Russia, in St. Petersburg. She claimed that a similar service existed in Czarist Russia. Russians are not typically superstitious about the number 13, except when you have 13 people at the table. So if you were holding a dinner party and you somehow ended up with a total of 13 people, you could call a professional guest who would come over on short notice and expand the number to 14. I have not been able to get independent verification of this claim, but my grandmother was not prone to confabulation.
The app claimed you could get paid to attend events. On the flip side, event organizers could buy people to show up, to generate buzz. When I tried out the app, I recall seeing just a couple events in Los Angeles (makes sense!). Then later they expanded the app so there were other things you could do to earn money. For instance, you could make money by buying items on Amazon, posting a good review, and then uploading proof of the purchase and review (which to be honest I did once. I don't think they required a 5 star review but it was something I felt comfortable giving a 5 star review for anyway).
This is good stuff here, but wow this would be a bizarre introduction to Scott's writing! Welcome to the party, and I hope you enjoy the more central examples of his work as well :)
This kind of post is Scott Alexander in peak form. Idol Worship, The Gods Only Have Power, and of course the canon on the old blog are clearly the best you have to offer. Sn-risk almost took me out of my chair
I was at a wedding reception once where there were quite a few google people. None of them talked like that, but I suppose it was because they hadn't quit google yet.
Scott, I think you could write a couple of hilarious skits for SNL.
too many unnecessary details; complete lack of tempo; peter thiel should have appear earlier in the passage; taylor swift shall be replaced by either a vegan blonde model slash programmer e.g. karlie kloss or one of the kardashians; periodic interludes of scenic descriptions of evening sea waves and warmly yellow street lights that contrasts with the never-grow-up theil foundation startups
I’ve been mulling over the ‘reincarnation without the woo’ thing for decades and think it does actually make sense.
It starts with: why do you have a first person experience from the creature that is reading these words? Why are you not having a first person experience from the body of Elon Musk (maybe you are, hi Elon!) or a particular sparrow in the New Forest?
And then, when your body dies, does that mean no more first person experiences again for ‘you’? Or, will some other creature create a first person experience for ‘you’ again (for whatever reason this current creature is creating your current first person experience?)
There is no need for a ‘woo’ part ie no memories are retained, no ‘new game+’, no element of karma (although I love the version of that in this story). Just the concept that first person experiences may not end with death of this current creature.
If this is correct - and we perhaps we should act in a way that assumes it is - what would be the implications?
Many creatures have minimal agency over their experiences. Humans are different, not just with more agency of themselves but of others - at a minimal level of their family and pets and immediate connections, but wider too esp in more developed countries and moving up the influence and power in society.
If you were a cow, you would look at humans and saying ‘if I was one of those I could impact this shitty situation’. Well congratulations, you are! How do you, as a first world human, use that power to mean that if you do have a first person experience from another creature, that future experience is…not utterly horrific?
That idea if embraced ties all living things together. Selfishness disappears - you might literally be in anyones (or anything’s) shoes in the future, so do anything you can to not deliver horrible experiences to anything. It’s to your own benefit!
It is perfectly reasonable if you assume that your brain is just a receiver for a consciousness that exists elsewhere, just as a radio doesn't have a little person inside.
In fact, the more that I think about it, the more reasonable this suggestion is. After all, evolution builds structures that take advantage of existing things in the physical environment. You would never build wings without air, nor eyes without EM radiation, nor muscles without chemical energy stores, so how could you build a conscious brain without some pre-existing physical phenomenon of which to take advantage?
Consciousness could come from the brain's processing in some way. It isn't as if things like circulatory systems tap into, say, the abstract concept of blood flow.
I guess that's a fair objection. Ignoring analogies, then, my issue with your suggestion is that while everything an organism does has to use some property of the environment (down to "the laws of physics let you do this" (and I guess that we live somewhere with the right temperature range for chemistry) in the case of storing chemical energy), that doesn't mean the environment already contains the stuff the organism is doing, only the basic substrate allowing it.
But where did the first advanced monkey or whatever get its consciousness from? Or was there a cosmic store of souls waiting for evolution to make use of it eventually?
I don't think that it is a very good shorthand as it requires the plural. I was thinking more of a singular, universal consciousness of which an individual conscious is a heavily filtered version.
An analogy might be that of a radio picking out a single, narrow band from the whole spectral continuum that impinges upon its aerial.
Not to my knowledge. The concept is easily dismissed because phenomena like blindsight show that consciousness is not purely a one-way communication as with a radio receiver, but must be two-way because qualitative experience has observable effects. If information flow is bidirectional, then the "radio" transmit/receive step is multiplying entities unnecessarily.
You'd be better served reading the state of promising mechanistic, scientific accounts for consciousness, like this one:
Thanks for the link, I shall peruse it with interest. I must say though, that I don't consider your objection to the external phenomena argument to be in any way convincing or definitive.
So it is with literally every thought experiment in the consciousness debate. I haven't seen a single instance of someone changing their mind. Every thought experiment serves only to sort you into the camp with people who share your preconceptions.
All I can say is that a good guide given past missteps of similar nature, like vitalism, suggest we ought to make as few assumptions as possible and stick to the verifiable facts.
If you can describe an experiment by which you can discern between theories where the brain is producing consciousness, and where the brain is transmitting/receiving some global consciousness field, then there's something to talk about. I posit that there is no such experiment.
No matter what surprises we find in the brain's neural network, it will always be axiomatically simpler to simply say the biochemical processes P within structure X simply produce consciousness, rather than posit some global field which P+X is "tuning" into. If you reproduce P+X and reproduce consciousness in other media, like silicon, it's still axiomatically simpler to say P+X simply produces consciousness. Since the tuner possibility is logically more complex and logically indistinguishable, we shouldn't even bother with it, among other reasons.
I was 6 when I first wondered about this. Why do I see through my eyes rather than Johnny’s? We all feel a disconnect between the mind and body. And although I don’t think the mind is the brain - it’s tightly coupled “software” - it dies when we die.
Sorry for any unclarity. What I mean is: what distinguishes the things having first person experiences (the ones providing first person experiences to "creatures") from each other? As far as I know, object identity isn't really an actual/primitive feature of the universe like that: things are "the same" if they have the same properties, or through some notion of continuity (there is a chain of things with very similar properties going through the time between them). What properties do they have - what makes this different to a new consciousness just being assigned whenever something's brain comes into existence and deleted afterward, if no information is carried over?
Re what makes it different - there are new conscious creatures coming into existence all the time but ‘I’ don’t experience their qualia - they create no first person experience for ‘me’. For some reason this current creature does create a first person experience for ‘me’ (and other creatures do for other consciousnesses) and that excludes any other first person experiences for ‘me’ in parallel. But when this creature dies, it’s easy to imagine another creatures qualia being experienced first person by ‘me’ again, for whatever reason this creature creates ‘my’ first person experience but others do not.
It’s really hard to explain without terms like ‘me’ that of course has no underlying thing to point to, but hopefully makes some intuitive sense
Like 80% of Bay Area house parties are actually nothing like this. That's more of a SF/Berkeley, transplant, grad. education type of party that rationalist types would be invited to, and which many of the same types of people in Boston, Austin, and Seattle would be familiar with.
In general Bay Area house parties are similar to what you'd find elsewhere across the US. A lot of people blitzed on 8 servings of alcohol surrounding beer pong, deafening trap music, tons of weed passed around, occasionally mushrooms and cocaine, and waking up to shenanigans on Instagram, and definitely not a whole lot of intelligent conversation. More like singing a long and people just reconvening happily, hugging, and shooting the shit. I love it, but could definitely use more rat-type parties too.
Not quite the Turtledove restaurant, but Topolobampo in Chicago (the fanciest of Rick Bayless's Mexican restaurants) did a "1491" menu some years back with a similar idea.
I was underwhelmed. Like the dinosaur killer asteroid, I'm glad not to have experienced the Columbian Exchange directly, but the results are clearly to my benefit.
A few years ago, there was a British reality TV show called '10000 BC' (https://m.imdb.com/title/tt4443898/) in which the participants had to live as their neolithic ancestors. Long story short, it mostly involved being very hungry indeed. In one episode, our heroes managed to hunt and kill a deer and, upon consuming its fire-charred liver, stated that it was the best tasting thing that they had ever eaten.
So, I reckon that a stone age themed restaurant where that sort of rough food (openly cooked over glowing embers) is served might be a winner if you can convince people not to eat anything for the 48 hours before they visit.
This sort of makes me happy to be a guy in rural Washington who quietly does wood working in his garage while thinking about things. At least I don’t have to be confronted with the existential horror that I’m the same as everyone else in a visceral manner.
"Freeze peach" is a distorted rendering of "free speech" sometimes used on the internet in mocking imitation of people who think that they should be able to post whatever they want wherever they want and anyone who says they can't is denying them a constitutional right. ("But muh freeze peach" is the expanded phrase.) As with most crude mockeries, its use rapidly became associated with the most mean-spirited and unreflective defenders of moderation; by putting it in the mouth of the Twitter moderator here, Scott is suggesting that they're reflexively censorious.
At some point one or more censorious losers decided that anyone fond of free speech as an ideal deserved to be mocked, so they changed the spelling in a way that could be easily posted to twitter - the place where other such losers tend to congregate.
Some people in these comments are taking this story, and the word "every" in the title, way too literally. *Obviously* most people in the Bay Area are the same as everywhere else. *Obviously* you would meet hardly anyone like the people described in this story if you came here, unless you actively tried really hard to do so. *Obviously* Scott's social circle is a weird little corner of a corner of a society, as every individual person's social circle is. Mine is a different corner of a corner so it's different. This is all so obvious I feel bad writing it, but I'm getting the sense it's somehow not apparent to everyone.
I think you might have misunderstood--I'm *being* the indignant pedant here :P I'm reacting to the commenters who don't live here and seem to interpret this story as actually saying something representative about the place as a whole.
You enter the party. The music is too loud. Your auditory processing disorder makes it impossible to discern voices from music. You hang out with the dog for a while. The dog is great company. You then leave.
Really enjoyed the part about Zen and enlightment.
I semi-seriously endorse the idea that whole enlightment thing is just an elaborate prank and becoming enlightened is figuring this out, laughting at yourself and then not spoiling the joke for others, while possibly continuing all the medival monk stuff for your own amusement.
Enlightenment is more or less about finding a way to have an acid trip without ingesting any actual drugs by breaking your brain through too much meditation, less impressive these days than it must've used to be.
A serious and humorless take on secularized 'reincarnation' - it's more or less a combination of any of these three ideas: heredity(you carry your ancestors in your blood), the notion of eternal return given either determinism or an infinite number of iterations and convergent thought on universal topics. It doesn't have to mean living past your death, especially given the focus on deemphasizing the notion of the self as illusory. But hey, discovering some arcane truth about say the distribution of prime numbers is tantamount to channeling every mind that thought about the same. Just in a poetic, not literal fashion.
I'll go a bit further and say that Buddhism stripped of its supernatural components is a lot more like an early attempt at practical psychiatry/psychology than a religion. E.g. Buddhist hells seem to be more of an attempt to describe various states of cognitive failure and depersonalization without having a modern model of the world than anything, one of which in particular reminds me of the one bad trip on acid I've had years back. The entire philosophy is more or less about dealing with progressing mental illness of various sorts in such a way that happens to be harmless to others.
Well, to think about reincarnation presupposes thinking about time. Maybe time is a restraint and kinda a lie. That's why I turned catholic. God should be able to sort this out.
I'm weirdly reminded of one of those Jane Austen drawing room scenes among the early 1800s aristocracy, with everyone[1] speaking competitively about who came into ten thousand a year and which horse the Prince of Wales favors at Ascot this year.
As I recall, one of the unwritten rules of parties in San Francisco was: if the party isn’t being organized by a startup, don’t talk about your startup. On the other hand, apart from the use of the word “alpha”, this does match a lot of my recollections about parties organized by startups.
Taking a slightly different tack on secular reincarnation: "You" is the mental pattern not the physical body, that's why when someone gets uploaded to the Matrix we don't start talking as though it's a different person. "You" is also fuzzy, people's patterns change over time but "you" describes both yesterday's and today's pattern. When you die you don't *automatically* reincarnate, but given an enormously large universe, eventually there will come another embodied pattern close enough that it also counts as you.
From there we get to karma by considering selection effects. If you were an especially violent pattern, the next place you pop up in the universe is likely to be the sort of place that produces a lot of violence, and you're going to be stuck there until you die at which point maybe you've changed enough that your next match lands you somewhere else.
It's not possible to extricate the mental pattern from the physical body. They are both parts of the same whole. The Matrix is science fiction for a reason, and even there they had to put the entire body into a pod instead of just the brain.
TIL YouTube supports that sort of video resolution - I kept absentmindedly trying to "scroll up" to see the rest of the picture until I realized what was going on.
We already had the "overdue" barbarian invasion. It was called 9/11 and it came out of Afghanistan. Then we went and beat up the barbarians badly enough that they're going to wait a while before trying that crap again, even though they technically "won".
Related: One of the justifications for tte Vietnam War was the "domino theory" that if we let South Vietnam fall to Communism, then there would be similar uprisings/invasions in other Asian countries and they would fall as well. There's a more recent hypothesis that the fact that South Vietnam did eventually fall and no other "dominoes" fell doesn't actually discredit the theory; the fact that the US fought as long and as hard as it did before giving up was enough to keep Communists elsewhere from trying.
I'm probably going to get scolded for this opinion; but I suspect the type of person who is on the so-called "Trust and Safety Council" at Twitter probably thinks the destruction of the monuments and works of Western Civilization is a commendable act.
This is the moment when I went from thinking "wow, there have been some great ACX posts recently" to "wow, ACX really is entering a new era of enhanced quality, perhaps enough to rival the SSC glory days of whenever that was"
There should be a party guest working on disruptive access to abortion, dropping packets of the 5 pills from airplanes, or selling them in pet stores "for aquarium fish use only", or something like Vine-Glo.
The scientific reincarnation thing is quite similar to the premise of Permutation City by Greg Egan. Not my favorite book ever but if that kind of stuff intrigues you check it out.
BTW: your repeated references to Peter Theil funding everything are now more important and more real than you let on.
Last night J.D. Vance, best known as the author of "Hillbilly Elegy" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillbilly_Elegy, won the primary election to be the Republican candidate in the State of Ohio for the U.S. Senate.
The national media is playing the story as a Trump endorsement story. And, to be sure, Trump's endorsement did seem to boost Vance into the lead. Vance won with about 32% of the vote in a 7 candidate race. #2 & #3 we about 23%.
But it really is a Peter Theil story. Theil groomed and promoted Vance's candidacy and invested $15 million in it.
Ohio is a red state now. Trump won it by 8% in 2020. Republican Governor Mike DeWine is very popular. Vance is very likely to be a US Senator come next January. And, Peter Theil will have funded him.
Love these short stories. Can never tell if they're apocryphal or mere exaggerations.
I have avoided the bay area due to the stereotype of Big-tech nerd on koolaid mono-culture. But, if the parties are anything like this, it sounds interesting. Can anyone in Bay Area / SF give me an idea of whether such spots quirky exist and where one could find them ?
"Exactly! With modern technology, the next time could be so much worse! Usually the steppe nomads are limited to a small fringe around the steppe where they can still graze their horses..."
I think Sara is a bit behind the times. The steppe nomads have embraced modern technology and taken a step up from both horses and archery: https://i.redd.it/idkemq67bqj71.jpg
If I'm remembering correctly, it's a quote from some philosopher, which Scott referenced in a short story on the old blog involving a superintelligent A.I. engaging in acausal trade.
I personally think all that "acausal trade" stuff is nonsense, and choose to interpret the line in the more grounded sense of "belief in God can provide people with psychological and sociocultural benefits that lead to material benefits." Which is way less exciting, for sure, but probably closer to what the original author had in mind.
Wouldn't make too much fun of that, that phrase is just pavlovian conditioning: be in a calm focused state, repeat same syllables a million times until an association forms, then whenever you utter them in a different context, it brings part of the emotion back. It's a self-hypnosis trigger more or less. Or to put it even simpler: saying 'banana' probably makes you think of a color and maybe a taste even if there isn't one under your nose.
Apropos of nothing, I created a couple fake twitter accounts pretending to be cardinal points on the political compass and started doing one reply a day to a large account (On company time, of course.).
Communism got banned first, after I threatened to Carthago a brand's lawn; Anarchist and anarchocap got banned around the same time for threating statements. Nationalist just kept going till I got bored; I couldn't bring myself to add a 'White' to the front and go full racist and I was less enthusiastic about it. It turns out, auth-right is just kinda boring unless you are willing to COMMMIT; and if you don't break any rules you can say pretty much whatever you want, even if it's outrageously offensive.
If I had to live surround by these people I'd just go ahead and commit quantum suicide and hope I reincarnated into a society that hadn't lost its friggin mind. Societies like this are only possible because of a genuine lack of want and need. Human beings worried about day to day survival do not have time for this crap. So apparently the closer you are to barely surviving, the more you actually live in reality.
Does the Taliban's victory in Afghanistan count as an example of SN-risk? Everyone keeps bringing up Russia and Ukraine, but it seems like the Taliban is a better match for modern Steppe Nomads. Afghanistan seems like one of the few remaining places on Earth where the Steppe Nomad strategy for fighting off larger, better equipped, and more organized forces could still work.
In keeping with Dogiv and Watchman's comments below, maybe the real winning strategy for the British/Soviets/Americans in Afghanistan would've been to build more railroads.
Maybe somebody can actually bootstrap a party with Elon Musk (or whichever big celebrity they want) attending, by telling all the other famous potential guests that Musk will be there, and then telling Musk that all those other people will be there.
These people are coo coo. Is this real or satire? And people make fun of followers of Christ and of the Bible for believing it (yes, some Christian beliefs don't make sense, but often it's because of a misinterpretation of the text).
What’s worked historically re steppe nomad risks, offered by the great novelist Jin Yong 金庸:
“I wrote about how powerful Chinese martial arts are in my wuxia novels, but actually it’s a bit exaggerated. Chinese people are not so great at fighting wars. When we fight wars with foreigners, we lose more often than we win. But we have stamina! If we don’t win this round, that’s okay, we’ll fight you long-term. Eventually, the foreign country falls apart from civil war. For instance the Huns were very fearsome, so we couldn’t win against them. Han Dynasty Emperor Gaozu was besieged by the Huns near Datong in Shanxi, and could not escape. His advisors offered a stratagem, to go to the Empress of the Huns and say: there are many beautiful Han ladies, and if you capture the Han Emperor, defeat the Han people, and get a whole bunch of beautiful Han women as spoils of war, it’s going to go badly for you -O Empress of the Huns! The Empress of the Huns fell for this stratagem, and pulled back the army. The Huns later split into Northern Huns and Southern Huns. The Southern Huns surrendered to the Han Empire, while the Northern Huns went westward, some of them reaching England, and they destroyed the entire Western Roman Empire. What was interesting was, half of the Huns were resisted by and surrendered to China, while the other half defeated all of Europe.”
I moved to the old money neighborhood in town, known for and named after its trees. Slowly, new money invaders have bought plots in said neighborhood and clear-cut them of almost all foliage. I am inherently distrustful and disdainful of those who don't feel safest and most at peace in a wooded, forest-like environment, so I can only assume these are the descendants of steppe nomads. They speak our language and look like us, but their gene-deep disdain for trees can only mean one thing—the invasion has already begun.
That would be war insurance.
Fwiw this is many-world multiverse, which is still completely compatibile with LQG.
No, I don't believe in many worlds, but still
I assume the prior poster burned down the Temple of Artemis.
If you believe Peter Zeihan (whose book you reviewed a while back), Putin's current wars of expansion make most sense as an effort to address sn-risk.
I don't think I've read this perspective, explain?
The only way to prevent sn-risk is to control the land they would come from. Either directly or by proxy. Ukraine has the last of the steppe land that is not Russian territory or a Russian puppet.
The Ukrainian Steppe Nature Reserve is in Donetsk:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_Steppe_Nature_Reserve
TINACBNIEAC.
It is if it is fired while riding a horse
I believe that is probably the situation Russian and Chinese military planners wargaming invasions of Mongolia are really concerned about. Or at least should be.
Is Mongolia a Russian puppet? (I know nothing about Mongolian politics).
It's less blatant than before, but yes.
More Russian than Chinese?
I think the more important question is: is Russia a Mongolian puppet?
oh yes...
It's ironic because the original Russian state, the one centered around Moscow (a.k.a. "The City Beyond the Forest") started as enforcers and tax collectors for the Mongols of The Golden Horde. The rise of Moscow as a state was primarily due to the influence of the Tartars. They eventually becames strong enough to conquer the older Russian states of Novgorod and Kyiv.
Kamil Galeev has an excellent thread on this...
https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1492164056962195457
and on his substack page...
https://kamilkazani2.substack.com/p/how-did-russia-get-so-big?utm_source=url&s=r
Of course, then you'd need to hold the Polish gap to address the risk of Prussians, and Finland, and the Baltic states, and. . .
But to summarize his take on the Geopolitics of Russia, Russia is a wide swath of useful land, surrounded by a much wider swath of useless (and indefensible!) land, surrounded by defensible borders with a few gaps that inconvenient other ethnicities tend to live in. So the plan from Ivan to Peter to Catherine to Josef to Vladimir has been to expand until you control the lands surrounding those entry points that can be manned with a reasonable number of soldiers.
He called the expansion into Crimea, and subsequently Ukraine (and also a number of other conflicts) years in advance, which suggests his methodology has something to say for itself.
I'm pretty sure that the Russian war against the remnants of the Mongolian horde inhabiting Ukraine was already won in 1783, though.
that's what the horde wants us to think...
I don't believe that quoting Chomsky in this crowd (on any matter besides linguistics) will endear either you or your point to your audience. More to the point, as a matter of tone and presentation, that really isn't how we talk to one another here. You may have more luck being heard if you're more direct, less bombastic, and generally more polite.
The guy who thought that Pol Pot was okay now thinks that Putin is okay. Somehow I am not surprised.
Wild!! It's all true !!
Russia's geopolitical goal is to control all the access points (e.g. mountain passes) to the Eurasian Steppe which are historical invasion corridors, from the Mongols to Napoleon to Hitler. During the USSR they plugged all the gaps, now they no longer do. Two of those gaps are on the opposite side of Ukraine, controlling Ukraine would make Russia's borders more defensible.
I kind-of expected the Russians themselves to turn out to be the current incarnation of SNs.
they basically are, they defeated/conquered/integrated/conscripted them. And just like the the Chinese-steppe horde symbiotic relationship, it went both ways.
The Cold War was sn-risk, the soviet union was always more steppe than russian
What is sn-risk in this context? I'm unfamiliar with the term.
In the above story, a young woman uses the term to describe the risk posed to settled Eurasian populations by Steppe Nomads (SN).
Accorting to Azar Gat's War in Human Civilization, the deciding event in the balance between established civilizations and nomadic ones was the Industrial Revolution. Prior to that, empires had trouble maintaining a hardened military that was both numerous and loyal, leaving vulnerabilities that nomads could exploit, but afterward, they could just use their massive infrastructure advantage to swamp the nomads in materiel.
According to Keith Otterbein's How War Began, the deciding event was the spread of railroads (part of the industrial revolution, of course) because it finally allowed centralized states to maintain military control over large areas of land not suitable for agriculture. Previously, any non-SN army stationed on the steppe had to be arduously supplied from home, which meant the steppe could only be conquered temporarily--the nomads would always eventually rise again.
There's a clear pattern of building fortresses (with modern weaponry) to establish military control of the key points in the area (and, these being proto-modernist planners, in gaps in between). These allow the development of industrial-society settlement in these places (basically agricultural or mining where appropriate), and these necessitate the construction of a rapid communication network, which allows the whole process to start again. This was the Roman and Persian model (due to technology limited to the edges of stepped) and the model used in the American West, so it seems pretty standard.
Railways made it easier to do the communication bit, and therefore possible to expand further into steppes.
Dude you’ve been playing too much role-play
Or reading to much academic history...
Adam Smith has an earlier version of the argument, pointing out that in antiquity the barbarians were a threat to the civilized, now the civilized are a threat to the barbarians.
This is amazing and true.
came here to make this comment, but you win. Replace "steppe horde" with "whatever people control the steppe."
This entire thread is brilliance.
The state that we now call Russia—that evolved from the Slavic kingdom centered around Moscow—has always been expansionist in character. The excuses for this behavior may have changed over the centuries. But it's always been about controlling the wealth to benefit the aristocracy (or later for Communist leadership and the post-Communist kleptocrats), and it was backed by a pan-Slavic religious ideology. Ukraine is one of the most fertile areas in Europe, and it has outlets to the Mediterranean. That's why Putin wants it.
you read Douglas Coupland all over again.
Enjoyed this a lot.
Excellent!
Most days, I fear I was born in the wrong city. But there are few, blessed, days, when Scott reminds me that things could be worse.
Your interpretation of this party was negative? It sounded like a super interesting party to me. Such visionary people. But I've lived in the US and having to do everything by car was too large a quality of life reduction for me.
So it's the Netherlands for me; the cities here are so nice that I don't understand that Dutch cities don't dominate the liveable cities indices. Perhaps it's the dark rainy winters? Because Amsterdam can easily beat Auckland (NZ) or Copenhagen in my opinion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_livable_cities
I just reviewed each individual interaction to verify, and yes, there isn't a single one I wouldn't pay the cost of a cab home to avoid.
Although I'm tempted to credit the post with nickiter's addendum: the dog sounds cool.
i agree w/ maybe later. This party sounds nightmarish. I would pay a reasonable fee to not have to talk to any of these people.
You're describing people who don't know who they are. Kids who haven't grown up. Some of them probably never will.
Yes, but the fun part is that out of 100 of these people, one will end up a billionaire, and another will end up setting the cultural agenda for the next decade. The best party game is guessing which ones.
What happens when The Bay Area can’t produce people like that anymore?
I'm pretty sure ~half of those people weren't born in the Bay Area, and some weren't born in the States.
They were still produced there (If you count selection as part of production, as we do at fancy restaurants and artisan shops).
Don't think the argument holds with self-selection
If you believe some, Miami or Austin will pick up the slack. Regardless, somewhere on Earth will be next.
Whatever about software, I think that most of whatever culture that originated in the Bay Area stays there. And we are probably way past peak startup era.
I blame the contradictions of capitalism.
Wealth inequality is high enough that there's more money to be made convincing investors you have some revolutionary new thing they should dump billions into than actually selling products to people. So all the smart people in the world get filtered into coming up with business pitches that might fool investors instead of actually doing useful things.
You're not thinking the brilliance of capitalism all the way through. An investment scam is basically a way to separate idle wealth from idiots, so that it can re-enter circulation and do something useful again. It's true it has to go through a period of being spent at the French Laundry and on having the Model S detailed weekly, but think of all the wage slave waiters and buffers who are thereby acquiring their daily bread.
So Robin Hood was a capitalist after all? Looks like Ayn Rand had it backwards.
Well he *would* have been, had his business model been to sell the wealthy bishops who wandered through Sherwood some kind of useless status symbol. "My Lord Father Fatty! Have you thought about how freaking awesome it would be to have a demonstration of impossibly skilled archery at your next convocation by the famous Robin o' Locksley? Shooting apples clean off a serving wench's head? Everyone's doing it, I tell you, we're booked up through St. Shroom's Day -- but as an old friend I can squeeze you in for 50 gold pieces, if you pay in advance."
No, Robin Hood took from the beneficiaries of the State. Perfectly legimitate!
Wage slave if I’m not mistaken there a 20,000,001 bowl of rice a day slaves in China and everyone wants to buy their shit because it’s cheaper if that’s stopped the wage slaves might have a chance of becoming entrepreneurs
I think your use of the term Wage slave is so derogatory you might not be worth talking to
Nah, his use of the term wage slave is perfectly accurate.
Corruption greed lawlessness and a lack of punishment for that lawlessness is to blame
there’s no balance
If there’s no balance there’s no sustainability if there’s no sustainability it becomes dog eat dog Until there’s only one dog left
That dog suicides himself and the next dog moves in and does the same thing
That seems like something that would have been a lot more true in 1995.
Is that a bad thing? They probably make more money and have more influence than most people who have "grown up"
If true, that would just make it worse.
Than why do they all seem so unhappy
You were there too?
Gotta say, the sn-risk thing seems pretty on-brand to me!
So how do you handle the new Avar hordes?
(For the record, the Manchu hordes were not really hordes by that point, and they took power by intervening in an existing Ming civil war in which quite a lot of their army was Ming deserters. It's a very good joke but it's not really historically accurate.)
The Avar hordes are already dominating the UFC.
I expected her to say that money is used to secretly screen young population for charismatic leadership potential and assassinate top scorers.
I didn’t realize Tyler Cowen had achieved this level of status.
Oh yes!
At the margin!
Oh crap Burja is here! Seriously, Empire Theory should be illustrated (or at least made into an infographic) by people like Jessica Hagy. It is obvious but most don't know it.
Those new service sector jobs…
He’s self-recommending so yes
I love these replies.
Pretty good house party. No one trying to get you to sell Amway. I call it a win.
A young man slides up to you. "Hey, I haven't seen you since high school!"
It's John, you haven't seen him since high school.
"You know, you were always a real self-starter. May I interest you in a business opportunity?"
"I..." you stammer.
"Here, let me 'show you the plan.'" He starts scribbling on the wall (which turns out to be a whiteboard), furiously drawing circles. "The entire financial system is setup to fundamentally reward middlemen. Rent-seekers who contribute nothing, but just impoverish the rest of us." He draws a big red X through a particularly large circle in the middle with a flourish.
"Thanks to the power of the blockchain, we can finally put a stop to this. Here's how it works. See this?" He pulls out a hardware wallet with a neon display on the front. "This is an NFT for the AmCoin catalog. You can use this to mint AmStuff NFT's for any product you would normally consume in your life -- toothpaste, shoe polish, laundry detergent -- even coca-cola! Then, you can burn those NFT's on an AmChain smart contract, and the products will be delivered to your door the next day."
"How is this a business opportunity?"
"Okay, there's the good part. We cut out the middlemen, see?"
You don't see. He continues anyways.
"Through the power of on-chain smart contracts, you can become your own distributor. Once you've bought enough products and built up enough on-chain reputation points, you will be able to mint your own AmCoin NFT catalogs. Everyone you distribute these to is cryptographically locked to minting AmStuff on your 'UpChain' until they level up to become distributors too."
"And the business opportunity...?"
"Right. So every time one of your recruits mints an AmStuff, they do that on your UpChain, and it sends a portion of their purchase to your wallet. You see? We cut out the middleman and pass the business opportunity on to you. The fat cats don't own us anymore!"
"Sounds, um, great."
"It really is. Now, after you've become a direct distributor, you're going to want to climb through the ranks so you can earn more money. Every one of your recruit's "UpChain" connecting them to you is your "DownChain" connecting you to them. Once you have enough profit-driving DownChains, you get to upgrade your AmJewel NFT. Once you've become your own distributor, it goes to Silver Tier, then Gold. As you keep grinding you'll eventually get to Ruby, then Sapphire, Emerald, and finally Diamond. Once you've gone Diamond, you've really made it."
"So you've gone Diamond?"
"No, I'm Gold tier right now, but my UpChain distributor is really great and has been sending me all these awesome tools." He slaps his forehead. "I can't believe I forgot to tell you about tools!"
"Tools?"
"Yeah!" He pulls out his phone and brings up some kind of proprietary podcast app. "This is another great innovation. You can get all your tools on AmCast. We call all our motivational and training materials 'tools' because you use them to build your own independent business. Tools are really important. Whenever you're in the car, or exercising, or sleeping, you really need to stick your airpods in and blast some tools on AmCast. If you're serious about building an independent business you really need to plug in and get this information."
"What's AmCast?"
"It's really great. AmCast has solved the problem of digital scarcity for motivational training tools. To ensure peak efficiency you need get your tools directly from an experienced advisor, your UpChain distributor. Every motivational tool they give you is cryptographically signed on the blockchain as an AmTool NFT. This makes sure nobody can pirate or plagiarize them, and this way we make sure they can only be played in the AmCast app. That's how you know it's secure."
"And you just download these AmTools from AmCast, or...?"
"Oh no, you buy them from your UpChain distributor. But it's a really great investment, because you're building a business see? And since they're NFTs, they're only going to go up in value. When you become your own distributor you can sell them to your DownChain at a profit. Here, I've got about 30 I can offload to you, I'll give you an incredible deal for them. "
"Before you do that, can you 'show me the plan' again?"
He turns back to his whiteboard and continues to furiously draw circles. You melt into the crowd while his back is turned.
just mix in Neuro-Linguistic Programming and it’s a science fiction plot...
I always wondered what it would be like to read something directly inspired by Satan. Thanks!
I, for one, would love to go to a party where everyone had a Scott Alexander-style thought experiment ministory to introduce themselves with. I guess this is why people pay Bay Area rents.
(Reminds me - looking forward to the Boston ACX meetup next week!)
I reread this whole thing and I'm still not sure I understand the meaning of "alpha" in this sociolect.
It's a finance term meaning something like "return on investment." Roughly.
I think in this context, Alpha represents an advantage that you have in the system over other competitors that puts you ahead.
I don't think so. It's close but not exactly. Literally alpha is beating the market so metaphorically what it means is your ability to outperform the baseline. I've heard it used this way, like saying that someone's connections were their alpha.
That sounds exactly the same to me, except with "beating the market" instead of "advantage in the system" and "outperform[ing] the baseline" instead of "[being put] ahead [...of the baseline]".
It's just "your edge" or the ability to have an edge
This is right. In finance, beta is your systematic risk (ie, the returns you would expect to achieve based on having market exposure). Alpha, on the other hand, is your idiosyncratic risk (ie, returns above and unique to your portfolio). Generally you expect alphas to reduce over time as more investors catch on to your investing strategy. So in this context, saying there's Alpha left means there's still potential/opportunity that others have not yet discovered.
You and Gangavelli and I all said the same thing, which is just as well because it's correct.
More like "profit." Normal return on investment that anyone can earn is zero alpha. Anything beyond that is positive alpha.
When I first saw "there's no alpha left," I misparsed "alpha left" as a noun phrase referring to a left-wing political movement that is "alpha."
I am not alone
Can someone cooler than me explain what "alpha" is in this context?
Sort of. Alpha is calculated with respect to beta (in a very simplified sense, risk). So if you have two equally performing investments with different risks then the riskier one would have lower alpha. But something can also have higher alpha despite having a higher beta. If you increase risk and increase alpha you are increases returns above the increase in risk.
Alpha is a finance term meaning the ability of something (a hedge fund, whatever) to beat the market in returns.
Borrowed from the concept of alpha in finance, it can most simply be translated to “coolness or uniqueness as a virtue”. Sort of like being the first in on a trend before it becomes too mainstream, thus losing its cool.
Ohh it’s like being the first mouse, but rebranded.
I had never heard of "being the first mouse".
I believe this refers to the expression "The second mouse gets the cheese" which is to say that the first mouse to approach a trap baited with cheese will set the trap off, and then the second mouse to approach can get the cheese because the trap is already sprung. The expression itself usually means to let someone else take the risk first.
For a context appropriate to the story, consider the case of a startup which launches before the market is ready and fails, but then another startup with the exact same concept is wildly successful a few years later.
I can see how that would make sense in other contexts, but here it's supposed to be advantageous to be ahead of others.
I agree - that part was addressed in the "early bird gets the worm" comment below. In order to make sense of it, I had to assume by rebranded they meant inverted in meaning, since startups are still a high-risk enterprise. Sort of like saying that if there is no trap, then the cheese can't be very good.
More like being the first bird, rather than the first mouse, I think, since alpha is considered a good thing.
The early bird getting the worm?
Yeah - I was assuming they were referring to the "early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese", but "alpha" is generally considered a good thing, but being the "first mouse" isn't.
If you're looking for a rather long winded and boring explanation of how alpha and beta arise from linear regression analysis, I once wrote a blog post about that: https://heiner.ai/blog/2020/09/08/more-linear-regression-capm.html
tl;dr: Alpha is the bias (aka affine translation aka offset aka coefficient of the all-1s intercept vector) in a linear regression.
Are you not assuming you are not the coolest person here though?
Are you not assuming you are not the coolest person here though?
I was until you showed up
Man, I've never lived in SF but I've spent collectively probably over a year there (between weeks and months spent in small doses). I've lived in Boston and NYC. This seems more like a college than an industry party. Maybe I'm just lame and didn't get invited to the really weird ones?
My version would involve a bar or lounge or tech offices, no or soft music, and a lot of people drinking while playing board games or ping pong and hashing out arcane technical details of this or that. I once had a long, long discussion about video compression in a downtown Boston lounge for example. It seems like the difference is people are shooting money from their ears while in my world you needed a solid plan to get to utility. Not necessarily profitability, but widespread adoption. If you just had an idea you'd get politely given advice rather than just kind of unmitigated approval.
Is it just that the East Coast is more businesslike and less into weird rat-culture stuff like AI risk? Maybe I just gravitate towards other engineers and we're a subculture?
Some people do. Others don't. I'm one of the people who still does from time to time.
Define regular basis. In pre-covid times I'd go to one every 2-3 months I guess (usually 2-3 around Christmas). Since covid it's been less but I've been to a few this year (and I do lean introverted)
Yeah bay area parties are a bit more college-y in vibe than east coast parties (though way less so than actual college parties)
Well, glad I'm not imagining it.
Sounds to me like you’re describing the South Bay Big Tech Employee parties whereas Scott’s describing (maybe?) the Berkeley Weirdo Rationalist parties.
The latter sounds like involves the people who decided they’d made enough money at Google to quit and do weird stuff, the former are those who stayed at Google to pursue more conventional life goals.
(Kinda speculative. I don’t get invited to Scott’s kind of parties, and I’m not sure I want to.)
Maybe that South Bay vibe is just more universal in the east? Because the house parties or the speculative parties weren't that different from the tech-y office ones. Including the weirdo parties where I had long philosophical tears or did some weird stuff. But it was definitely a quieter, more adult-y vibe.
The only parties I heard of in the south bay when I was there involved multi-story homes, spa pools, and nudity.
Yeah, I was going to say I met the male version of Buddhist-woman on the East Coast. But that actually was in college. And alas, he did not set the cultural agenda for the next decade, I think he just got busted (after dropping out) for copious amounts of drugs.
Such things happen. My zen master hugged me when I told him I was about to leave the sesshin for some lovemaking and I still like my beer.
Seems like not nearly enough drugs to be a proper party
Oh no about 30% of attendees are on acid and another 10-15% are on molly
Right on. Especially for San Francisco.
Very well done.
But typo: It's spelled "Khamenei" – not "Thiel".
“But Tyler Cowen hates parties!” 😂https://youtu.be/wPJo15XpvrE
This was probably my favorite post this year. Enjoyed it a lot. Thanks for writing it, Scott.
I've never seen the show Silicon Valley, but if anyone here vouches that it's even half as funny and relatable as this post, I'll watch every episode.
It's quite good. Like a lot of modern TV it outlived its optimal lifespan but definitely worth seeing at least a couple of episodes
It's just as funny and more relatable, though not as clever.
Yeah, it is worth watching.
Silicon Valley is great, but it becomes very formulaic later on. Rather than have the story line progress and have the characters grow and develop new relationships, it becomes very sitcom-y and pointless. And after TJ Miller is gone, so is a lot of the humor.
Could that be a deliberate meta-commentary on the real Silicon Valley?
Here's another vouch. I was going to post top-level that I felt like I just read the pilot for a reboot.
Judge's background in the real Valley is a big reason why the series was on the nose. Another is that he apparently got the right consultants - people who knew the place, obsessed on it, and still knew what was off about it to a "normie". AIUI, eventually there was a critical mass where real SV insiders would approach the writers out of the blue and say "I remember this time when..." and the writers could rearrange it a bit and stick it right in.
(I think TJ Miller leaving actually saved the series, personally - Ehrlich Bachman was coming dangerously close to being the series' Homer Simpson. Nearly every episode was about him for a stretch.)
“A woman in a blue dress was saying something about how she was trying to build a secular scientific interpretation of Buddhism.”
No, no! It was a gold dress!
I will beat you until you're white and gold :D
>If you think about it, all problems are caused by lack of awareness.
#Kony2012
You win the comments.
Was it here that someone linked this twitter thread on Kony? https://twitter.com/ctbeiser/status/1500244096262098944/photo/3
because that was also my immediate first thought on reading that (besides wanting to punch something).
Honestly I was also thinking of that thread when I was writing it.
What idiot called it "ViraCoin" and not "Koiny 2012"?
Yes, item 6 in https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/links-for-april-644
(no I don't have superhuman memory, I just searched my e-mail inbox for "Kony")
Man I miss bay area house parties. You skipped the part where the refreshments table has mealsquares though
So when is the next brooklyn meetup? Some approximation of this sounds like a lot of fun.
"You tell them what times and days of the week you’re available. Then if they have a need, they text you a day or two beforehand and tell you where to go. You get to eat other people’s free food, drink their free alcohol, and meet a lot of cool people. Sometimes you meet the same Partyr standby guests a few times in a row and make friends with them. Sometimes they even pay you a stipend. I got to say, it’s a pretty great deal."
having been an astroturfed guest like this at more than a few parties, it is indeed a pretty great deal
How were you an astroturfed guest? Does something like Partyr exist?
I thought maybe you got the idea from reading Ashley Mears https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/ashley-mears/
about the complicated ecosystem in which guys who are much like pimps draw attractive women to attend clubs that high status men frequent. The fascinating part is these women won't take money because that would be too meretricious; they have to be convinced to attend the clubs by a very influential man; likewise, the rich men attending the club don't want to feel like Johns either, so many subtle steps are required to get all these people together. Punishingly loud music also features in her stories about these club scenes, I forget her explanation for it but there is one.
^^yeah basically this
although someone sent me this thing once https://socialbuddy.us/, no idea if it's real or not
IIRC, a lot of outdoor public occasions ("New Year's Eve Concert With Whatever-TV Channel") have a subset of guests that are paid for, so it doesn't look ridiculous when they stream it and there's 5 people attending.
You can be paid to be in TV audiences as well. Years ago I went to see a screening of Penn & Teller's Fool Us (free tickets) but the people in the row ahead of us were paid to be there and while walking around Vegas we were approached by multiple people who wanted us to watch Pilot episodes.
Yeah, I once had a temp job handing out free movie tickets for a documentary that had just come out. The guests themselves weren't paid to be there, but I was getting $18/hour for 6 hours a day just to give the tickets out to anyone who passed by the theater and was willing to go. Incredibly easy job if you don't mind standing around the same area for the whole day and hearing "no thanks" a lot. I'm guessing the filmmakers wanted to get the theater packed for the first week of showings to prove that they'd drawn in a large audience.
My late grandmother had grown up in pre-revolutionary Russia, in St. Petersburg. She claimed that a similar service existed in Czarist Russia. Russians are not typically superstitious about the number 13, except when you have 13 people at the table. So if you were holding a dinner party and you somehow ended up with a total of 13 people, you could call a professional guest who would come over on short notice and expand the number to 14. I have not been able to get independent verification of this claim, but my grandmother was not prone to confabulation.
There actually was an app sort of like Partyr, it was called Surkus. It looks like it shut down in September 2021. See: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-new-app-will-pay-you-to-party-and-hang-out-at-restaurants-2017-08-18-10882955
The app claimed you could get paid to attend events. On the flip side, event organizers could buy people to show up, to generate buzz. When I tried out the app, I recall seeing just a couple events in Los Angeles (makes sense!). Then later they expanded the app so there were other things you could do to earn money. For instance, you could make money by buying items on Amazon, posting a good review, and then uploading proof of the purchase and review (which to be honest I did once. I don't think they required a 5 star review but it was something I felt comfortable giving a 5 star review for anyway).
So that's how humanity is going to die... when party music fooms.
This is the first I’ve read from you and I absolutely loved it!
This is good stuff here, but wow this would be a bizarre introduction to Scott's writing! Welcome to the party, and I hope you enjoy the more central examples of his work as well :)
Yeah, usually the angels in Scott's fictional parties are more depressed angels of heaven than depressing angels of finance.
"depressing angels of finance" is a good phrase
This kind of post is Scott Alexander in peak form. Idol Worship, The Gods Only Have Power, and of course the canon on the old blog are clearly the best you have to offer. Sn-risk almost took me out of my chair
This post is clearly inaccurate. No Twitter exec has ever studied Classical History.
I was at a wedding reception once where there were quite a few google people. None of them talked like that, but I suppose it was because they hadn't quit google yet.
Scott, I think you could write a couple of hilarious skits for SNL.
Is axolotl kosher? Can I mix it with dairy?
It lives in the water and doesn't have scales, so probably not? (I've no idea what I'm talking about)
It would probably be OK for Catholics to eat on a Friday then, like beaver.
(Stop sniggering at the back!)
And don't forget the barnacle geese that grow on trees!
too many unnecessary details; complete lack of tempo; peter thiel should have appear earlier in the passage; taylor swift shall be replaced by either a vegan blonde model slash programmer e.g. karlie kloss or one of the kardashians; periodic interludes of scenic descriptions of evening sea waves and warmly yellow street lights that contrasts with the never-grow-up theil foundation startups
Brilliant.
I’ve been mulling over the ‘reincarnation without the woo’ thing for decades and think it does actually make sense.
It starts with: why do you have a first person experience from the creature that is reading these words? Why are you not having a first person experience from the body of Elon Musk (maybe you are, hi Elon!) or a particular sparrow in the New Forest?
And then, when your body dies, does that mean no more first person experiences again for ‘you’? Or, will some other creature create a first person experience for ‘you’ again (for whatever reason this current creature is creating your current first person experience?)
There is no need for a ‘woo’ part ie no memories are retained, no ‘new game+’, no element of karma (although I love the version of that in this story). Just the concept that first person experiences may not end with death of this current creature.
If this is correct - and we perhaps we should act in a way that assumes it is - what would be the implications?
Many creatures have minimal agency over their experiences. Humans are different, not just with more agency of themselves but of others - at a minimal level of their family and pets and immediate connections, but wider too esp in more developed countries and moving up the influence and power in society.
If you were a cow, you would look at humans and saying ‘if I was one of those I could impact this shitty situation’. Well congratulations, you are! How do you, as a first world human, use that power to mean that if you do have a first person experience from another creature, that future experience is…not utterly horrific?
That idea if embraced ties all living things together. Selfishness disappears - you might literally be in anyones (or anything’s) shoes in the future, so do anything you can to not deliver horrible experiences to anything. It’s to your own benefit!
It is perfectly reasonable if you assume that your brain is just a receiver for a consciousness that exists elsewhere, just as a radio doesn't have a little person inside.
In fact, the more that I think about it, the more reasonable this suggestion is. After all, evolution builds structures that take advantage of existing things in the physical environment. You would never build wings without air, nor eyes without EM radiation, nor muscles without chemical energy stores, so how could you build a conscious brain without some pre-existing physical phenomenon of which to take advantage?
Consciousness could come from the brain's processing in some way. It isn't as if things like circulatory systems tap into, say, the abstract concept of blood flow.
Blood flow is hardly an abstract concept, it has a very real and obvious existence.
I guess that's a fair objection. Ignoring analogies, then, my issue with your suggestion is that while everything an organism does has to use some property of the environment (down to "the laws of physics let you do this" (and I guess that we live somewhere with the right temperature range for chemistry) in the case of storing chemical energy), that doesn't mean the environment already contains the stuff the organism is doing, only the basic substrate allowing it.
But where did the first advanced monkey or whatever get its consciousness from? Or was there a cosmic store of souls waiting for evolution to make use of it eventually?
What do souls have to do with anything?
Used it as a hopefully obvious shorthand for "consciousness that exists elsewhere", dunno what the kosher Buddhist analogue would be.
I don't think that it is a very good shorthand as it requires the plural. I was thinking more of a singular, universal consciousness of which an individual conscious is a heavily filtered version.
An analogy might be that of a radio picking out a single, narrow band from the whole spectral continuum that impinges upon its aerial.
You haven't removed the woo, you just inverted the homunculus so it lies outside rather than inside.
In any case this is a common suggestion that has been debated and largely left as unworkable.
Does this idea have a name? If so, then I would be obliged if you could provide it, so that I can find out what the problems are.
Not to my knowledge. The concept is easily dismissed because phenomena like blindsight show that consciousness is not purely a one-way communication as with a radio receiver, but must be two-way because qualitative experience has observable effects. If information flow is bidirectional, then the "radio" transmit/receive step is multiplying entities unnecessarily.
You'd be better served reading the state of promising mechanistic, scientific accounts for consciousness, like this one:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116933119
Thanks for the link, I shall peruse it with interest. I must say though, that I don't consider your objection to the external phenomena argument to be in any way convincing or definitive.
So it is with literally every thought experiment in the consciousness debate. I haven't seen a single instance of someone changing their mind. Every thought experiment serves only to sort you into the camp with people who share your preconceptions.
All I can say is that a good guide given past missteps of similar nature, like vitalism, suggest we ought to make as few assumptions as possible and stick to the verifiable facts.
If you can describe an experiment by which you can discern between theories where the brain is producing consciousness, and where the brain is transmitting/receiving some global consciousness field, then there's something to talk about. I posit that there is no such experiment.
No matter what surprises we find in the brain's neural network, it will always be axiomatically simpler to simply say the biochemical processes P within structure X simply produce consciousness, rather than posit some global field which P+X is "tuning" into. If you reproduce P+X and reproduce consciousness in other media, like silicon, it's still axiomatically simpler to say P+X simply produces consciousness. Since the tuner possibility is logically more complex and logically indistinguishable, we shouldn't even bother with it, among other reasons.
I was 6 when I first wondered about this. Why do I see through my eyes rather than Johnny’s? We all feel a disconnect between the mind and body. And although I don’t think the mind is the brain - it’s tightly coupled “software” - it dies when we die.
If there's no state transferred between lives, how would any of the things-being-conscious appreciably be "me" or "not me"?
By having a first person experience from one of those things
Sorry for any unclarity. What I mean is: what distinguishes the things having first person experiences (the ones providing first person experiences to "creatures") from each other? As far as I know, object identity isn't really an actual/primitive feature of the universe like that: things are "the same" if they have the same properties, or through some notion of continuity (there is a chain of things with very similar properties going through the time between them). What properties do they have - what makes this different to a new consciousness just being assigned whenever something's brain comes into existence and deleted afterward, if no information is carried over?
Re what makes it different - there are new conscious creatures coming into existence all the time but ‘I’ don’t experience their qualia - they create no first person experience for ‘me’. For some reason this current creature does create a first person experience for ‘me’ (and other creatures do for other consciousnesses) and that excludes any other first person experiences for ‘me’ in parallel. But when this creature dies, it’s easy to imagine another creatures qualia being experienced first person by ‘me’ again, for whatever reason this creature creates ‘my’ first person experience but others do not.
It’s really hard to explain without terms like ‘me’ that of course has no underlying thing to point to, but hopefully makes some intuitive sense
Fuck yes! That was awesome, Scott!
Irony aside, this is why I live in New York
Is there not simply a different breed of annoying social climber at your typical Manhattan cocktail party?
Like 80% of Bay Area house parties are actually nothing like this. That's more of a SF/Berkeley, transplant, grad. education type of party that rationalist types would be invited to, and which many of the same types of people in Boston, Austin, and Seattle would be familiar with.
In general Bay Area house parties are similar to what you'd find elsewhere across the US. A lot of people blitzed on 8 servings of alcohol surrounding beer pong, deafening trap music, tons of weed passed around, occasionally mushrooms and cocaine, and waking up to shenanigans on Instagram, and definitely not a whole lot of intelligent conversation. More like singing a long and people just reconvening happily, hugging, and shooting the shit. I love it, but could definitely use more rat-type parties too.
very funny
Rolled a 20 on this one... great fun!
Not quite the Turtledove restaurant, but Topolobampo in Chicago (the fanciest of Rick Bayless's Mexican restaurants) did a "1491" menu some years back with a similar idea.
I was underwhelmed. Like the dinosaur killer asteroid, I'm glad not to have experienced the Columbian Exchange directly, but the results are clearly to my benefit.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160324221332/https://www.chicagotribune.com/dining/recipes/ct-topolobampo-review-20140227-20140227-column.html
Huh, neat!
A few years ago, there was a British reality TV show called '10000 BC' (https://m.imdb.com/title/tt4443898/) in which the participants had to live as their neolithic ancestors. Long story short, it mostly involved being very hungry indeed. In one episode, our heroes managed to hunt and kill a deer and, upon consuming its fire-charred liver, stated that it was the best tasting thing that they had ever eaten.
So, I reckon that a stone age themed restaurant where that sort of rough food (openly cooked over glowing embers) is served might be a winner if you can convince people not to eat anything for the 48 hours before they visit.
Convincing people to starve just a bit before coming to your restaurant would be a hell of a hack.
Apparently there's a restaurant that's doing that every day opening in Minnesota. https://www.foodandwine.com/travel/restaurants/sean-sherman-owamni-restaurant-opens?utm_campaign=foodandwine&utm_content=bestof_90days&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_term=626ecfafee8b820001133a31&fbclid=IwAR2y7E5V3tq4dk5FHHKwvQYJN71PkzROEZw7lC2Y_cbv66sqKBIt_eaYBkU
You missed the main Aztec comfort food: Chihuahua!
Are the tense changes errors, or is Scott doing something too clever for me?
Errors.
This sort of makes me happy to be a guy in rural Washington who quietly does wood working in his garage while thinking about things. At least I don’t have to be confronted with the existential horror that I’m the same as everyone else in a visceral manner.
I have never in my life been to a Bay Area house party, but this is exactly what every Bay Area house party is like.
Can anyone fully unpack the meanings of “having alpha” and “freeze peach” for me?
alpha is finance lingo for beating the market. freeze peach is akin to imagining whirled peas.
"Freeze peach" is a distorted rendering of "free speech" sometimes used on the internet in mocking imitation of people who think that they should be able to post whatever they want wherever they want and anyone who says they can't is denying them a constitutional right. ("But muh freeze peach" is the expanded phrase.) As with most crude mockeries, its use rapidly became associated with the most mean-spirited and unreflective defenders of moderation; by putting it in the mouth of the Twitter moderator here, Scott is suggesting that they're reflexively censorious.
Ooooo that makes sense now
At some point one or more censorious losers decided that anyone fond of free speech as an ideal deserved to be mocked, so they changed the spelling in a way that could be easily posted to twitter - the place where other such losers tend to congregate.
Some people in these comments are taking this story, and the word "every" in the title, way too literally. *Obviously* most people in the Bay Area are the same as everywhere else. *Obviously* you would meet hardly anyone like the people described in this story if you came here, unless you actively tried really hard to do so. *Obviously* Scott's social circle is a weird little corner of a corner of a society, as every individual person's social circle is. Mine is a different corner of a corner so it's different. This is all so obvious I feel bad writing it, but I'm getting the sense it's somehow not apparent to everyone.
If you removed the indignant pedantry from Internet forums then you wouldn't have much content left. Just let it wash over you.
I think you might have misunderstood--I'm *being* the indignant pedant here :P I'm reacting to the commenters who don't live here and seem to interpret this story as actually saying something representative about the place as a whole.
*Obviously* Scott's readership is a weird little group of pedants who would get hung up on this sort of thing...
😂😅 Love it! Do you have a novel length techno, satire, sci-fi book? If not why not?
😉
unsongbook.com
Many thanks! I look forward to reading this!
unsongbook.com
Many thanks! :)
unrealistic: who would talk to that many people at one party
I definitely would - though rarely get such interesting responses!
You enter the party. The music is too loud. Your auditory processing disorder makes it impossible to discern voices from music. You hang out with the dog for a while. The dog is great company. You then leave.
Most of my friends have finally gotten used to me vanishing. It took a while.
For a moment, I thought it said, "The dog has a great company" which would also make sense at that party.
"Well, you see," he said, "On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're a Dog. Based on this, my company seeks to ..."
“We're going to solve moderation using the principle that there's no such thing as a bad dog”
The only difference is that the dog's funding comes from Peter Beagle.
This is what I would do, except for hanging around with the dog, if I wouldn't be drinking.
You insert your earplugs... and fall asleep on a sofa (my 20's party life).
I can't tell whether I would love or hate living in these social circles.
If Subnormality dropped the pictures entirely
Laughed out loud several times, well done!
Genius
Really enjoyed the part about Zen and enlightment.
I semi-seriously endorse the idea that whole enlightment thing is just an elaborate prank and becoming enlightened is figuring this out, laughting at yourself and then not spoiling the joke for others, while possibly continuing all the medival monk stuff for your own amusement.
True enlightenment is not just the realization that enlightenment is fake but that it's a prank: something you can do to other people for fun.
Enlightenment is more or less about finding a way to have an acid trip without ingesting any actual drugs by breaking your brain through too much meditation, less impressive these days than it must've used to be.
that was some party….
This is the funniest thing you've written in a while.
I don’t know what position Hunter Biden is running for, but I’m sure there’s more than a week before this election
No, I can't believe axolotl.
A serious and humorless take on secularized 'reincarnation' - it's more or less a combination of any of these three ideas: heredity(you carry your ancestors in your blood), the notion of eternal return given either determinism or an infinite number of iterations and convergent thought on universal topics. It doesn't have to mean living past your death, especially given the focus on deemphasizing the notion of the self as illusory. But hey, discovering some arcane truth about say the distribution of prime numbers is tantamount to channeling every mind that thought about the same. Just in a poetic, not literal fashion.
I'll go a bit further and say that Buddhism stripped of its supernatural components is a lot more like an early attempt at practical psychiatry/psychology than a religion. E.g. Buddhist hells seem to be more of an attempt to describe various states of cognitive failure and depersonalization without having a modern model of the world than anything, one of which in particular reminds me of the one bad trip on acid I've had years back. The entire philosophy is more or less about dealing with progressing mental illness of various sorts in such a way that happens to be harmless to others.
Well, to think about reincarnation presupposes thinking about time. Maybe time is a restraint and kinda a lie. That's why I turned catholic. God should be able to sort this out.
Obnoxious music aside this sounds better than most parties I get invited to.
I'm weirdly reminded of one of those Jane Austen drawing room scenes among the early 1800s aristocracy, with everyone[1] speaking competitively about who came into ten thousand a year and which horse the Prince of Wales favors at Ascot this year.
----------
[1] Except Darcy and Anne Elliot of course.
Yes, they're both salons, an idea that could use a broader revival.
As I recall, one of the unwritten rules of parties in San Francisco was: if the party isn’t being organized by a startup, don’t talk about your startup. On the other hand, apart from the use of the word “alpha”, this does match a lot of my recollections about parties organized by startups.
I really want to read about the bizarro world where people brag about their shutdowns.
Possible subtitle for this post: The Hidden Costs of Agglomeration Effects.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration
Ffs
> I’m studying sn-risks.”
> “I can’t remember, which ones are sn-risks?”
> “Steppe nomads. Horse archers. The Eurasian hordes.”
I feel attacked.
I love steppe nomads and most of the people here probably have some ancestry there. https://youtube.com/watch?v=v4xZUr0BEfE&feature=share Is something if you like rock'n roll.
Taking a slightly different tack on secular reincarnation: "You" is the mental pattern not the physical body, that's why when someone gets uploaded to the Matrix we don't start talking as though it's a different person. "You" is also fuzzy, people's patterns change over time but "you" describes both yesterday's and today's pattern. When you die you don't *automatically* reincarnate, but given an enormously large universe, eventually there will come another embodied pattern close enough that it also counts as you.
From there we get to karma by considering selection effects. If you were an especially violent pattern, the next place you pop up in the universe is likely to be the sort of place that produces a lot of violence, and you're going to be stuck there until you die at which point maybe you've changed enough that your next match lands you somewhere else.
It's not possible to extricate the mental pattern from the physical body. They are both parts of the same whole. The Matrix is science fiction for a reason, and even there they had to put the entire body into a pod instead of just the brain.
If the Mongols are coming back, invest in The Hu.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4xZUr0BEfE&ab_channel=TheHU
TIL YouTube supports that sort of video resolution - I kept absentmindedly trying to "scroll up" to see the rest of the picture until I realized what was going on.
We already had the "overdue" barbarian invasion. It was called 9/11 and it came out of Afghanistan. Then we went and beat up the barbarians badly enough that they're going to wait a while before trying that crap again, even though they technically "won".
Related: One of the justifications for tte Vietnam War was the "domino theory" that if we let South Vietnam fall to Communism, then there would be similar uprisings/invasions in other Asian countries and they would fall as well. There's a more recent hypothesis that the fact that South Vietnam did eventually fall and no other "dominoes" fell doesn't actually discredit the theory; the fact that the US fought as long and as hard as it did before giving up was enough to keep Communists elsewhere from trying.
I'm probably going to get scolded for this opinion; but I suspect the type of person who is on the so-called "Trust and Safety Council" at Twitter probably thinks the destruction of the monuments and works of Western Civilization is a commendable act.
This is the moment when I went from thinking "wow, there have been some great ACX posts recently" to "wow, ACX really is entering a new era of enhanced quality, perhaps enough to rival the SSC glory days of whenever that was"
Darn it, worrying about steppe nomads was going to be *my* thing.
Nancy mentions The Hu further down, but yeah: you *should* be worrying about the steppe nomads 😀
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pD1gDSao1eA&list=RDEMF5ZCKhXx2XiTDLBpNzrHug&index=3
There should be a party guest working on disruptive access to abortion, dropping packets of the 5 pills from airplanes, or selling them in pet stores "for aquarium fish use only", or something like Vine-Glo.
Or would that be too useful for the world?
...or selling them as dishwasher soap pellets. There has to be a way.
The scientific reincarnation thing is quite similar to the premise of Permutation City by Greg Egan. Not my favorite book ever but if that kind of stuff intrigues you check it out.
Great Post Scott, Excellent Satire.
BTW: your repeated references to Peter Theil funding everything are now more important and more real than you let on.
Last night J.D. Vance, best known as the author of "Hillbilly Elegy" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillbilly_Elegy, won the primary election to be the Republican candidate in the State of Ohio for the U.S. Senate.
The national media is playing the story as a Trump endorsement story. And, to be sure, Trump's endorsement did seem to boost Vance into the lead. Vance won with about 32% of the vote in a 7 candidate race. #2 & #3 we about 23%.
But it really is a Peter Theil story. Theil groomed and promoted Vance's candidacy and invested $15 million in it.
Ohio is a red state now. Trump won it by 8% in 2020. Republican Governor Mike DeWine is very popular. Vance is very likely to be a US Senator come next January. And, Peter Theil will have funded him.
BTW, my sources:
Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Win One for JD Vance in Ohio
The author of Hillbilly Elegy earned a victory in a Senate primary that put Trump’s endorsement—and Thiel’s political aspirations—to the test.
By Max Chafkin | May 4, 2022
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-04/jd-vance-trump-focus-overlooks-peter-thiel-s-role
A mole hunt, a secret website and Peter Thiel's big risk: How J.D. Vance won his primary
The former Trump critic leaned on a super PAC and his billionaire patron to put him in position for Trump's all-important endorsement.
By Alex Isenstadt | 05/03/2022
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/03/jd-vance-win-ohio-primary-00029881
Love these short stories. Can never tell if they're apocryphal or mere exaggerations.
I have avoided the bay area due to the stereotype of Big-tech nerd on koolaid mono-culture. But, if the parties are anything like this, it sounds interesting. Can anyone in Bay Area / SF give me an idea of whether such spots quirky exist and where one could find them ?
I wanna get paid to be a retard at a sweet VC party
"Exactly! With modern technology, the next time could be so much worse! Usually the steppe nomads are limited to a small fringe around the steppe where they can still graze their horses..."
I think Sara is a bit behind the times. The steppe nomads have embraced modern technology and taken a step up from both horses and archery: https://i.redd.it/idkemq67bqj71.jpg
Read Arslan, by M.J. Engh. A great novel about the sn risk from 1987.
"God is so powerful that He doesn’t even need to exist in order to save us.”
OMG, I think I might believe this! Thx.
If I'm remembering correctly, it's a quote from some philosopher, which Scott referenced in a short story on the old blog involving a superintelligent A.I. engaging in acausal trade.
I personally think all that "acausal trade" stuff is nonsense, and choose to interpret the line in the more grounded sense of "belief in God can provide people with psychological and sociocultural benefits that lead to material benefits." Which is way less exciting, for sure, but probably closer to what the original author had in mind.
Anybody say " Namu Amida Butsu" ten times just in case?
I heard you have to do it 10000 times. Lmk how that goes.
Wouldn't make too much fun of that, that phrase is just pavlovian conditioning: be in a calm focused state, repeat same syllables a million times until an association forms, then whenever you utter them in a different context, it brings part of the emotion back. It's a self-hypnosis trigger more or less. Or to put it even simpler: saying 'banana' probably makes you think of a color and maybe a taste even if there isn't one under your nose.
this is so fucking good and also so fucking accurate. I'm so blessed that somebody was able to write about my sf experience
Apropos of nothing, I created a couple fake twitter accounts pretending to be cardinal points on the political compass and started doing one reply a day to a large account (On company time, of course.).
Communism got banned first, after I threatened to Carthago a brand's lawn; Anarchist and anarchocap got banned around the same time for threating statements. Nationalist just kept going till I got bored; I couldn't bring myself to add a 'White' to the front and go full racist and I was less enthusiastic about it. It turns out, auth-right is just kinda boring unless you are willing to COMMMIT; and if you don't break any rules you can say pretty much whatever you want, even if it's outrageously offensive.
Tip: scribble “music too loud” on a piece of paper or just type it on your phone; this battle can be won.
Holy mother of god, this all sounds awful
If I had to live surround by these people I'd just go ahead and commit quantum suicide and hope I reincarnated into a society that hadn't lost its friggin mind. Societies like this are only possible because of a genuine lack of want and need. Human beings worried about day to day survival do not have time for this crap. So apparently the closer you are to barely surviving, the more you actually live in reality.
Very nice David Foster Wallace vibe
Превосходно!
Does the Taliban's victory in Afghanistan count as an example of SN-risk? Everyone keeps bringing up Russia and Ukraine, but it seems like the Taliban is a better match for modern Steppe Nomads. Afghanistan seems like one of the few remaining places on Earth where the Steppe Nomad strategy for fighting off larger, better equipped, and more organized forces could still work.
In keeping with Dogiv and Watchman's comments below, maybe the real winning strategy for the British/Soviets/Americans in Afghanistan would've been to build more railroads.
This was my favorite newsletter (maybe the wrong term?) in a while.
Three things:
1) This post was a lot of fun.
b) Is the thing about the pilot whales' relative unintelligence true?
III) I would absolutely eat at that restaurant.
The pilot whale thing is shamelessly copied from https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/25/neurons-and-intelligence-a-birdbrained-perspective/ , but I think I heard from someone that probably it was just mismeasured.
Very surreal but the point is not missed. People have gone bat shit.
The politically correct term these days is "guano." People have gone guano.
OK, maybe not.
Maybe somebody can actually bootstrap a party with Elon Musk (or whichever big celebrity they want) attending, by telling all the other famous potential guests that Musk will be there, and then telling Musk that all those other people will be there.
The Zen Buddhist reincarnation idea in here sounds incredibly similar to what they suggest in Space Dandy to be 'warp travel' aka FTL travel.
stupidity compounds pretty fast. If you buy $100 of stupid coin today you would have 10,000 in 10 yrs
As a finance guy I love that "alpha" has made its way into Silicon Valley vernacular. I wonder how that happened? Maybe via the quants?
We do live in a society.
These people are coo coo. Is this real or satire? And people make fun of followers of Christ and of the Bible for believing it (yes, some Christian beliefs don't make sense, but often it's because of a misinterpretation of the text).
German-japanese fusion is great, but an hour later you want to conquer the world.
God, this sounds amazing. Wish I could attend one. Major FOMO I'm feeling now.
Partyr actually seems like a good idea
What’s worked historically re steppe nomad risks, offered by the great novelist Jin Yong 金庸:
“I wrote about how powerful Chinese martial arts are in my wuxia novels, but actually it’s a bit exaggerated. Chinese people are not so great at fighting wars. When we fight wars with foreigners, we lose more often than we win. But we have stamina! If we don’t win this round, that’s okay, we’ll fight you long-term. Eventually, the foreign country falls apart from civil war. For instance the Huns were very fearsome, so we couldn’t win against them. Han Dynasty Emperor Gaozu was besieged by the Huns near Datong in Shanxi, and could not escape. His advisors offered a stratagem, to go to the Empress of the Huns and say: there are many beautiful Han ladies, and if you capture the Han Emperor, defeat the Han people, and get a whole bunch of beautiful Han women as spoils of war, it’s going to go badly for you -O Empress of the Huns! The Empress of the Huns fell for this stratagem, and pulled back the army. The Huns later split into Northern Huns and Southern Huns. The Southern Huns surrendered to the Han Empire, while the Northern Huns went westward, some of them reaching England, and they destroyed the entire Western Roman Empire. What was interesting was, half of the Huns were resisted by and surrendered to China, while the other half defeated all of Europe.”
— from https://feikayser.substack.com/p/chinese-ladies-for-decisive-military?s=w
I moved to the old money neighborhood in town, known for and named after its trees. Slowly, new money invaders have bought plots in said neighborhood and clear-cut them of almost all foliage. I am inherently distrustful and disdainful of those who don't feel safest and most at peace in a wooded, forest-like environment, so I can only assume these are the descendants of steppe nomads. They speak our language and look like us, but their gene-deep disdain for trees can only mean one thing—the invasion has already begun.
Reminiscent of Point Counter Point.
I started to get a real Disco Elysium vibe when the music defended itself
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