1) We can find cases where the AI does what we said, not what we want, on toy problems.
2) Given our progress in making AI, it seems highly likely that sooner or later we will have very intelligent AI.
3) Godlike beings are highly unlikely to exist. Aliens don't seem to have visited so far and have had billions of years to do so, strongly suggesting that aliens prone to interfering on earth don't exist. Future smart AI is highly likely to exist.
I think you are misusing "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" if you think AI doom is that extraordinary. Sure, the evidence we have is a bit more ambiguous hints, not vast and overwhelming the way the evidence for evolution is. So if you start with really really low priors, you don't update to AI doom. I think the problem there is the low priors. (I also suspect you aren't familiar with all the various arguments)
Do you think that a smart AI that acts by itself and wishes harm on humanity.
a) Is impossible. (Strongly implies human brains are magic, as some fairly smart independent and malicious humans have existed)
b) Is possible, but will never be built.
c) Couldn't do that much harm. (Requires believing that humans are near the limit, there isn't that much supertech we could invent if we were smarter. Being able to duplicate yourself and have many copies work together isn't that powerful. ...)
"Bigness is inherently ugly. There’s never been a beautiful skyscraper. Every single one of them is an atrocity. The fact that people still pretend otherwise tells you how conditioned we’ve become to disregard our own nature and our own natural longings." -Tucker Carlson, January 5, 2022
I'm reading the book now and often find myself responding to posts with what I'm currently reading - like a hammer looking for nails - if that helps. [an inevitable systematic intersection??] : )
Singapore is half size of London with a unique history. Dalio(2021) referred to it as a boutique country - like Switzerland. Singapore was fortunate to have Lee Kuan Yew at the right time(and he, the opportunity, imo). I'm sure it's a great place to live.
That said, wealth, prosperity and urban living tend to turn cities liberal/progressive over time.
---
Let me underscore that from the original post that Conservative is NOT synonymous with "racist" and not all rural folks are staunch conservatives. Many are moderates of the right and some left.
Beat me to it....I am a lifelong enthusiastic urbanist who also did some time in the burbs and knows what the real differences are. It ain't skyscrapers. Skyscrapers are a _result_ of urbanism.
(Which is not to say that all skyscrapers are aesthetically the same, there are ugly ones and beautiful ones just like with any other type of built structure.)
Sure, but what do you mean by "urbanism"? I was thinking of it as a preference or lifestyle, but your use of the word "about" makes it sound more like a movement.
(The "smart-growth" movement does exist, in a previous job I gained some professional level knowledge of it actually. But it's always struck me as fairly incoherent and shallow.)
I have often thought of urbanism as a particularly Western affliction that shoe-horns people together in close physical proximity while they tend to lead socially isolated and lonely lives.
Many skyscrapers are beautiful as artifacts, just as many teapots are beautiful as artifacts, but if I found myself living in a forest of 500-foot-high teapots I would constantly feel like I was in a weird fever dream and needed to get back to somewhere normal with trees and lawns, and this is how I feel about skyscrapers too.
I grew up in Hong Kong - and to me, skyscrapers are both beautiful and normal, while lawns, though pleasing in their own way, seem contrived and unnatural.
I grew up with lawns, but I have to agree that they're unnatural. I think it's A) that they actually are very contrived and unnatural and B) that despite all the green, suburban areas aren't really possible to survive in if you don't have a car to take you to the grocery store all the time. They feel weirdly like a desert when I walk through them without owning a home.
This is true in the new world, but most of Europe is a different beast. Medium sized cities tend to be quite walkable and survivable without a car. Possibly because they were born before cars existed.
Ah yes, the suburbs. Where your kids are trapped in a special kind of hell, because they can't go anywhere or do anything without you taking them there.
Only if you move to a shit suburb. Move to a well-designed suburb, one with walkability and good public transport connections.
To be fair, I'm not sure if any good suburbs actually exist in California. But it bugs me when people observe that the suburbs around them are shit and blame suburbia in general when they should be blaming their local governments for designing such shit suburbs.
The US needs fewer urbanists and more suburbanists -- people focused on figuring out how to make suburbs better without sacrificing backyards and driveability.
My kids walked to school from kindergarten through 6th grade, with crossing guards and stuff. Clubs and whatnot met at the school grounds, or sometimes at the public ball parks and tennis courts, which you could get to with a bike ride, half of which was on bike path through park, and half along roads with nice wide bike lanes. They could walk to their friends' houses, or take the bike. Best of all, the chances of them being accosted by a meth-head or having to step around a pile of human shit were zero. Maybe you're referring to a specially degenerate type of suburb?
I grew up in a suburb, we even had stroads and all the things urbanists hate. I remember walking all the way to the nearby city on nothing but green, trafficless public green space, and riding bikes to the mall.
Suburbs are specifically built for parents and their kids, if the suburb you live in is hell for kids, and this is a common practice - perhaps it's not an urban design problem but a parenting one.
Specifically, parents in the 50s and 60s at Peak Suburb Meme wanted private space and a yard, but also wanted to make sure their kid could get around, because the idyllic white picket fence life included hoodlum teenagers and lemonade stands on the sidewalk. Some combo of stranger danger and UMC striverism made that less of a priority.
Ah yes, my childhood was hell. Hanging out with the neighbor kids, swimming in our pools, playing baseball and basketball in our cul de sac street with almost no traffic, spending most of our day unsupervised with no real threat to our safety, having dogs and yards for them to live and play in, building billy carts and riding tthem around the street etc.
Where and what are all these kids doing in the city by themselves?
Cities aren't for kids, and living there makes people not want to have kids, and that's supremely self-destructive for a society.
Then maybe you should get back to trees and lakes and ponds (and real Detroit pizza) here in MI. What will you really miss not witnessing the end of the world? Witness the world as it is now. It’s lovely this time of year (the world and MI both).
Too true. A mountain range is beautiful from a distance, but I wouldn't want to be twenty thousand feet up Mount Everest with my teeth chattering in the cold, my nose and fingers turning black with frostbite, and peering over a ten thousand foot sheer drop!
You are attempting to get a group of people who have defiantly rejected the possibility of human values outside of the rational to understand the idea of an aesthetic preference. They ain't gonna get there.
It's the principle of charity. One must assume that there is a sensible justifation for a position, even when it appears on the surface that the opposition just has really bad taste ;)
On what planet are urbanists and YIMBYists fair to anyone that disagrees with them? In this very thread someone is talking nonsense about suburbs being "a special kind of hell" for kids.
Ah yes, glorious singapore, a society so healthy that that they have the second lowest fertility of any country in the world. A true urbanist utopia....
Fertility is low here, though the better comparison is probably to other global cities, not to other countries.
I'm not sure I'd use fertility as a proxy for healthy, though. Many of the places with the highest fertility are amongst the least healthy. Both in a literal health sense, but also in a more metaphorical sense.
Growing up in NYC, I've always found the city skyline to be absolutely beautiful, particularly when viewed from across the river at night. I find them rather less appealing up close, though.
Agree about skyscrapers etc. Bigness in nature isn't inherently ugly, though, right? -- mountains, 200 foot waterfalls, and the poor megafauna who were so happy and unacquainted with fear they just stood there and let us kill them. I have miseries in cities too.
When I was fairly young my parents took me on a trip that took us through Houston. My main memory of Houston was the awe inspiring and seemingly endless mass of pipes and tanks associated, I assume, with the chemical and petroleum industry. I was "wowed" by it.
I admire the technology of them, and some of them are aesthetically appealing. But more of them are nothing but crude phalluses, there's no denying it. I mean, if you have no money, you draw a dick on the wall of the public toilet, if you have all the money, you do the same on the skyline.
Also, tigers are majestic, but I'd prefer living somewhere not too close to them. Preferably separated by a large deep body of water, just in case. Some beauty is better observed when I'm not the part of it.
What non-phallic substitute would you use for “make efficient use of a city block”? It kind of has to be tall and slender-ish. It’s like complaining that rockets or cigars are phallus shaped. I mean they are, but it’s a functional shape.
I'm not complaining exactly, especially not about the function. I mean, I know where it comes from. But that doesn't make me ignore they are ugly. I recognize the fact. How to make it not ugly? Well, the same way you write good poetry, or good music, or paint a beautiful painting - just make it not ugly. There are examples, it's possible. Yes, it'd cost more money and effort. That doesn't change the evaluation of the result though.
They don't have to be as slender as they are. Making a whole city block one building would make them a lot less phallic. Going the full arcology route (with the streets underneath as tunnels) would be even more efficient.
Also Paris has basically no skyscrapers and manages to be one of the densest cities outside Asia, so you can pack people tight even without going hundred of stories up into the sky
I'm pushing back against your use use of the phrase "there's no denying it."
We're talking about aesthetic preferences here.
You seem to be stating your aesthetic preference and then saying not only that people should share your preference but that it's not really possible that anyone else can have a different preference.... that it can't be denied that your opinion is correct.
I'm here to tell you that it *can* be denied. That it *is* in fact possible for someone with different preferences than yours to look at a bunch of skyscrapers without seeing a bunch of dicks.
Truly, SF's skyscraper game is pitiful compared to NYC's. There are some decent Art-Deco-era buildings if you know where to look, but the big modern efforts like Transamerica Pyramid and Salesforce Tower show much more grandiosity than taste.
I can't say I agree with Tucker on this one. There's beautiful skyscrapers, it's just that none of them is in San Francisco.
The Transamerica Pyramid has a certain charm, but everything else is generic filler. It's the boring buildings you get in SimCity to persuade you to pay for the DLC.
IMO "generic filler" can look quite pleasant if it's well designed...i.e. if a neighbourhood consists just of typical "boring" modern apartment buildings, but has lots of greenspace, pedestrian zones, and shops/restaurants etc. then it's a pleasant place to live in and visit...
Aren’t castles kinda like skyscrapers? Wonder how much more palatable traditionalists would find large condo towers if they had a pointy top of some sort
I'd certainly be fine with living in a building that looks like a castle. I mean, now I'm spoiled and I want my own house with the backyard, but back when I was young and lived in apartments, I'd certainly consider it very cool if it were made to look like a castle.
When I think of San Francisco, I don't think of skyscrapers. I imagine part of the problem is that there are a lot of modern ones, which don't have the same style as the Art Deco ones. Look at this skyline. How... inspiring (though of what, I will refrain from mentioning):
As to building castles out of towers, there was a monarch who tried that and it ended with him going (if not already) crazy and bankrupting his personal fortune, but on the other hand it is undeniable that it did wonders for the tourist trade in later years:
I lived in and around SF for 20+ years and you are right - though the City is only 49 square miles, just a small nub of that is skyscrapers. The rest of it is so ...not skyscraper.
I don't think that fact really makes the feeling of not liking being around skyscrapers any less real. Castles are a large defensive fortification intended to intimidate. Some are beautifully designed and decorated, but no peasant in 12th century France would like to be surrounded by castles. That would be a threat on all sides. A castle is much less claustrophobia inducing because there is just one, and you can run from it.
If Tucker Carlson had a more poetic frame of mind, I wonder what he would say about a people grown so distant from beauty that when seeking a word to set up opposite 'ugly', the best they could come up with is 'badass' - a conjunction of not-good and the place of defecation.
As much as I disagree with the anti-skyscraper thing, "bigness is inherently ugly" is a way broader statement, and way wronger.
"Big" things include the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, the Hubble Deep Field (and Extreme Deep Field, Ultra Deep Field...), ... Even for manmade stuff - the cathedrals of Europe, the Golden Gate Bridge ...
This could be a case of Simpson’s paradox, where we notice things only when they are elegant or big. Since it’s harder to be both and we ignore small ugly things we hallucinate an anticorrelation.
Re anti-skyscraper: I find it interesting that the two groups most opposed to skyscrapers in the modern world seem to be "traditionalist" conservatives and "de-growth" leftists...maybe the horseshoe theory is correct after all?
The only problem with the horseshoe theory is that it posits that moderates are somehow intermediate between the two, whereas in any sane metric space of political viewpoints, the left and right would be clustered together way off in a corner.
They're both conflict theorists, radical revolutionaries, Hegelians aiming to drag the world closer to perfection, and dogmatists who believe they alone possess absolute truth, and that thus tolerance of or compromise with other views is a sin. Both believe the ends justify any means, thrive on hate, and hate individualism, free speech, debate, reason, and science. Both believe anyone who opposes them in any way is evil and sub-human. Both force innocent moderates to profess absurd beliefs to prove their submission. Historically, both have gained power over unwilling majorities by seizing control of institutions, especially educational institutions, and taking away everyone's guns.
The use of "left" and "right" is a con game to fool the majority into believing those are their only options, which has worked very well at giving both of these two small groups enormous political power.
As with much of what Tucker writes, I wonder if he really means it or is just pandering to his viewers, most of whom live in suburban or rural areas.
As to human nature, man is a social animal and the denser a place is the more people relatively close by. One of the reason it sucks to live in a small town is that you often have to leave that town, and your friends and family, to get a good job somewhere else. The denser an area is, the more potential friends, romantic partners, businesses, and employers in any given distance, though past a point it starts becoming more difficult to reach places if you don't have a car.
If you imagine better tech and wave a magic wand and solve the present problems with cities, the NIMBYism, the public sector unions, the mentally ill homeless people, the criminally inclined classes few want to live near,(even if they won't admit it) you get the futuristic image of the city that you usually see if you google "futuristic scene."
Not to rain on your parade, but I lived in Seoul as a foreigner for a substantial amount of time. Korea has basically zero crime and while Seoul has a homeless problem I saw orders of magnitude less aggressive pandering than in any western city. I suspect their government had an easier time fighting NIMBY sentiment at least in the Park dictatorship period, during which massive growth and urbanization took place. Moreover, public transportation is excellent and cheap. Still, it sucked to live in such a massively crowded place. I would feel better for a while when I flew to Taipei, which is still a crowded city but not at that level. Noise, lights always on at night, the absence of gardens and even balconies, the inability to see the sky except for a small solid angle above my head, the general absence of space killed me.
Those futuristic cities are disgusting. They're ugly, cold and souless, even when they try and make it pretty with tree covered skyscrapers. And it's truly sad that the future people people desire is one where every city is indistinguishable from any other with it's gross shiny skyscrapers and abject lack of national character or idenity.
And like Eh says below, what you describe is similar to places like Seoul. Seoul is extremely crowded and is literally home to the least fertile people on earth, and South Korea ranks a lowly 59 in the world for happiness.
"ugly, cold and souless"...you could say this about most American suburbs. Or even "traditional" European cities (to me, Edinburgh looks quite "cold" in terms of architecture compared to Miami, despite being much older...).
Suburbs are soulless indeed. Conversely, certain parts of Seoul have a strong character: the strip running from Hongdae to Ewha women’s university is a 24/7 student playground, Itaewon is the American expat place, Myeongdong the tourist-friendly chinatown, Gangnam the fake luxury hub, etc. Still something in my reptile brain would tell me to run away from it all to a place where my eyes could rest on some vegetation, something that was hours away by public transportation. I liked the city the first year or so. After a few more years I began to feel trapped. Having a tiny apartment did not help. I remember going out at 3AM to look for space, only to bump into more people. Once I walked all the way to gyeonggi-do along the river to reach the limit of the city. At least they couldn’t build on the water. People go to convenience stores and cafes just to have some space. It’s not rational- I was safe, well fed and on very friendly terms with the locals all the time; still it was stressful.
What would this person say about the Great Pyramid of Giza? It was considered the greatest Wonder of the World for millennia (the only of the seven still standing), and mostly because it was far bigger than anything else build by humankind at least until the late Middle Ages.
Nothing in nature makes me feel the way even mediocre skyscrapers do. I get no sense of wonder from natural occurrences. They are just "there". The fact that a group of people are able to build skyscrapers fills me with feelings of hope and admiration. There is no place on Earth more beautiful to me than the middle of a major American or Asian city's financial district.
I'm curious because this is so different from my personal experience-- what natural places have you been? Might have phrased that a bit directly for the internet, so please take it as an honest question and not a challenge. Skyscrapers and the effort effort required to construct them are definitely awe-inspiring, but it's hard for me to wrap my head around the fact someone would look at a natural arch or something and feel nothing. But I can also be wowed by, like... a big tree, so my bar is not terribly high. Being in the presence of something massively larger and older than oneself can temporarily recalibrate your sense of size and time in a very humbling way.
You could say skyscrapers make me cognizant of humanity's amazing achievements, and natural structures remind me my own life is in some ways very short and small.
I've been all over the world. I'm not saying that nature isn't pretty or that I don't like it, it's just that I don't have that visceral reaction to it that I do with man-made structures. Take something like Machu Picchu for example. If it was just the mountains, it wouldn't have made an impact on me. It would have been a feeling of "oh look, more pretty mountains, just like all the other pretty mountains." But the fact that there were man made structures up there made it one of the most beautiful places I've ever been. I was in complete awe that something like that could be done with the technology they had.
The fact that these frequently very ugly and unappealing buildings were deliberately designed that way fills me with disgust, whereas natural processes often beyond our comprehension built things vastly more beautiful.
So people are different in terms of their tastes...I personally like skyscrapers (despite being from Europe and therefore culturally from a region where people think "traditional architecture" is superior and have an opinion about high-rises similar to yours, even if they are not right-wing). But I also like natural features, such as mountains, canyons, cliffs, trees...so I guess you can like both natural and man-made objects. I don't see a contradiction here...
An oblique maybe congratulations here if I’m reading between lines.
If it is of any consolation that may or may not be needed, there has always been darkness and there has always been courage rising up to throw it back.
Eh, it’s less touchy feely than that. The best way to die is to stand still and do nothing when you know something awful is going to happen. Courage is always necessary. There’s never some wizard who is going to come along and say “you specifically are destined to go and do this.” There’s only you saying “well, shit, I guess it’s me.” And mostly being wrong, but caring enough to try.
"A horse which has been often driven along a certain road resists the attempt to drive him in a different direction. Domestic animals expect food when they see the person who feeds them. We know that all these rather crude expectations of uniformity are liable to be misleading. The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken."
No, don't worry, the anthropic argument (the "Doomsday Argument") is just silly and wrong. You weren't some floating soul who randomly selected one human out of all of history to inhabit. Making a new human creates a new observer. When you correct for this, the statistics become completely unsurprising (tautological, even) and the Doomsday Argument falls apart.
To put it in another way: of course you can't get "free" information about whether or not the world will end tomorrow (A or ~A) solely based on the fact that you're living in it today (B). B is true for both A and ~A, so gives exactly 0 information.
Note that the anthropic argument does work when applied to events in the past - just not for producing magical predictions about the future.
This famous counteragument, called the self-indication assumption, has a famous counter-counterargument: the presumptuous philosopher. Let's say that astronomers have two plausible competing theories about the universe. According to one, the universe is very big and has a trillion observers; according to the other, the universe is very very big and has a trillion trillion observers. The astronomers are about to collect 5 years of observational data to see which theory is right. The presumptuous philosopher barges in and says "wait! You're wasting your time! I already know, to trillion-to-one odds, that the universe is very very big."
The astronomers ignore the philosopher and collect their data, which show unambiguously that the universe is "only" very big (p=0.000000001). The philosopher barges in again and says "wait! You might think that's a really good p value, but you forgot to multiply it by a trillion, and if you do, you find that the very very big theory is still overwhelmingly favored!"
It's only called the "Self-Indication Assumption" by proponents of the Doomsday Argument. People who aren't drinking the kool-aid just call it basic logic. The thing that frustrates me is that, if you're decent at math, it's honestly not hard to understand both the Argument and why it's wrong, which is why the Wikipedia article uses a lot of ten-dollar words to make it sound like it's a Serious Philosophical Theory and not a math error.
The Argument: You have two vases filled with balls numbered 1 to N, one with 1000 balls and one with a trillion. You pick a random vase then you pick a random ball out of it. It's numbered 398. Now you know with near-certainty that you picked the 1000-ball vase.
Why It's Wrong: Every new human is an observer - you're not the One True Human who chose a random body to inhabit in a world of p-zombies. So, actually, you (human #398) just pointed to the vase and asked "is there a ball numbered 398 in this vase?" and I said "yes". You still have no information on which vase you chose.
You can dress this up with obscure philosophical language and call it the Self-Indication Assumption and write out some complicated Bayesian equations and multiply them out, but at the end of it you'll notice the odds of which vase you chose are still 50-50. There's no surprise to this result - it's very boring. True things often are.
What if you pick two balls from the same vase? And you get #398 and #6. In that case it seems to me the odds that you picked the 1000-ball vase are a lot better than 50/50.
You're not picking two balls. You have one observation (that you, human #398, exists). You can never have another, because you're not anyone else. :)
EDIT: Sorry, I think there's still a misconception here. You're NOT actually "picking" a ball. That's the problem. You're just noticing that you exist, which in the analogy is noticing that the Ball #398 is in the vase. (Which it always is, regardless of the vase you choose.)
Your arrogant tone and your ad-hominem attacks don't make you more convincing, and neither does the fact that your comment has nothing to do with the self-indication assumption itself.
"at the end of it you'll notice the odds of which vase you chose are still 50-50."
No, it is not. If you repeat the experiment many times and use the simple rule "if I pick a number less than 1000, I guess vase 1; otherwise, I guess vase 2", you'll be right 100% of the times when the real answer is vase 1, and 99.9999999% of the time when the real answer is vase 2. That's a remarkably high success rate if the rule isn't useful!
Another way is to ask: out of all repeats of the experiment where a ball less than 1000 is drawn, what percentage of those draws came from vase 1? In N repeats, you'd get N/2 balls less than 1000 from vase 1, and N/2 * 1e3/1e12 balls less than 1000 from vase 2. Therefore, 1/(1+1e-9)= 0.999999999 of the draws less than 1000 come from vase 1.
Yes, I'm aware of how the Argument works. As I said in my comment, in the first scenario the odds of picking vase 1 are indeed much higher. Your calculations are correct. It's just that the first scenario is a bad analogy - it's the second scenario that applies, where the odds are indeed 50/50. (EDIT: rewrote this to be less confrontational.)
So, ok, let me take a step back. You're right that I'm using a condescending tone here. I apologize for that.
This is a personal bugbear of mine, something that seriously frustrates me. I first encountered the "Carter Catastrophe" in a sci-fi novel by Robert J. Sawyer, and it bothered me to no end until I sat down, worked through it, and saw why it was wrong. But the Argument didn't go away - it just morphed into a less-easy-to-understand form, so that it could better propagate as a meme. Nowadays it has a highly credulous Wikipedia article, lots of proponents everywhere, even more SF novels that mention it, and worst of all, Scott took it seriously in one of his posts about future risks.
As a theory it really doesn't go any deeper than the summary I gave above - there's no fascinating philosophical argument here, just a lot of clever obfuscation around something simple and wrong. (Kind of like all the clever arguments used by the Flat Earth society, although I'm pretty sure those are just done for fun and almost nobody takes them seriously.) It has the same relationship to serious (and difficult!) anthropic arguments as astrology has to astronomy.
I think the Doomsday Argument is, far and away, the clearest example of a plainly-incorrect belief that is somehow still popular among the rationalist community. What can I do better in the fight to defeat it? I don't want to argue as if both sides have merit, because they don't. (I wouldn't argue that way with someone claiming "0.999... isn't 1" on sci.math, either.)
Here, let me try one more analogy that I hope really explains the root of what's going on in these anthropic arguments and also shows the assumptions required for the Doomsday Argument to actually work.
You're a God. You've created two deterministic Universes with humans in them, both from exactly the same initial conditions, except that one you let run until 1000 humans exist and then you stop it, and the second you let run until 1 trillion humans exist and then you stop it. This is a cartoonishly simple Metaverse, where humans have a 50-50 prior probability of flourishing. (Note that the "apocalypse" in the first Universe is totally arbitrary, but that's actually kind of appropriate - the Doomsday Argument says nothing about what the apocalypse would look like.)
Later, you look back on the Universes, and notice with some amusement that Human #398 discovered the Doomsday Argument, and argued that there almost certainly won't be a trillion humans. One of the Human #398s was right (for bad reasons), and the other was wrong. From each #398's perspective, the correct odds were actually 50-50 - unsurprisingly, the same as the priors.
Ok, let's try to figure out how to make the Doomsday Argument actually work. So, it turns out all these humans are p-zombies - not observers at all! In fact, you as God created just one Soul that experiences qualia. Then you took all the humans in your Multiverse and picked one at random, then plunked the Soul into it (which turns out to be a #398, which is unlikely but not impossible). Now the one true observer, as Human #398, discovers the Doomsday Argument, and ... oops, well, it's still wrong. Because there are two #398s, and one is in the small Universe and one is in the big Universe. The odds from the perspective of the Soul are still 50/50. D'oh.
Ok, one last try. As God you instead create one Soul, and then you randomly pick one of the two Universes to drop it into, and then FROM THAT UNIVERSE you randomly pick a human (#398) for it to inhabit. Only now is the Soul finally correct in its belief that it's overwhelmingly likely to be in the small Universe.
So, this is what the Doomsday Argument requires. Not just that (a) observers are detached from humans, but that (b) for some reason the Universe must be picked _before_ the random selection of a human in that Universe.
I think most rationalists would disagree with (a) (basically the argument that there's an unmeasurable Soul divorced from the physical body). So intellectual consistency means that such rationalists should also disagree with the Doomsday Argument. But, even if you agree with (a) philosophically, (b) is an actual math error. Probability is a measure over the (lowercase u) universe of possibilities, which for you, as a human, consists of all humans in all possible Universes. Constraining the concept to one pre-selected Universe, an awkward step, means you're no longer talking about "probability", the math concept with centuries of cachet behind it, but some sort of "philosophical probability" which looks similar but is basically made up for this Argument only.
I really don't like calling the argument against (b) the Self-Indication Assumption, because it makes it sound like this is a Serious Named Criticism of a Serious Named Theory. But it's not honestly even a clever criticism - it's just pointing out a logical error, after which you return to the unsurprising result that (to quote rationalwiki) "it doesn't make sense to argue from something that is 100% true (regardless of future events) to something uncertain in the future."
I stopped worrying about the Doomsday Argument a long time ago, when I tried to generalize it to /all/ possible shapes of population trajectories [and not just exponentially rising curves with hard dropoffs ("doomsdays") at the right end] and realized it just generalized to "All other things being equal, you are more likely to have been born at a time when birth rates are high".
And, well, duh, yeah.
It's easy to predict a doomsday scenario when the only population trajectories you're considering assume an inevitable doomsday baked right into the model.
On the one hand, we've got cryptocurrency, higher inequality, new recreational drugs,(fentanyl, kratom, synthetic marijuana) smartphones, hacktivist groups, less social conservatism, homeless encampments, and robots you can have a coherent conversation with.
On the other hand, there are some things present in the cyberpunk novels of 1975-1985 that are missing today. Cyberpunk was largely urban, while America has gone through short periods of mild urbanization followed by periods of mild de-urbanization. I feel like cyberpunk was predicting that a larger proportion of Americans would live in places like NYC. Cyberpunk largely missed one of the most consequential developments of the past half century, the rise in credentialism and academic inflation. Cyberpunk seemed to portray a "grow up faster" world, similar to blighted urban areas where you drop out of high school and enter the workforce(or crime) at age 17. Ours is more of a "grow up slower" world where you need more credentials to get jobs and more people live with their parents. (And people say kids are less mature, though that's hard to prove or disprove.) And the kind of inequality is different from the cyberpunk portrayal, which was more a clear, meat-and-potatoes kind of inequality. Some people have money, others don't, and everyone knows which side of it they're on. Instead, our kind of inequality is more concerned with education and status, such that a plumber can be "low class" even if he's making more than his college educated office drone neighbor. The phenomenon of the 30K millionaire posting fake vacation pics on Instagram is not something cyberpunk anticipated.
I'm feeling like it's a battle between Rudy Rucker and Peter Watts -- I'm just waiting to spot a vampire wearing a Happy Cloak while munching on a haunch of Wendy (if we're lucky, Rudy's more correct).
5 in my case. Though I still think the 5th got a fine but less than perfect name. - "thinking about" = "obsessively ruminating"? since when? - anyways: "S.A.S., shall his offspring outnumber the starlink-satellites in the sky!"
He was also in general much later than he should have been, though fortunately not too late to lose everything. I mean, when your main antagonist has a sentient artifact of immense power that has been lost, and that is known to have a will to try and return itself to him, any artifact even remotely resembling it suddenly showing up in the field should have triggered all the alarms. And the question of "how do we recognize The One Ring of Power among many other rings" should have been asked and answered centuries before by the interested parties. And yet it was ignored for 60 years. Good enough for government work, I guess?
The resident expert on Rings of Power, and Gandalf's boss, was busy assuring everyone that the ring had been lost in the sea long ago, while he worked in secret to take control himself. By this reading all of Eliezer's AI alignment work is a ruse designed to slow down everyone else while he builds his own world-dominating technogod.
Presumably Palantir's role in both stories is exactly the same.
Well, a Wizard shouldn't be duped as easily, I think. If someone who spent a lot of time researching AI risk suddenly comes out and says "folks, there's no AI risk at all, let's forget about it completely and dig into gender studies and enumerating all possible pronouns" - I think some people would suspect maybe he got a large investment in one of the new and rising AI startups going? I mean, that's why we have conspiracy nuts around, don't we? Yet, nobody suspected anything.
Also, I guess, that's one example why "Trust The Experts!"(TM) is not such a good idea as it seems?
Well, Tolkien's whole narrative philosophy required the Good Guys to be dumb and incompetent enough to end up in position to have to snatch an unlikely victory from the jaws of defeat. He called it 'the eucatastrophe'. I'd say that it worked decently enough in The Hobbit, a fanciful silly tale that it is, but a reprise in the ostensibly more serious LotR definitely strains the suspension of disbelief.
It wouldn’t be surprising to see a selection of AI ethics and similar arguments used to promote legislation whose real aim is cementing the market position of incumbents by building a regulatory moat. The current incumbents being Microsoft and OpenAI we know from whom to expect the push for more regulation.
I haven't reread it recently enough, but was it actually known to gandalf that Sauron's power came from a ring? It definitely wasn't common knowledge. Furthermore, when did gandalf become aware that Sauron was still alive?
"Alive" is not a good term, as Sauron was never dead, and couldn't possibly be ever dead. He's an angelic spirit, to use Christian-aligned analogy, so the gift of death is not available to him. Not that his disembodied formless existence outside of the material world is a lot of fun. Gandalf knew that Sauron is, so to say, re-coalescing for a while by the time of LOTR events. And it had to be expected, given without destroying The Ring his links to the material world could never be entirely severed and he was bound to return. And yes, it was widely known what The Ring is for (it's not exactly that all Sauron's power came from it - it's just a very significant part of it was invested into it) at least during the Second Age - the whole Isildur story is based on it, the Elves wanted Isildur to destroy The Ring (thus ending the link of Sauron to the material world and expelling him forever) but he wanted the power of the Ring to himself (that's how the Ring worked - the more powerful the owner was, the more they wanted to keep the Ring, that's why Gandalf or Elrond or Galadriel refused to even touch it) so he kept it. It did not end well, predictably. But then the Ring stayed lost for so long, everybody just kinda fell into the routine of considering it lost forever, even though it's not a good strategy with a sentient super-powerful artifact. In part, the supervisory role of Istari (the Wizards) was to kinda keep the long view on things, but they were also prone to going native. Tolkien has never been shy of depicting his characters as flawed, with all humanly faults and biases.
"Tolkien has never been shy of depicting his characters as flawed, with all humanly faults and biases."
Indeed:
"But in this 'mythology' all the 'angelic' powers concerned with this world were capable of many degrees of error and failing between the absolute Satanic rebellion and evil of Morgoth and his satellite Sauron, and the fainéance of some of the other higher powers or 'gods'. The 'wizards' were not exempt, indeed being incarnate were more likely to stray, or err. Gandalf alone fully passes the tests, on a moral plane anyway (he makes mistakes of judgement). For in his condition it was for him a sacrifice to perish on the Bridge in defence of his companions, less perhaps than for a mortal Man or Hobbit, since he had a far greater inner power than they; but also more, since it was a humbling and abnegation of himself in conformity to 'the Rules': for all he could know at that moment he was the only person who could direct the resistance to Sauron successfully, and all his mission was vain. He was handing over to the Authority that ordained the Rules, and giving up personal hope of success.
That I should say is what the Authority wished, as a set-off to Saruman. The 'wizards', as such, had failed; or if you like: the crisis had become too grave and needed an enhancement of power. So Gandalf sacrificed himself, was accepted, and enhanced, and returned. 'Yes, that was the name. I was Gandalf.' Of course he remains similar in personality and idiosyncrasy, but both his wisdom and power are much greater. When he speaks he commands attention; the old Gandalf could not have dealt so with Théoden, nor with Saruman. He is still under the obligation of concealing his power and of teaching rather than forcing or dominating wills, but where the physical powers of the Enemy are too great for the good will of the opposers to be effective he can act in emergency as an 'angel' – no more violently than the release of St Peter from prison. He seldom does so, operating rather through others, but in one or two cases in the War (in Vol. III) he does reveal a sudden power: he twice rescues Faramir. He alone is left to forbid the entrance of the Lord of Nazgûl to Minas Tirith, when the City has been overthrown and its Gates destroyed — and yet so powerful is the whole train of human resistance, that he himself has kindled and organized, that in fact no battle between the two occurs: it passes to other mortal hands. In the end before he departs for ever he sums himself up: 'I was the enemy of Sauron'. He might have added: 'for that purpose I was sent to Middle-earth'. But by that he would at the end have meant more than at the beginning. He was sent by a mere prudent plan of the angelic Valar or governors; but Authority had taken up this plan and enlarged it, at the moment of its failure. 'Naked I was sent back – for a brief time, until my task is done'. Sent back by whom, and whence? Not by the 'gods' whose business is only with this embodied world and its time; for he passed 'out of thought and time'. Naked is alas! unclear. It was meant just literally, 'unclothed like a child' (not discarnate), and so ready to receive the white robes of the highest. Galadriel's power is not divine, and his healing in Lórien is meant to be no more than physical healing and refreshment."
I have it on good authority that negotiations between the Eagles and the FAA dragged on for most of that and eventually he just had to give up and start off on foot. Only a last-minute executive order allowed the Eagles to perform the extraction.
People who wanted to do LOTR film adaptations (animated and live action) did tend to over-use the Eagles and Tolkien was against it:
(1) "An abridgement by selection with some good picture-work would be pleasant, & perhaps worth a good deal in publicity; but the present script is rather a compression with resultant over-crowding and confusion, blurring of climaxes, and general degradation: a pull-back towards more conventional 'fairy-stories'. People gallop about on Eagles at the least provocation; Lórien becomes a fairy-castle with 'delicate minarets', and all that sort of thing."
(2) "Here we meet the first intrusion of the Eagles. I think they are a major mistake of Z, and without warrant.
The Eagles are a dangerous 'machine'. I have used them sparingly, and that is the absolute limit of their credibility or usefulness. The alighting of a Great Eagle of the Misty Mountains in the Shire is absurd; it also makes the later capture of G. by Saruman incredible, and spoils the account of his escape. (One of Z's chief faults is his tendency to anticipate scenes or devices used later, thereby flattening the tale out.) Radagast is not an Eagle-name, but a wizard's name; several eagle-names are supplied in the book. These points are to me important.
...At the bottom of the page, the Eagles are again introduced. I feel this to be a wholly unacceptable tampering with the tale. 'Nine Walkers' and they immediately go up in the air! The intrusion achieves nothing but incredibility, and the staling of the device of the Eagles when at last they are really needed. It is well within the powers of pictures to suggest, relatively briefly, a long and arduous journey, in secrecy, on foot, with the three ominous mountains getting nearer.
Z does not seem much interested in seasons or scenery, though from what I saw I should say that in the representation of these the chief virtue and attraction of the film is likely to be found. But would Z think that he had improved the effect of a film of, say, the ascent of Everest by introducing helicopters to take the climbers half way up (in defiance of probability)? It would be far better to cut the Snow-storm and the Wolves than to make a farce of the arduous journey."
Bilbo was very secretive about the ring, gave conflicting stories about how he came to have it, and in general Gandalf only had rare opportunities to examine it; mostly he was aware that it was *a* magic ring, but what sort he wasn't sure, and he gauged it by its effect on Bilbo (which was not "oh crap he has just turned into a Nazgul" but "mostly he uses it to dodge his annoying relatives and I can't blame him for that").
There were all kinds of magical rings floating around, not all made by Sauron, and it was a case of "think horses, not zebras". It was only after thinking about it for a long time and doing independent research when he could (and Denethor wasn't any more eager than Saruman to let Gandalf poke his nose around) that he came to the conclusion that it was, indeed, the One Ring.
Well, yes, he didn't examine it much. But if he *really* wanted to, he would get all the access he needed. It's not like Bilbo could resist a Wizard, and there's not much coercion that would be required either - a stern look probably would do it. He knew it's a magic ring - and he should have known "throw it into the fire" trick by then, which he neglected to research until much later - and that should have been enough to ID it. Yes, he thought horses, not zebras - which is OK to do except in the case where there's a human-eating superpowerful zombie zebra that might be lurking nearby and if you miss it, the whole world is going to be ruined. In that case, occasional thought of zebras may be warranted.
Well, they already *had* the human-eating superpowerful zombie zebra on the doorstep, with the Necromancer setting up shop in Dol Guldur in Southern Mirkwood.
It's not like Gandalf and the White Council had nothing better to do all that time than gossip over tea! "Oh great, the One Ring has just turned up again? Well why the fiddlesticks not, throw some more gunpowder on the bonfire!"
"It's not like Bilbo could resist a Wizard, and there's not much coercion that would be required either - a stern look probably would do it."
And that is the *one* absolute forbidden thing for the Wizards, they are *not* permitted to coerce *any* being, even by stern looks. That's part of Saruman's fall - wanting to make others do things his way 'for their own good' and eventually making his own Orcs and Uruk-hai to control with his own will. Interference with any being's free will, even for 'their own good', is a big no-no and if you remember Tolkien was Catholic, you will understand why:
"Why they should take such a form is bound up with the 'mythology' of the 'angelic' Powers of the world of this fable. At this point in the fabulous history the purpose was precisely to limit and hinder their exhibition of 'power' on the physical plane, and so that they should do what they were primarily sent for: train, advise, instruct, arouse the hearts and minds of those threatened by Sauron to a resistance with their own strengths; and not just to do the job for them. They thus appeared as 'old' sage figures."
And from a brief description of Gandalf the White:
"He is still under the obligation of concealing his power and of teaching rather than forcing or dominating wills,"
". But since in the view of this tale & mythology Power – when it dominates or seeks to dominate other wills and minds (except by the assent of their reason) – is evil, these 'wizards' were incarnated in the life-forms of Middle-earth, and so suffered the pains both of mind and body. They were also, for the same reason, thus involved in the peril of the incarnate: the possibility of 'fall', of sin, if you will. The chief form this would take with them would be impatience, leading to the desire to force others to their own good ends, and so inevitably at last to mere desire to make their own wills effective by any means. To this evil Saruman succumbed. Gandalf did not. "
All of which is a long-winded way of saying that in Tolkien's set-up, Gandalf could certainly have *asked* Bilbo to let his see and test the ring, but if Bilbo refused, Gandalf could not over-ride his refusal. Even just by a stern look.
From what Gandalf says, while none of the rings were made by Sauron except the One, he had a hand in all great and lesser rings but the Three. Even if it's a lesser ring, it's basically a cursed object that Gandalf should probably have been more concerned about Bilbo continuing to possess.
Gandalf also says that he first "began to guess" before the Battle of Five Armies, and that he "wondered often how Gollum came by a Great Ring". Leaving aside when he found out that all the Great Rings but the One had gems, if he a) knew that it was a Great Ring, and b) knew that it wasn't one of the Three (whose disposition he knew), that doesn't leave any good alternatives just based on the rhyme "long known in Elven lore".
Best case is it's a Dwarven Ring, which was still under Sauron's influence and still not good for its owners, but at least wasn't on record as turning Dwarves into wraiths or slaves. Gandalf's assessment of Hobbit toughness may have led him to think they'd be more like Dwarves than Men on that score. But it still seems like sharing what he knew earlier (even if that wasn't everything) would have been better for Bilbo.
Though of course it raises the question what to do then. It presumably won't go uncollected, and Gandalf doesn't trust himself or the other Wise with it. So leaving it in Bilbo's hands while he tried to learn more may have seemed like the least worst thing he can do.
Gandalf didn't exactly do *wrong* - all the actions you describe make sense. Except that he took way too long to do it - maybe because he was an immortal angel for whom the passage of time is not a serious limitation, maybe because there were other things he thought are more important at the time. Thus I think the line of "the Wizard is never late" may have to be understood a bit ironically - this particular Wizard is late so often it may be a habit.
Iirc Kurzweil thinks AGI by 2029 and then the singularity by 2045. Where either date by itself is plausible, but the conjunction of them isn't (barring big governance interventions).
Why not? Both are vague concepts, with wide latitudes for interpretations. For instance, some claim that the current crop of multimodal LLMs like PaLM-E and GPT-4 already qualify as weak AGIs, but the path from here to superintelliegnce isn't at all clear.
Gandalf really does live up to his name of 'Stormcrow' by the kind of encouraging things he says 😁
'Hush!' said Gandalf from the shadows at the back of the porch. 'Evil things do not come into this valley; but all the same we should not name them. The Lord of the Ring is not Frodo, but the master of the Dark Tower of Mordor, whose power is again stretching out over the world! We are sitting in a fortress. Outside it is getting dark.'
'Gandalf has been saying many cheerful things like that,' said Pippin. 'He thinks I need keeping in order. But it seems impossible, somehow, to feel gloomy or depressed in this place. I feel I could sing, if I knew the right song for the occasion.'
Gandalf makes note: "Take Pippin to even scarier places to get him to take things seriously."
Pippin makes note: "Toss stone into well in the middle of orc-filled dungeon, steal wizard-ball and talk to Dark Lord, then address most powerful mortal ruler in Middle Earth en tutoyant."
"...certainly they’re not so real that if you inscribe every word ever written onto a piece of glass then the glass comes to life and kills you. That’s just an urban legend." Loved this line.
I got the reference to AIs trained on the contents of the Internet, but I don’t know which urban legend is being referred to. Care to enlighten me?
The legend of the Golem came to mind, but that was just one word, not every word ever written. There’s an Asimov short story about a group of monks writing out all the names of God, but it doesn’t quite fit either. So I got nothin’.
Not Asimov but Clarke, "The Nine Billion Names of God", where Tibetan monks get the help of computer scientists to set up and run a computer that will calculate all the permutations of the possible names, and once this task is complete, then the Universe will end (having performed the task for which it was created).
Spoiler ending for any who have not read the story: look away now
The swift night of the high Himalayas was now almost upon them. Fortunately, the road was very good, as roads went in that region, and they were both carrying torches. There was not the slightest danger, only a certain discomfort from the bitter cold. The sky overhead was perfectly clear, and ablaze with the familiar, friendly stars. At least there would be no risk, thought George, of the pilot being unable to take off because of weather conditions. That had been his only remaining worry.
He began to sing, but gave it up after a while. This vast arena of mountains, gleaming like whitely hooded ghosts on every side, did not encourage such ebullience. Presently George glanced at his watch.
"Should be there in an hour," he called back over his shoulder to Chuck. Then he added, in an afterthought: "Wonder if the computer's finished its run. It was due about now."
Chuck didn't reply, so George swung round in his saddle.
He could just see Chuck's face, a white oval turned toward the sky.
"Look," whispered Chuck, and George lifted his eyes to heaven. (There is always a last time for everything.)
Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.
This is my favorite thing I've read in a good while. And I genuinely cannot believe that no one on the internet has used the phrase "Chicxulub or bust" before.
I also had some poetic thoughts while walking around before dawn this morning:
“Man, what a shithole. Why did I move here? Is that a shantytown under that bridge? Jesus christ why doesn’t anyone pick up after their dogs in this city. Oh great a crackhead is trying to talk to me. He’s pretty industrious to be doing this at 5:30am. I should stop procrastinating on that concealed carry application.”
Is there such a thing as CC in SF? I thought it's mythical unless you regularly shake hands with somebody the rest of the people only ever see on C-SPAN (maybe you are?).
That said, my recent visit in SF about a month ago pleasantly surprised me. They managed to keep the strip along about half of the mile from the shore mostly clean. I mean, there are homeless tents here and there but not too many, and the area is relatively clean and not revolting to walk through. Of course, once you go deeper inside the city, it starts to match all the noir expectations.
Recent supreme court ruling against New York forced all cities to become “shall issue” for CC, though places like SF and LA are dragging the process out
Well, there's law and there's application of the law... I'd expect SF to be extremely hostile and obstructive on it to the point of direct sabotage. Maybe even issue a blatantly contradictory regulation and just wait for a couple of years for it to make its way through the courts, maybe things change somehow till then. Though I admit I didn't follow up the details recently as I am no longer even living in California...
Given how what you really have to worry about is the subsequent jury trial you have to read the room. You'd probably be better off buying a trench coat and one of those totally not a flame thrower things that Elon Musk sells.
The vast majority of SF is still pretty clean and just fine. The squalor is concentrated.
Downtown is in rough shape, but most of the neighborhoods are doing just fine. You can have a lot of lovely days where the only problem is all the other people trying to do the same cool thing you're trying to do.
More likely, the AI would produce a lot of convincing arguments about how it's all your own fault and you should feel bad for noticing it, and feel even worse for not liking it. Which is I guess what is happening now anyway.
This is making me miss San Francisco. I can understand not liking the skyscrapers of downtown and finding them alien, but for me it's the first place that ever felt like home. Maybe because it was so strange and alien nobody really belongs, so it's okay to be a bit weird and out of place there.
While I was in college I did a semester abroad, and soon after returning, I drove with some friends up to San Francisco, and that moment on the 101 when you come around the bend and suddenly see all the skyscrapers right there felt like coming home. (Or is it the 280? It's now been so long since I lived in the Bay Area that I don't even remember.)
Is anybody a native San Franciscan? Do people really have kids there and stick around so they grow up there? Isn't it all people from other parts of America and the world wanting that "flowers in your hair/get RICH RICH RICH in Silicon Valley" experience? 😁
Good luck to Scott and his missus if they really do have little Saffron and she spends the first six years of her life (at least) in SF, she will be a National Cultural Treasure in years to come ("yes people, come learn from the wisdom of one of the few living Native San Franciscans!" "Thank you, thank you, it's great to be back, ah I remember when this area was all YIMBY land yet to be built upon!").
Plenty of people live in Silicon Valley who grew up there, even young people. It's just easier to find them at a neighborhood church than in a startup office.
I even have the authentic experience of having my family priced out and being forced to downsize to [nearby small town] for years, because even back in the 90s it was really expensive for two full-time working parents to have two kids! Often wonder how life woulda been different if we'd stayed.
I seem to recall the official demographic statistics are a lot less dire (or encouraging) than one frequently sees in the media, but at least in my little slice of Supreme Fallacy, it's actually fairly rare to meet other born-and-raised natives. So many people are commuters for college, commuters for tech jobs, retirees who hate sun and alligators, immigrants of one persuasion or another. (So many from SoCal. Why?) Kids are much less plentiful here than I see in nearby towns and cities - they've all been body-snatched and replaced with that class of dogs an old business partner calls "little kickers", or my family calls "yapyap dogs". Better than 50/50 odds that's what you'll see in any given stroller, it's depressing.
ngl I sometimes have nightmares about Scott coming to shop at my store, and the various ways I'd probably beclown myself in The Rightful Caliph's presence. I hope to not offend his future progeny either. (The name got me thinking - if I really wanted to annoy the locals, I'd name my hypothetical daughter Seed Oil. She's bad for you.)
Infertility means she'd be all hypothetical and no daughter, but, sure. (Although biotech advances might put this on the table someday, assuming it's remotely affordable. Viable gametes from skin cells, artificial wombs? These are heady days. That doesn't address the "find a partner" bit, sadly.)
"We have walked this path for too long, and everything else has faded away. We have to continue in wicked deeds [...] or we would have to deny ourselves.”
Of course an Alpha Centauri player would be a fan of Fall From Heaven too..! The faction it is quoted from was no coincidence either, I'd wager: https://fallfromheaven.fandom.com/wiki/Sheaim
I think about 10% of my hippocampus is dedicated to exactly remembering early 21st century video game quotes. Personally I always picked Sidar so I could satisfy my min-maxing urges by stacking Shades in the capital.
Found an unedited version of the quote. For anyone who's wondering:
"We have walked for this path for too long and everything else [has] faded away. We have to continue in wicked deeds, blaspheme and deny the will of Heaven, or we would have to deny ourselves." -Gosea (Great Prophet)
"Blaspheme and deny the will of Heaven" is a worthy description of SF vibes if you ask me.
This is a tremendously beautiful sentence: “We pay rents that would bankrupt a medieval principality to get front-row seats for the hinge of history.” It sings. I would also buy a book called The Hinge of History that works backward tracing the huge, grotesque cities where the trajectory of the world was decided. As much as cities can be distasteful, there aren’t a lot of epochal technologies or works of art being forged in the Rococo gardens of the world.
I find it notable the worst example Scott could find for participating in social decay is porn. We had porn since before we had writing, I am sure. If only porn were our worst problem... At least we could nominate fentanyl? Though it of course is a symptom as much as porn is, but at least the harm is obvious here.
It'd be nice if there was a clean term for "superstimulus of base desires" that we could use to describe porn, and fentanyl, and corn syrup, in a way that communicates that there is a real sense in which these are all powerful forces with similar mechanisms, but varying levels of badness. I'm sympathetic to the idea that they're doing an inordinate amount of damage to society as a group, but some are also fulfilling a lot of legitimate preferences and "social decay" is a loaded term at the best of times.
Where there is going to be nonzero overlap, I think there is a very large difference between what Scott (et al) identify as a novel superstimulus of uncertain value and what conservatives view as social decay that is destroying society. It'd be nice if there was a term cleanly pointing to specifically the former.
Ah, I was replying to your response in the narrow sense of it being a reply to MCH above. I'm sure there's a lot more to societal decay, but 'porn' is a punchy catch-all for ways the superstimulated modern-day conservative cooperates with it.
I think Scott was not giving what he believes to be the best example of social decay, he was giving what a conservative might think was their greatest sin of participating in social decay. Perhaps merely "porn" doesn't quite hit the mark, but if we amend it to be a bit more "degenerate" (gay, or femboy, or trans, or what have you, porn) I think it fits the bill quite nicely. And certainly there are many conservatives out there getting off to those kinds of porn.
The difference between picking up a Playboy at the corner store and hour-long hyper-cut PMVs on tap from the device in your pocket all day is the difference between chewing a coca leaf and crack.
ChatGPT confidently told me it stood for "Predicted Mean Vote". Bing Chat hedged by supplying a range of guesses, including pre-manufactured value, the paramyxo virus which affects pigeons and other birds, and a website called Drip PMV featuring pop music artists. Wiktionary says it's the initialism for public motor vehicle, and a finance dictionary-style website supplies gives me "private market value". I learned a lot of things except the thing I actually wanted to learn, which is I suppose a point in favor of good human explainers like you (for now...).
I thought Scott was picking porn to highlight the hypocrisy of the conservatives, who rail about social decay meaning social liberalisation, then go home to hit up "hentai Japanese lesbian MILFs" to jerk off with (at? towards?) thus using that very social liberalisation to indulge their appetites. Not all conservatives will be consuming* fentanyl, but there's a good chance they'll be bashing the bishop!
I am now blaming you all for me looking up "porn search terms" on the Innertubes:
*I have no idea what the correct term for the abuse of that drug is, whether you smoke it, sniff it, inject it, or put it on a shelf and look at it, and I'm not looking it up because God damn it, I've already given Google enough material to monetise off data-scraping my searches and they'll have no opinion of me left at all if I do that.
Fentanyl is more dangerous than pornography, but on the face of it, wanting to experience pleasure by ingesting a substance is not shameful in the same way that wanting to experience pleasure by watching people in degrading situations (which at least a considerable amount of pornography consists of).
Original text generators that just generated random text: about 10 words in and you know it's rubbish.
Markov chains: 20-50 words in and you know it's rubbish.
GPT: takes hundreds of words before you know it's rubbish, and sometimes it gets lucky and can spew thousands of words and it's still not obviously rubbish. Here, probably because 95% of everything humans generate is rubbish. Not a high bar to top.
Yes, we are still in a lucky time in history. If someone brilliant writes something, and you also are brilliant, you can tell if it's adding signal to the noise of history, or if rather it is simply rubbish.
I wonder how long it shall be before the LLMs combined with some other fancy AI tech will start generating text (and images and audio and video and...) that isn't obviously rubbish to brilliant folks.
>GPT: takes hundreds of words before you know it's rubbish, and sometimes it gets lucky and can spew thousands of words and it's still not obviously rubbish.
Do people find it hard to identify GPT4 text? I'm not trying to be a dick. I can typically recognize it within the first 2-3 sentences.
(Unless it's affect-free technical writing, or something with little Shannonian information like "Yes", or text that's been reprompted a dozen times by a human. If you do that, it's not really AI writing anymore.)
Tells:
- flawless spelling and grammar
- shallow. either obvious platitudes or nonsense
- a waffly "student padding out an essay" style
- "it is essential to recognize", "in conclusion", "we must remain mindful of" etc
- a bunch of other stylistic tics I can't even remember right now
- a tendency to repeat itself. I generated a bunch of fake Scott Alexander blog posts. Over half of them were "The Paradox of [something]" or "The Parable of [something]", usually with similar ideas.
But if Scott had posted https://gwern.net/image/ai/gpt/2023-03-20-gpt4-scottalexander-halfanhourbeforedawninsanfranciscosample.png you would simply think that this was an unusually bland and centrist post for him... So the versimilitude is still amazing; I really wish I could use the non-RLHFed/chatbotted GPT-4 version because I strongly suspect it would be a lot less bland and draw on rarer words/concepts/facts (even if it'd be unlikely to hit on Poe as the frame).
That text feels like it was edited and approved by a large diverse committee or corporate lawyers and PR executives. Which I guess is exactly what happened, in a sense. It has all the right words, none of the wrong words and not a single original thought or idea or movement. You can run a successful election campaign on something like that. In a couple of years, probably everybody will.
My thought was it reads like a popular magazine article opinion piece, but I get what you mean about it being very... commercial and lacking that essential Scott-ness that we follow this blog for.
> So the esoteric meaning of 86 is “to produce an heir by unnatural means and have it go badly for everyone, because you rejected Eliezer”
But that isn't what happened in the original story. Abraham planned to make Eliezer the heir, but God had other ideas. Wouldn't that turn the esoteric meaning into "to produce an heir by unnatural means and have it go badly for everyone, because *God* rejected Eliezer"?
I wasn’t trying for Poe or responding to Scott, I wrote that sonnet in September 2020 when California was burning. But it seemed apposite enough to post here.
One of the samples from when I experimented with a reduced prompt did curiously quote a few lines from "The Raven" mixed in: https://pastebin.com/wU2djv7M
Your take on skyscrapers reminded me of something I saw the last time I was in L.A., in the canyons of downtown. It was morning: I was there for a conference, and went to grab some breakfast before heading for the convention centre. Found a small diner, sat down to have my coffee, and observed the comings and goings outside, in that inhumane technical landscape of man-made cliffs of steel and glass that loom over the by comparison ridiculously small sidewalks around them. A lady walked past in the morning light, with her dog on a leash. The mid-sized shaggy dog loyally following her, at her side.
Somehow that scene was as absurd as anything Hieronymus Bosch ever came up with, at least from the viewpoint of the wolf that went near the campfire a few thousand years ago, for some scraps and morsels. That dog in the hazy L.A. morning light seeping through the streets was as removed from its roots as anything can ever be, short of flying to Mars and starting a colony there. Yet it was loyally at her side, pattering along in that abyss of reflecting surfaces. It probably never saw anything much else in its life anyway.
As always with L.A., the conference and the visit were nice - but I was also very glad that I could get on a plane back to Europe afterwards. Europe has its own share of issues (in particular, its own brands of atrocious modern architecture) - but most of it is still less of a nightmare than modern U.S. cities.
I used to work in Santa Monica, and I always felt like something was off, but I couldn't put my finger on it. One day, I invited a friend from out of town (who was passing through LA) to have lunch with me, and he immediately identified the source of the weirdness. He said, "It's incredible, people in LA never just stand idly. They are always striking a pose, like they're trying to pass an audition". Once I saw that, I could not unsee it. Everywhere you turn, there were people casually lounging against the bus station sign, or sprawled artfully on a park bench, or elegantly strolling down the street with millimeter precision. It's incredible, and also kind of frightening.
Everyone who has read their Fritz Leiber ("Our Lady of Darkness") knows that the Transamerica Pyramid is the focus of all the occult energy in the hemisphere and that the city is a living. breathing, utterly nonhuman, unfathomably evil entity.
I haven't read the novel in a while, but if I remember correctly, Leiber's thesis is that once a city reaches a certain size and complexity, it "awakens" in a vaguely Lovecraftian sense, and that this newly-sentient thing is no friend to the human vermin that infest it.
Everyone who has read their Armistead Maupin (“Tales of the City”) knows that the Transamerica Pyramid is a beacon to draw reincarnated Atlanteans to the city.
As a fan of creeping horror and cosmic writings I'd like to compliment you on an excellent conveyance of eschatological dread but as a fellow human I feel obligated to ask if you're doing okay
There's something about when Scott writes like this that feels like coming home to an old friend in the place you belong.
"We pay rents that would bankrupt a medieval principality to get front-row seats for the hinge of history. It will be the best investment we ever make." Immediately went into my notes to look back at later.
If you inscribe every word ever written on a piece of glass, it turns into a monster -- a fabulous creature, a being ripped from myth. Write the world you want to see.
Me? I agree it was low effort. I'll try to do better in the future. :)
But I stick to the opinion that climate change has too easy a solution -- a tax on net CO2 emissions and maybe even just falling cost of non-CO2 emitting technologies -- for that to be a huge thing to worry about.
I sympathize, but to play devil's advocate: there's plenty of historical evidence of adverse climate effects on agriculture contributing to societies' collapse, possibly more so than social decay per se.
AGI would also have an easy solution: the ultimately rather small number of qualified people could just stop working on the LLMs and go do literally anything else. This isn't happening, and neither is a worldwide movement towards taxes on CO2 emissions!
The place to start is to get environmental activists on board with the tax as the least cost way to achieve reduction in net CO2 emissions. The public and politicians will come along eventually.
That's because voters don't want it, and politicians aren't idiots. A person with power who tries to implement a carbon tax will simply be stripped of power in the next election, and the remaining politicians will observe and learn the lesson.
By all means. But I suspect, since this is not a new idea, that that start has already been made, and everyone who finds the idea appealing has already heard of it and pledged allegiance. The remainder appear to have rejected it, and I would hypothesize they will not be moved to reconsider by mere repetition.
Either a new idea is needed, or else conditions have to change such that the old idea gains new appeal.
Ah, but is it Death or the Tower Struck By Lightning as the pause between the previous way and the next? One is more forceful than the other, and if we take the skyscrapers as indicative, that is the Tower:
"16. THE TOWER.-- Misery, distress, indigence, adversity, calamity, disgrace, deception, ruin. It is a card in particular of unforeseen catastrophe. Reversed: Negligence, absence, distribution, carelessness, distraction, apathy, nullity, vanity."
Bravo, magnificent writing. The turn at the end seems masterfully calculated to sink the hook: playing it straight all the way through would invite a version of the criticism of AI non-kill-everyoneism that says "Sounds like it could be from sci-fi (or in this case, horror)!". Turning it humorous leaves the conclusion within the reader's psyche, as he has no reason to reject it. (See Zizek on "Kung Fu Panda" for a more amusing example of this.)
Since we're doing Poe, here are two things from his admirers (Charles Baudelaire and Clark Ashton Smith, with the latter the translator for the former, here):
-
Alchemy of Sorrow
Charles Baudelaire
One with his fervor shall inform
The world, and one with all his sorrow:
One sees a glad, unsetting morrow,
One hears the whisper of the worm.
Hermes unknown, whose hand assists
My toil, and fills my dreams with fear,
Through thee I am the mournful peer
Of Midas, first of alchemists.
Fine gold to iron corruptible
I turn, and paradise to hell;
In winding-sheets of cloud and levin
A dear cadaver I descry;
And build upon the shores of heaven
Towering proud sarcophagi
-
A Vision of Lucifer
Clark Ashton Smith
I saw a shape with human form and face,
If such should in apotheosis stand:
Deep in the shadows of a desolate land
His burning feet obtained colossal base,
And spheral on the lonely arc of space,
His head, a menace unto heavens unspanned,
Arose with towered eyes that might command
The sunless, blank horizon of that place.
And straight I knew him for the mystic one
That is the brother, born of human dream,
Of man rebellious at an unknown rod;
The mind's ideal, and the spirit's sun;
A column of clear flame, in lands extreme,
Set opposite the darkness that is God.
-
[Note: the conceit in "alchemy" is that grief makes us turn everything dark: a cloud in the sky appears to a man who has lost his wife as her corpse shrouded in white cloth. That describes Scott's process feeling melancholic before dawn, but also serves up a powerful phrase for describing the massive dead structures: 'towering proud sarcophagi'.]
[Further note: rather than a shoggoth, we can think of the LLMs as something essentially human-shaped, like Smith's Lucifer, but made into a deity. From an atheist futurist's perspective, such a being would indeed be a 'column of pure flame [...] set opposite the darkness that is god'; i.e. as in Scott's older essay about killing Gnon.]
that’s just a coincidence, everyone knows words aren’t real. Or maybe I phrased that awkwardly, but certainly they’re not so real that if you inscribe every word ever written onto a piece of glass then the glass comes to life and kills you. That’s just an urban legend.
Hang in there, it's going to be over soon one way or another.
And to think my biggest fear was this bullshit, boring society continuing on unchanged until I die of old age. I am told it is not, in fact, a Chinese curse, but either way we seem to be living in the most interesting times of all.
The sense of immanetized eschaton and/or doom does hang heavy in the air, these days.
Also,
> The few visible human commuters pump thick black Arabian hydrocarbons into their vehicles
Gasoline is a very pale yellow (think a very light white wine), and lighter and thinner than water.
edit: I suppose I didn't consider that these people may be commuting via container ship and are loading up on bunker fuel, in which case, please disregard
The port is in Oakland, not SF, so not container shops. Also worth noting hydrocarbons consumed in the US are highly likely to have come from the Western hemisphere, not Arabia.
"Everyone here thinks the world will end soon. Climate change for the Democrats, social decay for the GOP, AI if you’re a techbro."
And I think they're all ridiculous for believing that. Every generation has its doomsayers, and they've been wrong 100% of the time so far. Statistically, of course, one of them will eventually be right, because nothing lasts forever. But I'm 99.999% certain that won't be for a very long time. And the remaining 0.001% is because there's a very slim chance we get wiped out by some cataclysmic natural phenomenon like an asteroid impact or a supervolcanic eruption; the odds of us wiping ourselves out are even lower.
Don't get me wrong. All the problems you mentioned are serious issues. Climate change will kill a lot of people if left unchecked. AI might kill a lot of people too, if we make too many of our critical systems dependent on it and then it malfunctions (though the realistic scenario is less Skynet or Paperclip Maximizer, and more "oh shit, the AI we put in control of air traffic bugged out and now planes are crashing everywhere"). Social decay might also cause some deaths - due to increases in suicides and drug overdoses, and maybe violent crimes, or just due to a general decline in infrastructure and living standards - though probably nowhere near as many as the other two would. But none of those things will come anywhere near causing the literal extinction of humanity, nor the collapse of modern technological civilization.
Not to be rude, but are you the only person on the internet who hasn't seen that picture of a fighter plane with all the little red dots all over it? Everything you wrote is just survivorship bias.
I am with Lady Jane. Climate catastrophe is almost all hype — if you look at numbers instead of rhetoric the result of doing nothing is that we will be a little poorer at the end of the century than if we had followed the optimal policy to hold it down. AGI might kill us, but we don't know nearly enough about what sorts of intelligences we can build or how they will behave to be confident it will. Social decay will be bad for some people but it won't end the world, hasn't the last twenty times.
There's historical precedent. Millenarianism is always with us . The monks in their cells, poring by candlelight over their ancient text, scribbling numbers, struggle to calculate the exact date of The End Of The World. They've been doing it for thousands of years, and will still be at it thousands of years hence.
For my money, when our species finally gets wiped out, it will be via some cause we never saw coming at all. We'll sail into it completely unaware, our attention tightly focussed on some other chimera.
To clarify, I'm not a "Lukewarmist" in the manner of Bjorn Lomborg, and I do think our situation is a bit worse than what you're describing. In the worst case scenario, large swaths of coastal cities could be destroyed by flooding, smaller island nations might sink beneath the waves completely, desert regions that are already harsh may become completely uninhabitable due to the increased temperatures, and the resultant loss of biodiversity could cause all sorts of ecological side effects throughout the world.
Wealthy and highly developed nations will probably be able to mitigate most of these problems through the use of costly protective measures, such as massive seawalls and enormous climate-controlled enclosures. But countries that are poor and less developed will have no such recourse. These disasters would also bring second order effects such as regional famines, mass migrations, and border conflicts, potentially leading to major international and civil wars, as well as the rise of authoritarian regimes to keep everything under control. I don't necessarily think this will happen, but I consider it a distinct possibility. Not world ending, but still life shattering for tens of millions of people.
I do agree with comments you've made elsewhere about how some parts of the world may actually benefit from climate change. Canada, Scandinavia, and Russia might indeed end up better off, as their winters get less harsh and more of their northern territories become fit for large-scale agriculture. But on the global level, I think climate change will definitely be a net loss, and probably to a significantly greater extent than "everyone is a little poorer." And the countries that do benefit are likely to face a massive influx of climate refugees from the ones that don't, which brings its own complications.
I said I agreed with you, not that you agreed with me.
Take a look at topographic maps of cities and calculate how much sea level rise it would take to flood large swaths of them. That's a scare story. The only cities I know of which would be largely flooded by the end of this century, judging by topography, are the ones already below sea level, New Orleans and much of the Netherlands. Maybe Miami at the high end of estimates, if it doesn't do anything to defend itself — at 80cm + the highest annual high tide none of it floods (see one of my substack posts).
A useful rule of thumb is that a meter of SLR shifts the coastline in by 100m. That's assuming no diking at all.
What I described was not my own opinion — I'm agnostic as to whether the net effect would be positive or negative. It was the opinion of William Nordhaus, who is rhetorically a believer in the terrible effects of climate change but produces numbers that make it look like a wet fire cracker, or the implications of the numbers, but not the rhetoric, in the IPCC reports. Warming Minnesota to the temperature of Iowa is not a catastrophe.
Any large change is likely to have bad effects as well as good; if only the bad effects get publicized, it's easy to believe the net must be very bad. One of the details in the latest IPCC report that I didn't see in the news stories, or the Summary for Policy Makers they are mostly based on, was that some (but not all) projections show climate change resulting in the greening of the Sahara and Sahel. Another is that the globe on net is greening — observation, not projection — area of leaves going up, not down.
"But on the global level, I think climate change will definitely be a net loss"
This may or may not be the right place to pursue the argument, but I am curious about the "definitely." Given the uncertainty of the future, how can you be that certain? Have you actually tried to put numbers on costs and benefits, or do you only mean that people you trust tell you that climate change will be a net loss?
Rennert et. al. 2022 is an article estimating the cost of carbon which I have criticized as badly and obviously overestimating the costs it looks at. Nonetheless, its graph of the distribution of possible costs has the tip of the lower tail below zero, meaning that even it is conceding that there is a possibility, it thinks low probability, that additional CO2 might be a benefit.
1. "The only cities I know of which would be largely flooded by the end of this century, judging by topography, are the ones already below sea level"
I looked at the information in your blog post and I stand corrected. Even so, any major increase in the frequency or severity of coastal storms could still cause a lot of damage. And the world does have a fair number of major cities below sea level - enough that their flooding would cause significant cultural and economic losses as well as noticeably large displacements. But my initial claim referred to coastal cities in general, and clearly I was mistaken on that point.
2. "Warming Minnesota to the temperature of Iowa is not a catastrophe."
Agreed, but looking at a climate map of the U.S. (https://gisgeography.com/us-temperature-map/), Minnesota isn't the problem. Southwestern Arizona is already the hottest part of the country, and if it becomes even a few degrees hotter, that could indeed be a real catastrophe for the people living there! And warming Kansas to the temperature of Oklahoma and northern Texas - while not catastrophic - would likely cause a lot of serious difficulties with agriculture, water availability, and natural habitat preservation.
3. "I am curious about the "definitely." Given the uncertainty of the future, how can you be that certain?"
It's partly based in simple demographics: There are far more people living in the parts of the world where climate change is predicted to have negative effects than in the parts of the world where it's predicted to have positive effects. Furthermore, countries in the more tropical parts of the world tend to be poorer overall, which gives them less ability to mitigate the problems that arise (though the economic gap between the global north and the global south may narrow or close over the next few decades).
Granted, I'll admit that "definitely" was too strong a claim. I suppose it's possible that if the negative effects are particularly mild, then the net effects will be positive for the world overall. But that's the absolute best case scenario, and one that seems very unlikely. Alternatively, it's possible that population demographics will change dramatically over the next century, with far more people living in the colder parts of the world and far fewer people in the warmer regions. But I wouldn't count on that happening either.
"Where climate change is predicted to have negative effects."
Climate change has some positive effect everywhere, since increasing the CO2 concentration of the air increases crop yields and reduces the need of crops for water. Some negative effect everywhere too. The question is what the net effect is. I am guessing that you haven't actually done any calculations of that — my own view is that we, certainly I, don't know enough to do so. I suspect you mean "where I am told by authorities I trust there will be net negative effects."
"Even so, any major increase in the frequency or severity of coastal storms could still cause a lot of damage."
According to the latest report, frequency is predicted to go down, severity to go up. The Summary for Policy Makers says that the fraction of cyclones that are high is projected to increase, does not explain that the reason is that the number of high end (I think 3-5 but am not sure) is expected to stay about the same, the number of low end to decrease. It also says that the high end are projected to get somewhat stronger, which is true.
Are you allowing for the time involved? The end of the century is almost eighty years away. That's time for a lot of population shifts away from Arizona if it turns out that it becomes less habitable, lots of time for farmers to change what crop they are growing in response to climate change. I doubt there are many farmers today still growing the same variety of the same crop they were growing eight years ago.
On the other hand, if you look at a map of global average temperature, Arizona appears less hot than some parts of the world that are densely populated:
And Arizona, being rich, is better equipped to deal with high temperatures than India or Africa.
What cities other than New Orleans and cities in the Netherlands are currently below sea level?
"But that's the absolute best case scenario,..."
The absolutely best case is that global warming is what is holding off the next glaciation, which would be a very strong positive effect. I don't think it is at all likely, but people predicting very bad effects include unlikely ones. Nordhaus includes negative effects of climate change that are very unlikely but very bad in his calculations.
" and one that seems very unlikely."
What is your reason for believing that — other than that authorities you trust say so? Do you think you could list good and bad effects and give an order of magnitude for the size of each? I can't.
Given both positive and negative effects of uncertain size, one has to actually estimate the size to reach a conclusion about the sign of the net effect — better, a probability distribution for the sign and size. It doesn't sound as though you have done so and I don't believe, at this point, anyone can estimate with any accuracy.
If you read my substack post, you should know that I believe the academic project of estimating such things is badly corrupt, badly enough so that an elementary textbook can run through three editions with multiple factual claims that are provably false — all of which make the effects of climate change look worse. I can point at more advanced work that is evidence for the same conclusion, such as an article in Nature currently being considered by the EPA which calculates the cost of carbon with the implicit assumption that there will be no medical progress for the next three centuries (other things wrong with it as well, but that's the most striking).
If I am correct, then the fact that lots of authorities say climate change is bad is very weak evidence that it is. But it sounds as though that is what you are basing your opinion on.
Certainly more people live where the climate is optimum, and if the location of the optimum shifts, one would naturally assume the people will move, too. If Arizona becomes even more obnoxiously hot than it already is, people will move to Montana, and Montana will thrive, become urbanized, gain representation in Congress, et cetera, while Arizona will do the reverse.
Why is this catastrophe? People already move around, and states and locations already experience net immigration and growth, and net emigration and decline, for all kinds of reasons. Once upon a time it was de rigeur to live in New York City if you wanted to have anything to do with the high tech of the day, which was running railroads. In the 80s it became Silicon Valley. Now maybe it's turning into Salt Lake City or Austin.
Countries rise and fall, too. Oil is discovered here, but not there, and oil is a valuable commodity, so fortunes shift. Lithium turns out to be really important in new technology, so fortunes shift. Rivers stop being as important as deep-water ocean ports. And on and on. Humanity has *always* had to adjust to changing conditions that change which locations are better than others. It no doubt always will. Why is a change brought about by a modest and slow climate change any different?
Having everything stay the same forever is not an option on the table anyway, for all kinds of reasons, so having climate change foreclose the "option" isn't any kind of loss at all.
I do think doomerism of any stripe is a really bad trap to fall into - as Zvi would say, the value of a good normal life is still very high even in a future where doom is verifiably coming soon - but it'd equally be a mistake to place near-zero weight on Substantial Change In This Lifetime, Probably Sooner Rather Than Later. It doesn't have to be literal extinction, a regression to arbitrary_year living standards, or other similarly terrible goalpost configurations. The really casual colloquial personal usage of "world ending" suffices here: change is in the air across so many domains, so it's just an unwise move to get overly attached to notions of enduring stability these days. Lot of delta in swaying with the tempest...like skyscrapers, not masonry. (Sorry.)
On the object-level question though: I hesitate to classify as ridiculous that which I can''t pass the ITT for, but sure. Like Scott's follow-up sentence, revealed preferences sure don't give off credible signals that I ought to apply for my Chicken Little member card quite yet. Though it's still quite tragic, and other adjec-tives when people decide not to have kids because climate...stoking panic is just bad, really. (Insert forced joke about runs on sperm banks prompting fertility bailouts.)
So, if you have a contemplative turn, and don't mind facing unpleasant truths, I would say what one *really should* be spending the younger to middle years doing is preparing for the indignities and losses of getting old.
For your eyesight declining, so nothing is 100% clear any more, and you have little spots and streaks, and you have to switch glasses about 10x a day, and things still are a little fuzzy. For the modest aches and pains that may be worse or may be less, but never go away entirely. For the loss of that feeling of energy and spring you get when you climb out of bed in your 20s, which one day you never notice just goes away, and never comes back.
For the loss of people and love. Your parents get old, they stop remembering stuff, the personality fades, and then of course one day they die. Similar things happen to your best friends, and there's a new great aching endless cold silence where once there was life, warmth, and lively mind with which it was a joy to converse. And that Great Empty never gets smaller, it just gets larger, sometimes slowly, sometimes in big gulps.
Your job changes, and the world changes. Skills that were essential in your youth become quaint and useless. New stuff comes along, and you know 75% of it is just as ephemeral, and you have to parcel out your energy, so you try to figure out what that is new is here to stay, and what is just another fad. Values on which you came to rely shift, and you start to realize that a shockingly high fraction of social values are also just fads, stuff that everyone chants to signal belonging, but which are actually morally ambiguous, neutral, useless, or even unkind in subtle ways. So you try to figure out where you stand on these shifting sands: what *is* eternally true, and right, and good? What is merely the passing wind of human pontification and tribal signaling? You worry that the values you taught your kids were only half-baked because you were ignorant yourself -- what did you mess up? What will they have to unlearn painfully themselves in their own time?
You survey your life, and you wonder whether it was good. You add up the wins and the losses, the things you did of which you are still proud, the things you did of which you are still ashamed, and you wonder -- what would Christ the King (or your own mother) say about you, if you were a newly disembodied soul, standing naked before your Judge, everything known. Did you do well? Are you worthy of eteneral life? Or even of being remembered, once or twice, by your great-grandchildren?
And even if you are proud of your life now mostly past, does that, in the end, compensate for the daily more certain knowledge that your time is very limited, that you can count the years left, surely, and you are aware that the time is softly stealing closer, every day, when you will learn that your personal moment of epiphany has arrived -- when you can count the months, days, or even hours?
Get a grip on all of *that* when you're moody about turning 30 or 35 and you will be about 10,000x better prepared for your most probable future than any amount of fussing about shiny robots or alien zombies hunting you down to eat your head.
(I always really enjoy your thoughtful and well-reasoned comments.)
Without getting into an unnecessarily personal point-by-point, I'd say I've already wrestled with most of those one way or another...though not always through deliberate deliberation. Fast-paced retail has a way of ageing people really fast...not just physically, but it's a firehose of glimpses into fragments of other lives, many much older and/or worse off than mine. So many there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I moments. Quite a bit of unpaid labour clocked in the Department of Navel Contemplation.
80% confidence I'm going to Hell, though this has been slowly trending downward while the market for Purgatory ticks up. Still an awful person in so many ways, but an increasingly large share of that sin is now in the mirrorview rear...so it's more a question of what I'm doing going forward, and that remains Not Much. Contemptible, when there's so many hills in need of true believers to die righteously on. Rationalized by living on borrowed time anyway; the NPC meme refers to other people, for me it's always felt like I'm at least one step detached from my own life. Happy in many respects for not dying back during [youth crisis], but still no idea what to do with that saved life. Forever a passenger, never attempting the driver's seat. Ambivalently alive, just observing the time pass at History's Hinge. (Keeping Death's Door aligned, for now.)
Some things I'm definitely copping out on...the Rationalist greytribe values might resonate more strongly with me than other bundles, but if I didn't derive them independently before drifting here, they're fundamentally not my own. And it's easy to sigh and say, oh well, what the hell, the lonely future won't be so bad when that's largely how the present is anyway. Can't miss what you never had. And that becomes self-fulfilling, since it's a perfect excuse to not make heroic attempts at social life, nevermind partnering. Can't improve on skills one never exercises, and I know low base stats there mean improvement's really much easier. "Tsuyoku naritai, but only for things I'm already competent at." Again, contemptible - talent may be granted by God, and squandering it is wrong, but only doing what one's optimized for is not much better than living as a glorified machine.
I think it's mostly future employment which is on shaky grounds still...on the one hand, recent AI developments make me more and more grateful for working in grocery. We've been able to build Amazon Gos for years, if that was gonna cannibalize the market it'd have done so already. On the other hand, remaining low-skill seems increasingly dangerous...that same software keeps being turned towards unexpected ends, costs are dropping rapidly, and performance isn't that much worse/sometimes better than human. Definitely more worried about my white-collar friends in vague email jobs, and yet. That's a cushion of wealth, skills, connections I just don't have. On the other other hand, perhaps so much extra value will be creatred, and so much labour saved, that more muscular redistribution is finally on the horizon. (Yeah, right.)
"Woe be unto you, O earth and its seed, for the Devil sends the beast of wrath, because he knows the time is short." Death is the enemy. Still an overall optimist anyway. Lots of inevitable future misery, no sense spending it down now while emotional interest rates remain very favourable. Hopelessness is a terrible instrumental value.
Well, it sounds like you have a rich history -- a great deal of life experience with sharp edges. Perhaps that is the grist for some future mill. For complicated reasons involving family black sheep, I have a modest acquaintance with the drug and alcohol recovery community, and a lot of people who have gone through that particular hell find deep meaning in helping others through it. It's very difficult work -- discouraging, unpaid, frustrating, and lonely, since most of the rest of the community dismisses these people as worthless refuse -- and you have to take it slow, one soul at a time, and you only succeed every now and then. But...what could be more meaningful than saving a life? And in no small number of cases, that happens.
So maybe there's a human life out there that you are destined to save, to pull back from the brink, and maybe when that shipwreck heaves into view all that harsh preparation you endured will give you, and only you, the clear vision and tools needed. By me that would be something more meaningful than anything a buildingful of Facebook programmers pull off in the next decade.
Well, as someone who recently turned 36, I can relate to most of that. My body isn't what it used to be, and I've been finding out the hard way that I need to be more mindful of my health than I was in my youth. Back in my 20s, I could get away with drinking excessive amounts of alcohol, or eating lots of unhealthy snacks all the time, or partying until 6:00 in the morning and waking up 3 hours later; I can't do any of that now without feeling like absolute garbage for the entire day. I used to be exceptionally lean and skinny despite not exercising and not putting any thought into my diet, but over the past few years I've been putting on weight for the first time in my life. I can't complain too much, I'm still young and healthy enough that I can keep myself in good shape with a bit of effort, but it's humbling all the same. C'est la vie.
The wretchedness of the long, slow decay of your body (beginning around mid 30s) can be offset by having children and seeing hope in that eternal defiance of entropy.
"There is seduction in apocalyptic thinking. If one lives in the Last Days, one's action, one's very life, take on historical meaning and no small measure of poignance."
As some evidence, note that past catastrophes include running out of topsoil, peak oil, population growth leading to mass starvation, the end of the world in the year 1000, since God obviously uses Arabic numerals, and lots of things between.
Well, but shoes don't interfere with using the whole limb as a digit, so to speak, so equally base 4. Maybe along those lines women are supposed to use base 6 and men base 5, though.
Have you got any reassuring reasons why we won't run out of phosphorus? I take that prediction more-seriously than the others, precisely because nobody is talking about it. (Which is a sad commentary either on our public debates, or on me.)
The story is that phosphorus is essential for modern agricultural productivity, and we're running out of it. Probably the usual arguments of Julian Simon apply, but I haven't really looked into it. I probably heard about it here, from this comment: astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-266/comment/13374727
How would we run out of phosphorus? Where will it all end up? The natural abundance of P in the Earth's crust is about 0.1%, which is pretty high as far as elements go. It's #11 according to Wikipedia, just behind hydrogen and ahead of manganese. It's in the group of elements that are "next most common" behind the big ones (O,Si,Al,Fe,Ca,Na,Mg,K) which make up most crustal minerals. (For reference Li is at 0.002% and #33).
Probably more relevant is that P almost always occurs combined with O in phosphate anions, which is the form in which we mostly already want to use it, for agriculture, so it's pretty cheap to mine and process, unlike elements that need reduction first (like all the metals).
The main draw is the idea that pretty much everyone else will be dead and you can finally live freely in a small community. The reality is that you would almost certainly also be dead.
Three cheers for Poe! But what is this quotation from?
"“We have walked for this path for too long, and everything else has faded away. We have to continue in wicked deeds [...] or we would have to deny ourselves.”
Searches only bring up vague biblical references to paths of wickedness, etc. The quote definitely isn't biblical but sounds like T.S. Eliot or Khalil Gibran.
I have a three month old son. I too am excited to have him experience, optimistically, sixteen years of life.
From where I sit, being close to the specific pane of glass seems not to produce a better view, for after all there are long long rivers of the stuff strung up all throughout this world, under the oceans, or across the heavens.
I'd have stayed in Michigan. But, you know, as our fallible human hearts might enjoin one another: you do you.
I had a nightmare a couple of months ago about apocalyptic flooding where I live in Los Angeles. Then, a week later, I heard the words "atmospheric river" for the first time, and saw more rain fall in this city than I ever had before. For days, I couldn't stop looking out the window, afraid that I'd see water rolling in to drown the cars in their covered spaces.
My city hasn't flooded the way it did in my nightmare, but there was bad enough flooding nearby that a handful of people died. And I realized that while it might not have turned out to be an apocalypse for me, it was certainly an apocalypse for them.
Death is the end of the world for everyone who dies, regardless of when. In another sense, people who live in fear of climate change/social decay/AI is self-perpetuating and self-fulfilling. Because if you believe your world is ending, aren't you sort of right by default?
>> Everyone here thinks the world will end soon. Climate change for the Democrats, social decay for the GOP, AI if you’re a techbro. Everyone here is complicit in their chosen ending - plane flights, porn
Let me quote myself, writing in THE RED QUEST,
>>Watching pr0n is easy, making it is hard. Which is more meaning? In the GAME OF THRONES books, the warrior culture of the Iron Islands has a rule about jewelry, at least for men... if a man wears a bauble, did he pay the iron price for it (he took it off the corpse of an enemy), or the gold price (he bought it)? For pr0n, a similar principle applies... gold price, or iron price?
If a man makes it himself, with a woman, then it's good... if he is passively consuming it, then maybe it isn't.
I have never understood why anyone would want to live in, or even close to, a large city, except the economic benefits. Like, if they offer you a really high paying job and your other prospects are bad, then I can see it being worth it. Or if your goal is to build up a large nest egg and then go retire in Florida or something, it might be worthwhile as a temporary sacrifice.
But if you work on the internet, writing a blog and doing virtual psychiatry, you should be able to move and not change your income at all? I'm not completely sure of the specifics regarding how you have stuff set up. But if you can manage to get out, I highly recommend it, it will do wonders for your mental health and quality of life.
And from an altruistic perspective, it will marginally help with the housing crisis. One less person taking up space, meaning room for one more person at existing housing levels. I don't think it would completely solve the problem, but if all of the people who didn't need to live in cities for their jobs got up and moved somewhere else it would put a heavy dent in the issue (and the excessive cost of living and other issues caused by too many people in too small of a space).
Maybe, maybe not...I read a (sadly paywalled) post from Matt Yglesias in early February about how the effects of remote work on housing supply aren't as intuitive as one wold expect: "Thanks to remote work, fewer people want to live with roommates, more people want spare rooms to use as home offices, and many people have benefitted from a mix of rising wages and diminished commuting costs, allowing them to afford more square feet per person. [...] Homelessness has risen in many places, for example, because your home office has displaced someone poorer than you from a bedroom."
Basically that the sudden rise of WFH has way outpaced the construction of new housing to accommodate it - low bar there! - so there's increased demand combined with reduced supply, and that's a lot of why absolute rents remain high everywhere even as urban cores empty out. Which also leads to more retirees faster, since Real Estate Up, and that likewise removes homes from the possible-rent market: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4335860
I don't miss white-collar work, but definitely didn't appreciate until now that even a shitty office is effectively a type of subsidized housing one spends a good fraction of each week "living" in.
This makes sense on a macroeconomic scale. If the number of people in the city goes down and the amount of space demanded by each person goes up, and those proportions are exactly equal, then average costs will stay the same.
But on a microeconomic scale, on the marginal level of your impact as an individual person, you moving out and taking up twice as much space in a low demand area will benefit the city that you left. If remote work goes up and people fail to move out and instead use up more space within the city then prices will rise even more dramatically. If remote work goes up and the same proportion of people move out as space demands increase then prices will stay the same. If remote work goes up and more people move out than the space demands then prices will drop.
I'm not saying it's your duty to sacrifice your needs and move away from a city if you have the opportunity just to help other people. Just that it's an added bonus.
Yes, it doesn't quite add up at the micro level. I *think* part of the puzzle (implied by prior posts) was that converting old office space into housing, or anything productive really, is slow and difficult...so on the one hand, yes, you've freed up a room or possibly a whole house for someone else. But on the other hand, office parks and other related "downtown" infrastructure have a whole supporting ecosystem of goods and services that simply wouldn't exist without that concentration. All the coffeeshops, brunch spots, rideshares, ebike rentals, and to a lesser extent stuff like grocery stores...they might stick around, but sales will be reduced, hours cut, and employees let go/not hired. So some lucky individuals will find cheaper newly vacant housing, but for each one of those, there's a few that'll be worse off financially. (Can't move into a newly vacant unit if you've lost your income.)
I think it also follows that this reduces the "amenities/attractions" ratio of the city, thus decreasing the appeal of moving to there - or investing. Which, yes, will drive down rents as well...but that's self-defeating in many ways. The whole point of living in a city is the value generated from agglomeration - cheap housing doesn't matter so much if it's now less desireable to live there in the first place. Similarly, the places receiving WFH employees get a much smaller and lossy share of that value transfer - it's just one household with somewhat more individual wealth. (Although this changes if more and more WFH settle nearby - this seems to already be happening some places?)
...maybe I'm still being too macro though, unsure. Definitely not contesting that many individuals are much better off now, or that cities were "overvalued" in the same way tech sector was. The current contractions show that there actually were a lot of engineers and whatnot that didn't "need" to move to SF or wherever in the first place.
At a considerable tangent, macroeconomics isn't the study of large markets but, roughly speaking, of disequilibrium. The world wheat market, or the national housing market, is a subject of microeconomics. That is part of the reason that "microeconomics" ought to be called "Price Theory."
Going back to the topic, if the people who are demanding more space are the ones who moved out of the city because they could now work from home, demand for space in the city goes down, demand for space out of the city goes up — and would even if the individuals were not demanding more space. So urban rents and home prices should go down, non-urban up. As per your second paragraph.
For me it's pretty straightforward: my family and friends are all here in my big city (capital of my country), and it turns out the boost to my mental health from having them around beats quite a large income differential, speaking from experience. I suspect this is a commonly shared experience, so I was pretty confused by your first sentence.
I've been thinking for a while that if all the AI people lived in Singapore instead of SF, we'd get markedly better odds of aligning AGI with human values. SF is one of the least aligned cities I know.
If you measure a city's alignment by how aligned its citizens are with each other's values, SF seems (from a distance) to be one of the most-aligned cities in America. Are there culture wars in city hall there? What's the chance that the next mayor will be Republican?
This kind of stuff leaves me stunned by how much Baghdad by the Bay has changed since I knew it in graduate school. Forty years ago SF was none of these things: it was a funky languid slightly amused city, which wouldn't dream of taking itself all that seriously. I recall once stepping into the tulip graden in GG Park, on my way to meet my girl for Irish coffee, and sitting down to enjoy a respite from the wind. A black man who looked like he slept in a shelter arrived with a battered guitar and a tiny amp, set it down, and began playing a talented stream of classical improvisations -- Bach, mostly, with some Mozart and Handel. On the electric guitar. It was that kind of place
Now...I dunno, every time I visit, it's like SF is determined to out-Manhattan Manhattan, and it seems further sunk in bitter brittle unvoiced recriminations. Where did we go wrong? That so many of her talented denizens brood over psychedelic zombie apocalypses does not surprise, sadly.
The sparkling city you detest is more than it's glittering buildings ...
It's a big heart beating, gushing really, with a big belly. A living surging mess. Its incredible beauty punches you up and down its soaring streets. It's like there was a cultural spasm that sprayed the city with the colors of every country - along with their cuisine. There's a kitchen puffing up aromas from Nepal, another from North Africa, another from Tuscany. In an alley, someone is serving a meal as delicious as any in the world. At that shop, people wait, patiently, smiling. knowing the coffee they about to get is inspiring. Sorry Seattle. SF is like a collection of visions, of smells and sounds, condensed as molecules and spread around for our senses to experience. And from Victorian windows - each ornately framed and painted - light glows and laughter tumbles out to the street. In this city, we are each a part of an enormous web of self-aware neurons triggered by a tremendous light that constantly fights its way through fog and structure. It's so easy to be drunkened by it all. Yes, there's a seedy side and some nutty politicians. Entertainment value when you think about it. The ingredients of the whole. And if you're not gobsmacked by the sheer daring that is SF .. the other evidence should convince you. Just ask yourself, how can a smidgen of a dwelling be worth more than the wealth of Mansa Mula.
The Lulu blurb for Unsong mentions, "[I] would recommend waiting a little while before purchasing this book, as I'm going to experiment with a couple of different paper/printing settings." Is this advice still applicable?
Ah, so you're saying that kabbalah predicts we have all the way until GPT-86 before things get really bad? Good to know, I'm updating accordingly in favour of slow takeoff. We get what we deserve for rejecting Yudkowsky.
Skyscrapers: marvelous technological achievement, one of my favourite symbols of Progress. They don't have to be dragon's teeth either - have you seen what they're doing with wood these days? I honestly get a kick out of the feeling of being dwarfed by something much bigger than I am, built by innumerable human hands combining sundry fields of expertise. Yeah, maybe it's not the Coliseum or Versailles or whatever, but it's current_year and the monuments should reflect the times. I will grant that I wouldn't want to raise a family or retire in one...but those seem increasingly impossible anyway, and not cause the world will end Real Soon Now. It's just really expensive to live in Sullen Futarchy as one of the <s>serfs</s> <s>sharecroppers</s> retail grunts. "Who would want to raise a child here?"
Also, I can't remember the last time I saw any mere commuter pumping diesel. Unless the colour of gasoline changed recently? Could have made the joke go the other way, mildly-jaundiced carbons to match watered-down Americanos and their Sugar-Festooned cousins. Does that come with almond milk?
(If it wasn't clear, I liked this a lot - your nonfictional travelogues are about as fun as a Bay Area House Party.)
SOF-Special Operations Forces-Are also an end, the sharp end at the end of the logistical spear and the end of the enemies of the state that wields them.
Great great piece! Really. I loved it. Compliments. Above all an excellent language creativity and property. When you read such well written pieces, you receive good impulses that "summons" creating
Waoooh, so evocative! You transported me in another world by describing your dawn so vividly and so originally! I hope that you write another volumne of fiction at some point!
> if you inscribe every word ever written onto a piece of glass then the glass comes to life and kills you. That’s just an urban legend
If it’s really an urban legend, I’d like to read more about it. Not looking likely, though, because GPT-4 says:
> I cannot definitively determine if the urban legend you mentioned was created by the author or if it has existed prior to their writing. [... It] is not a widely known or documented urban legend that I can find in my database.
It's a poetic way to describe AI. Computer chips are made of silicon, the same as sand or glass, and AIs are a text-prediction engine trained on the internet, which stores almost everything humanity has ever written. So AI research is the process of inscribing words onto a piece of glass until the glass comes to life.
Agreed, the reality is that we take small pieces of rock and force patterns of lightning through them according to certain esoteric incantations. If you get the incantations right then the rocks will tell you things that you want to know.
We keep hoping for that, but it's not what happens. In fact, we get out just what we put in, only perhaps re-shaped more pleasingly or with far greater detail. All very useful stuff, to be sure, and it keeps our airplanes flying and makes our food cheaper, but our silicon idols will still not spin straw into gold, however much we keep hoping and trying out new spells.
If this is what we get when you end up alone in SF, I'll upgrade to Founding membership or whatever the higher level was named, if you start going more often.
I spent every sunlit moment deep in the North Florida woods yesterday. It was one of those very special events, when you get a glorious winter day late in spring when you no longer expect it. I'm not articulate enough to describe the beauty of such a place and time, so I'm not going to demonstrate that by trying.
What urbanites have going for them is that they don't know what they're missing. They will say that they do because they once spent a week in Yosemite. But the truth is, if they knew what they were missing, they wouldn't be urbanites.
But thanks to them for not understanding, because if they did, the Garden of Eden places I inhabit would all look like Disney Land.
So, please ignore this post. It's all wrong and completely full of crap. The North Florida woods is just a bunch of weeds full of annoying little insects that fly up your nose. You might step on snake, be eaten by wild coyotes, or crushed in a stampede of nervous hogs.
Yup, nature sucks. It's complete waste of time. It's better just to avoid it altogether. Just find the closest coffee shop, sit down next to some guy who has been living on the street for 18 years, and eat your donut. That's the best policy.
You say that nature is superior to urban existence, but ironically, it is the existence of densely populated cities saves space that can be conserved as wilderness/nature.
Google says: the population density of the average American suburb = 1,850 people/square mile.
density of San Francisco = 19,000 people/square mile.
If San Francisco were populated at the density of the average American suburb, it would take up ten times as much space as it does now, and all that space would come at the expense of currently uninhabited land. The more people live in cities, the more open space remains for you to enjoy your glorious winter days.
If the entire US population lived in suburbs with that density, it would occupy a little less than 180,000 square miles. The area of the U.S. is 3.5 million square miles, so a little more than 3.3 million would still be free for the squirrels, snakes, and nature lovers. Crowding people into SF makes it more by a trivial amount.
People wildly overestimate how densely the U.S. is populated because they are averaging over people not land. The average person lives in an area with (I am guessing) ~3000 people/square mile. The average acre is in an area with a population density of about 94 people per square mile.
Right, though with a big caveat which is that the western part of the U.S. includes some truly vast areas that are fundamentally inimical to residential human settlement at any sort of scale or density. The peoples who occupied this continent before Europeans didn't _reside_ in those deserts or up in those mountain ranges any more than was true anywhere else in the world.
That said -- even cutting the U.S. acreage available for practical human settlement down to maybe 2 million square miles, your overall point holds. In a similar way I have always eye-rolled at the wailing/gnashing about urban sprawl replacing good farmland: the American farm belt has several hundred _million_ acres of good farmland! All of our exurbs a hundred-fold couldn't dent that enough to actually "threaten the nation's food supply" or whatever.
> Right, though with a big caveat which is that the western part of the U.S. includes some truly vast areas that are fundamentally inimical to residential human settlement at any sort of scale or density.
The founders of Phoenix and Las Vegas say, “hold my beer”.
What nonsense. I am a lifelong nature lover, have lived and spent lots of time in places like your woods literally since infancy. Indeed I have made ecological restoration my career and life's work precisely because I love and cherish wild places and the natural world.
Absolutely none of that has dick-all to do with being an urbanist any more than being a classically-trained musician is inherently opposite to loving ice hockey, or whatever other ridiculous assumption you can think of. News flash: people are interesting complicated critters. Though one thing that unites many of us is a strong aversion to self-righteous snobs....
Is it something about San Francisco's skyscrapers in particular that makes people see them as horrific concrete monoliths?
I live in Cincinnati, and it's not exactly a vast urban hub, but when I look at the skyscrapers we do have, I generally don't feel awe or horror, more "oh, that's a nice background." They can be pretty, they add a distinctive look to the skyline and can have an impressive weight up close, but they're not some sort of all-encompassing icon. Does it change when your city gets to a certain level of density, or are San Franciscans just naturally inclined to see omens of doom in the world around them?
They both look "blocky" and both are definitely better at night, when the lights make them look much improved, but the SF one is somehow more cluttered or something.
But I have also noted in my commonplace book: "The doctrine of the imminent end of the world is clearly true, as it has been endorsed by eminent authorities through all recorded ages."
Remember Castro's Law: "They predicted Castro would die soon in 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000, but they were wrong each time. Therefore, Castro will never die."
Therefor, the fact that people predict Castro's death soon is at most weak evidence that he will die soon.
Similarly, the fact that people predict climate catastrophe, AI catastrophe, or social collapse catastrophe is at most weak evidence that any one of those will happen.
The obvious response is "but I have looked over the evidence, and this particular catastrophe is quite likely to happen." One should discount that by the observation that many other people as smart as you have reached a similar conclusion in the past, and that so far they have all been wrong. That is evidence not that catastrophes don't happen but that people frequently hold unjustified confidence in their beliefs.
One should also remember that almost all of the evidence on which you based your conclusion was second-hand; there is probably nobody alive who has a sufficient basis to predict any of those three catastrophes from his own first-hand knowledge. You should discount your probability of catastrophe not only for uncertainty implied by the evidence but also for the possibility that much of what you are told is the evidence is not true. That's hard to do and most people don't do it.
My own conclusion is that, while there are a number of ways in which the human race might wipe itself out over the next century, there are none to which I would give a 30% probability or anything close.
There are hideous perversions in the social dynamics of things like this. Let's suppose the economists' predictions are correct, that climate change will have large costs over the coming decades, which are large enough to make it work while to make large expenditures right now. So there's a profit-making opportunity, possibly worth hundreds of trillions of dollars. But of course, the public doesn't want to pay for anything that doesn't have a very quick payback. ("People do financial planning like they expect to die within a few years.") So to prod them toward rationality, you find yourself shouting the most extreme gloom-and-doom; if you're a responsible type, you avoid sentences that are actually false. Indeed, to perform your function in the system well, you have to *believe* your own hype.
All of this works against anything like proper democratic decision-making. And it's probably been going on for millennia.
"Let's suppose the economists' predictions are correct" is the kind of naivete that has led to a shocking amount of human misery. Even right now, witness the fierce arguments over whether the Federal Reserve should raise interest rates by 0, 25, or 50 basis points, or even cut it. And this is the world's most educated and experienced experts attempting to predict very narrow very short term outcomes, like "if we do this will any large banks fail in the next 6 months?" or "will inflation tick up or down by 10% in the next year?"
If you can look at that chaos, and the long train of failed short- and medium-term predictions that people trying to steer the economy centrally have made, going back centuries, and say "well THIS time they might be quite right, even though they're making predictions on a much larger scale, and over a much longer time!" then I suggest one has the level of credulity required to join Scientology or become an astrologer.
You're right, but Worley wasn't asking us to suppose those predictions are correct. He was saying that our decision-making is still dysfunction /even if/ those predictions are correct.
Well, on that point, collective decision making beyond the Dunbar Number I always expect to be stupid, pretty much ipso facto. How can it not be? The only thing a large number of people can agree on is what's obvious or what appeals to their basest instincts. Everyone can agree the sky is blue, and that it would be nice to be given a free lunch.
So far as I can tell the only good collective decisions humanity ever makes are distributed, a/k/a "grassroots" and such: when everyone makes his own decision, based on his own local circumstances, and there's a mechanism[1] for transmitting information about that decision to the wide world so other individuals far away can factor it into their own decisions.
---------
[1] Id est price, one of humanity's greatest intellectual inventions.
Insofar as there is an "economists' predictions" it's by Nordhaus, who got a Nobel prize for his attempts to predict the net costs of climate change. In _A Question of Balance_ he wrote:
"the best guess in this book is that the economic damages from climate change with no interventions will be on the order of 2.5 percent of world output per year by the end of the twenty-first century"
Roughly speaking, that implies that the effect of climate change over the rest of the century will be to cost us the equivalent of a year or two of economic growth. I wouldn't describe that as "large costs over the coming decades."
That's also about the same as the worst-case estimate in the IPCC's 2015 report, which isn't "no interventions", but "start dumping lots more CO2 into the atmosphere starting now". Roughly the same cost as the Covid-19 lockdown, I guess.
The environmental damage is hard to know how to measure, but the worst-case scenario seems certain to be less than the environmental damage and species loss in the 20th century, and I'd guess the 19th century as well. The estimated loss of arable land would be dangerous, but less-dangerous than population growth was in the 20th century--would be dangerous, if it were a figure that took into account the /gain/ in arable land, but I don't think it is. I couldn't find any mention of that in the report.
The very-long-term problem could be severe, but I'm pretty sure the best strategy for solving it in the long term (> 1000 years) is to be economically prosperous enough to develop the technology and energy resources to solve the problem technologically.
The long term problem probably doesn't exist, since Earth is ecologically stable. CO2 levels have fluctuated way more than the greatest possible excursion the IPCC envisions within geological time spans, and the ecosphere has done just fine. Crank up the CO2 and plants grow a lot more -- they are basically "starving" as it is, with a tiny 0.04% of the air containing their sustenance. The amount dissoved in the ocean increases, it forms carbonate rocks (or gets incorporated in carbonate shells) which then sequester the stuff as sediment and ultimately carbonate rock. And so on. Like any stable equilibrium, you push in one direction and various forces push back, and you get a new stable equilibrium not a whole lot different from the previous one.
The entire reason for concern for climate change as far as I know is that the *speed* with which current CO2 levels are changing seems unprecedented (although personally I question whether we really know this, since short-term fluctuations 15k-1M years ago are pretty hard to measure). The concern is that the natural negative feedback paths that keep the ecology stable might not be able to react fast enough to a very fast change in CO2 concentrations, and that's where problems can arise. That is, there is *only* a short-term problem.
I understand that this is a place of conscious niceness and the sort of ecumenism that will bestow upon abbreviated-Chicago-style-tomato-casserole the title "pizza," but surely calling it "the good stuff" veers into the untrue territory.
Next someone will be calling Montreal round holed bread treats "bagels."
Surely the Little Caesar's corporation wouldn't lie to me?
In their favor, Detroit has the music scene Austin pretends to. It brought us Motown, Industrial, and Dubstep. And of course you can't define the Goth spectrum without reference to The Crow.
I think there are at least two misunderstandings here:
- Detroit pizza is (AIUI) a style in its own right, it's not just a synonym for Chicago pizza
- by "the good stuff", I mean "good *Detroit* pizza" - I assume that like all dishes it can be done well or badly, you've probably only tried bad versions (or not at all, if you're confusing it with Chicago pizza), but Scott has had an opportunity to try the good versions
- the only true pizza is Glasgow-style deep fried pizza crunch, anyway 😜
Yes, skyscrapers are symbols, not practical buildings. The Statue of Liberty is also a symbol, but how many monumental statues do you need in each city?
And what do they symbolize? They remind us of the technological progress that builds them, but they also remind me of the political regress and corruption that concentrates construction in small lots, rather than the large expanses of five story buildings of Manhattan or Paris. They remind me of their tenants, that seem to be buying positional goods. Their concentration in the finance district reminds me that actually existing "techno-capital" is not the free market.
My favorite pre-dawn SF is pre-dawn SF from a distance.
I was last in SF circa 2014 with my wife and circa 2yo daughter, whose circadian rhythm stubbornly remained on EST the whole time. So despite not having spent much time in SF overall I have spent a lot of time in pre-dawn SF. My daughter would wake up around 3am and in order to give my wife a few extra hours of sleep (she was there for a work conference, the peanut and I were just tagging along), I would strap my little one to my chest and hit the streets. Our hotel was in Chinatown, and each morning I set off in a different cardinal direction. Once we found a 24/7 diner and I drank coffee as she nommed stale breadsticks and ogled the decor. Early morning Telegraph Hill had its charms. One morning we found ourselves in a grimy warehouse district where workers were powerwashing the sidewalks in front of their one-story brick boxes.
It was all underwhelming compared to my view of the city from the week prior. Before arriving in SF we were in Marin County, where one morning my little one and I caught the sunrise from the top of Mount Tam. Watching San Francisco emerge out of the night, from silhouetted ghost towers with a few dots of light to a tight cluster of proud, vibrant structures that I knew were home to so much of the most world's creative energy at that time was an electric experience. If circumstances had permitted I would have moved my family to the Bay Area then and there. A few days later, sipping bland coffee in a 24/7 diner on the outskirts of Chinatown, I realized my prior impression was an illusion. But it was a glorious illusion! That is my favorite San Francisco.
“'The morning has broken' - I had thought of the morning like an egg that had split with a crack and was spreading. Before us lay all the green of the green country of England, with its rivers and it's roads and it's hedges, it's churches, it's chimneys, it's rising threads of smoke. The chimneys grew taller, the roads and rivers wider, the threads of smoke more thick, the farther off the country spread; until at last, at the farthest point of all, they made a smudge, a stain, a darkness - a darkness, like the darkness of the coal in a fire - a darkness that was broken, here and there, where the sun caught panes of glass and the golden tips of domes and steeples, with glittering points of light.
I love finding myself looking down one of the Manhattan avenues, especially at night, lined with tall buildings and feeling insignificant against the endless corridor of towering steel and cement. It's practically a numinous experience for me. Even skyscrapers and high-rises I'd hate in isolation (I like the art deco ones though) are still beautiful as part of the gestalt. I find nature both less impressive and less consoling than a great human city.
On the subject of morbid thoughts, let hope there won't be someone in 2600AD scrambling over the remains of San Francisco like the Saxon in c. 600AD gloomily reflecting on the ruins of Aquae Sulis:
Well-wrought this wall: Wierds broke it.
The stronghold burst ...
Snapped rooftrees, towers fallen,
the work of the Giants, the stonesmiths,
mouldereth.
Rime scoureth gate-towers
rime on mortar
Shattered the shower-shields, roofs ruined,
age under-ate them.
And the wielders and wrights?
Earthgrip holds them - gone, long gone,
fast in graves-grasp while fifty fathers
and sons have passed.
Walls stood,
grey lichen, red stone,
stood under storms, high arch crashed -
stands yet the wall-stone, hacked by weapons,
by files grim-ground ..
.. shone the old skilled work
.. sank to loam-crust.
Mood quickened mind, and a man of wit,
cunning in rings, bound bravely the wall-base
with iron, a wonder.
Bright were the buildings, halls where springs ran,
high, horn-gabled, much throng-noise;
these many meadhalls men filled
with loud cheerfulness: Wierd changed that
Came days of pestilence, on all sides men fell dead,
death fetched off the flower of the people;
where they stood to fight, waste places
and on the acropolis ruins.
Hosts who would build again
shrank to the earth. Therefore are these courts dreary
and that red arch twisteth tiles.
wryeth from roof-ridge, reacheth groundwards ..
Broken blocks ..
(The dots indicate where the words are unreadable, due to scorch marks on the sole surviving manuscript of the poem.)
That's a great poem. Thanks--now I'm getting a copy of the Exeter Book to see what else I've missed.
I had a hard time finding it--Google doesn't know about that translation. A longer & very different translation is at https://sianechard.ca/web-pages/the-ruin/ . The Greek word "acropolis", which I was curious about, isn't in that translation.
This translation appears to be from Michael Alexander's 1966 translation, _The Earliest English Poems_ (which he mentions doing in 1959, so it might've been published elsewhere before). I'm not sure why Google (web) refuses to show any hits from it at all other than here and 1 webpage excerpting a bit of it, when searching individual lines in Google Books shows that it's very well covered in their corpus and is how I found Alexander (the translator, not the OP). Bing doesn't do any better.
(As far as 'acropolis' goes, that's how Alexander is translating 'burgsteall', which as the root burg- hints, is some sort of city, although it looks like Old English scholars differ on the connotations of 'fortress' and 'citadel', so while some just translate it 'city', Alexander is taking some license here by settling on 'acropolis' as the meaning and deliberately adding a Greco-Roman flavor since this is, of course, a Roman ruin.)
Yep, that's it. I bought a paperback edition of this in a charity shop (called a thrift store in the US I think). It is available on Amazon in paperback or kindle:
It was formatted somewhat better in the book, but substack seems to have zero ability to format quotes or code samples in comments. (I'd be pleased to know how that can be done if it is possible - I tried two or three annotations such as HTML-style angle brackets and square brackets, all to no avail)
The Exeter book has some interesting sections, including comical riddles. Another one worth a browse to get a feel for how people thought and how societies functioned in the dark ages is the Book of Rochester:
Man, I miss the bay area. Wish it wasn't so expensive. Maybe after the world ends I'll be able to afford to go back and be around what's left of my family
This doomsday mindset is reminiscent of Europe in 1910, so much so that it seems like history repeating itself. The intellectuals of Europe despised "bourgeois" European culture, and with better justification than we have today. Jack London's 1903 /The People of the Abyss/ showed a London where starvation, malnutrition, exposure, and dangerous workplaces were major causes of death. All of educated Europe was tingling in anticipation of its own liberating doomsday, hoping for a repeat of the French Revolution. The 1910 return of Halley’s Comet sparked these doomsday premonitions into a panic.
Every intellectual in Europe had a Utopia to peddle: anarchists, reactionary fascists and Catholics, communists and socialists, and machine-obsessed futurists. They saw liberal democracy as a failure, and were champing at the bit for a world-wide devastation that would sweep civilization away, theoretically leaving clear, pure ground on which to build Utopia.
Modernists have created a myth that the modern arts developed as a reaction against World War 1; but as anyone who's studied modern art for more than a day knows, all of its major branches were fully-developed by 1914. The truth is the opposite: the modern arts were developed in order to ignite a world war.
The authors of the modern art manifestos written around that time were explicit about this. Even the Dada Manifesto, written in 1917 long after it was clear that the war in no way revolutionary, was still shouting, "there is a great negative work of destruction to be accomplished. We must sweep and clean."
What they got, of course, was World War 1. It did sweep away the Kaiser and the Tsar, only to replace them with, respectively, a weak democracy that the people hated so much they elected Hitler, and a totalitarian government far more bloody-minded than any Tsar. And the intellectuals of Europe immediately began choosing sides, communist or fascist, for the next great war.
You are right about the mood of the intellectuals of the edwardian era. The French Revolution had been accompanied by a brutal Terror but intellectuals were still okay with bloodshed and even welcomed it as long as violence advanced their political goals. This is an attitude which continued until the late 70's.
I don't see any movement welcoming an AI apocalypse. The left has the power and wants to keep it while the right wants to preserve as much as it can of the old status.
Nick Land with his old accelerationism is the only one I can think of, but that was in the 90's. Last I heard of him was a decade ago when he had turned to neoreaction.
🙄 the doomerism, the smug self-obsession, the complete ignorance of the lived reality or pertinence of literally everywhere else.
Like, yes, it’s pretty prose, and artful. Well-written, indeed. But the mood, the felt sense, is just so… helpless? Unhelpable. Why would anyone want that? Why, especially, would someone who deals with helping people wrestle with unhelpful mental patterns *choose* a place that generates, sustains, emanates these feelings?
Scott, please tell me this is just art. I’m worried about you. And any of the rest of the millions of you over there who are harboring a similar need for… green grass, sunshine, and digging bare toes into the earth. Good luck man.
> “We have walked this path for too long, and everything else has faded away. We have to continue in wicked deeds [...] or we would have to deny ourselves.”
> What you fear is not true. The probability is almost zero.
Care to elaborate?
1) We can find cases where the AI does what we said, not what we want, on toy problems.
2) Given our progress in making AI, it seems highly likely that sooner or later we will have very intelligent AI.
3) Godlike beings are highly unlikely to exist. Aliens don't seem to have visited so far and have had billions of years to do so, strongly suggesting that aliens prone to interfering on earth don't exist. Future smart AI is highly likely to exist.
I think you are misusing "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" if you think AI doom is that extraordinary. Sure, the evidence we have is a bit more ambiguous hints, not vast and overwhelming the way the evidence for evolution is. So if you start with really really low priors, you don't update to AI doom. I think the problem there is the low priors. (I also suspect you aren't familiar with all the various arguments)
Do you think that a smart AI that acts by itself and wishes harm on humanity.
a) Is impossible. (Strongly implies human brains are magic, as some fairly smart independent and malicious humans have existed)
b) Is possible, but will never be built.
c) Couldn't do that much harm. (Requires believing that humans are near the limit, there isn't that much supertech we could invent if we were smarter. Being able to duplicate yourself and have many copies work together isn't that powerful. ...)
Beautifully written!
"Bigness is inherently ugly. There’s never been a beautiful skyscraper. Every single one of them is an atrocity. The fact that people still pretend otherwise tells you how conditioned we’ve become to disregard our own nature and our own natural longings." -Tucker Carlson, January 5, 2022
Very silly stuff. Skyscrapers are badass dude
I agree with you ethically and philosophically, I just can't make myself feel it.
People give Scott shit for supposedly being a conservative or a racist or what have you but his real sin is not being an urbanist.
Maybe it's that people have different thresholds for certain labels that are mood dependent then tie them to their identity.
Maybe we take ourselves too seriously.
[agree - prob not an urbanist]
Didn't you know? "Conservative" and "racist" are just other ways of saying "not urban."
That is of course nonsense, Phil. Have you read Tim Urban's latest book?
Could something, one single time, please just not be a coincidence.
I'm reading the book now and often find myself responding to posts with what I'm currently reading - like a hammer looking for nails - if that helps. [an inevitable systematic intersection??] : )
Singapore is pretty urban, and pretty conservative by some measures.
Singapore is half size of London with a unique history. Dalio(2021) referred to it as a boutique country - like Switzerland. Singapore was fortunate to have Lee Kuan Yew at the right time(and he, the opportunity, imo). I'm sure it's a great place to live.
That said, wealth, prosperity and urban living tend to turn cities liberal/progressive over time.
---
Let me underscore that from the original post that Conservative is NOT synonymous with "racist" and not all rural folks are staunch conservatives. Many are moderates of the right and some left.
Not to be the preachy urbanist in the comments, but urbanism is definitely not about liking glass-box skyscrapers.
Beat me to it....I am a lifelong enthusiastic urbanist who also did some time in the burbs and knows what the real differences are. It ain't skyscrapers. Skyscrapers are a _result_ of urbanism.
(Which is not to say that all skyscrapers are aesthetically the same, there are ugly ones and beautiful ones just like with any other type of built structure.)
Sure, but what do you mean by "urbanism"? I was thinking of it as a preference or lifestyle, but your use of the word "about" makes it sound more like a movement.
I mean preference.
(The "smart-growth" movement does exist, in a previous job I gained some professional level knowledge of it actually. But it's always struck me as fairly incoherent and shallow.)
I wouldn't say Skyscrapers are necessary for Urbanism. OTOH that doesn't mean more or less Urbanist.
Urbanism? You mean that thing that makes hundreds of millions of people miserable and single and childless across Asia?
I have often thought of urbanism as a particularly Western affliction that shoe-horns people together in close physical proximity while they tend to lead socially isolated and lonely lives.
"I agree with you ethically and philosophically, I just can't make myself feel it."
You like no skyscrapers at all? Of most skyscrapers (and/or collections of skyscrapers) just aren't your thing?
Many skyscrapers are beautiful as artifacts, just as many teapots are beautiful as artifacts, but if I found myself living in a forest of 500-foot-high teapots I would constantly feel like I was in a weird fever dream and needed to get back to somewhere normal with trees and lawns, and this is how I feel about skyscrapers too.
Come to Europe, we have cities without skyscrapers.
I grew up in Hong Kong - and to me, skyscrapers are both beautiful and normal, while lawns, though pleasing in their own way, seem contrived and unnatural.
Maybe they're prettier once they reach a critical density, and look like a geological formation.
I grew up with lawns, but I have to agree that they're unnatural. I think it's A) that they actually are very contrived and unnatural and B) that despite all the green, suburban areas aren't really possible to survive in if you don't have a car to take you to the grocery store all the time. They feel weirdly like a desert when I walk through them without owning a home.
IMHO, lawns are much prettier if you let the "weeds" grow. An expanse of nothing but mowed grass is a kind of wasteland.
This is true in the new world, but most of Europe is a different beast. Medium sized cities tend to be quite walkable and survivable without a car. Possibly because they were born before cars existed.
You realize that most gardens contain things other than tightly cropped grass, right?
https://file.lucasvl.nl/f/ANbFgkT
Move to the suburbs bro. Driving everywhere isn't so bad. A car is like a little house you can take with you wherever you go.
Ah yes, the suburbs. Where your kids are trapped in a special kind of hell, because they can't go anywhere or do anything without you taking them there.
Only if you move to a shit suburb. Move to a well-designed suburb, one with walkability and good public transport connections.
To be fair, I'm not sure if any good suburbs actually exist in California. But it bugs me when people observe that the suburbs around them are shit and blame suburbia in general when they should be blaming their local governments for designing such shit suburbs.
The US needs fewer urbanists and more suburbanists -- people focused on figuring out how to make suburbs better without sacrificing backyards and driveability.
My kids walked to school from kindergarten through 6th grade, with crossing guards and stuff. Clubs and whatnot met at the school grounds, or sometimes at the public ball parks and tennis courts, which you could get to with a bike ride, half of which was on bike path through park, and half along roads with nice wide bike lanes. They could walk to their friends' houses, or take the bike. Best of all, the chances of them being accosted by a meth-head or having to step around a pile of human shit were zero. Maybe you're referring to a specially degenerate type of suburb?
"because they can't go anywhere or do anything without you taking them there."
Because playing with other children in their yards is now illegal (in some jurisdictions).
I grew up in a suburb, we even had stroads and all the things urbanists hate. I remember walking all the way to the nearby city on nothing but green, trafficless public green space, and riding bikes to the mall.
Suburbs are specifically built for parents and their kids, if the suburb you live in is hell for kids, and this is a common practice - perhaps it's not an urban design problem but a parenting one.
Specifically, parents in the 50s and 60s at Peak Suburb Meme wanted private space and a yard, but also wanted to make sure their kid could get around, because the idyllic white picket fence life included hoodlum teenagers and lemonade stands on the sidewalk. Some combo of stranger danger and UMC striverism made that less of a priority.
Ah yes, my childhood was hell. Hanging out with the neighbor kids, swimming in our pools, playing baseball and basketball in our cul de sac street with almost no traffic, spending most of our day unsupervised with no real threat to our safety, having dogs and yards for them to live and play in, building billy carts and riding tthem around the street etc.
Where and what are all these kids doing in the city by themselves?
Cities aren't for kids, and living there makes people not want to have kids, and that's supremely self-destructive for a society.
Just pretend you're in Bryce Canyon, or Muir Woods.
I think the Sears Tower in Chicago is my favorite. Less geometrically simple than most.
Then maybe you should get back to trees and lakes and ponds (and real Detroit pizza) here in MI. What will you really miss not witnessing the end of the world? Witness the world as it is now. It’s lovely this time of year (the world and MI both).
I suggest living somewhere that makes you feel happy. Job be damned.
What we need are small skyscrapers to put on shelves and tables. If you could pour tea out of them, even better.
What we need is a toy skyscraper that turns into a robot.
Too true. A mountain range is beautiful from a distance, but I wouldn't want to be twenty thousand feet up Mount Everest with my teeth chattering in the cold, my nose and fingers turning black with frostbite, and peering over a ten thousand foot sheer drop!
You are attempting to get a group of people who have defiantly rejected the possibility of human values outside of the rational to understand the idea of an aesthetic preference. They ain't gonna get there.
People who like skyscrapers have defiantly rejected the possibility of human values outside of the rational?
It's the principle of charity. One must assume that there is a sensible justifation for a position, even when it appears on the surface that the opposition just has really bad taste ;)
You mean the "rationalists"? yeah I don't think that's fair to them.
On what planet are urbanists and YIMBYists fair to anyone that disagrees with them? In this very thread someone is talking nonsense about suburbs being "a special kind of hell" for kids.
We have both skyscrapers and plenty of trees and other greenery in glorious Singapore.
Plenty of trees on top of skyscrapers too, which I kinda like.
Still not sure I'd call Singapore my ideal balance between skyscrapers and green space.
Ah yes, glorious singapore, a society so healthy that that they have the second lowest fertility of any country in the world. A true urbanist utopia....
Fertility is low here, though the better comparison is probably to other global cities, not to other countries.
I'm not sure I'd use fertility as a proxy for healthy, though. Many of the places with the highest fertility are amongst the least healthy. Both in a literal health sense, but also in a more metaphorical sense.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependencies_by_total_fertility_rate
I remember when US right-wingers were big fans of Singapore...not so much anymore, I guess?
Imagine the horror of living at the top of this hideous monstrosity:
https://www.houseandgarden.co.uk/article/skinniest-skyscraper
And that's when the elevator is working. If it was out of balance, the whole building might be quivering and shaking like a leaf:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11887385/NYCs-new-One-Vanderbilt-skyscraper-evacuated-huge-SHAKE-rippled-it.html
Or it could fail entirely, so one might have to lug arms full of grocery bags up a hundred flights of stairs!
Or you could open the window, and skydive to work.
The United States Courthouse Annex in Salt Lake City looms like a Borg cube over traffic. It's horrific.
truly disgusting
Growing up in NYC, I've always found the city skyline to be absolutely beautiful, particularly when viewed from across the river at night. I find them rather less appealing up close, though.
Agree about skyscrapers etc. Bigness in nature isn't inherently ugly, though, right? -- mountains, 200 foot waterfalls, and the poor megafauna who were so happy and unacquainted with fear they just stood there and let us kill them. I have miseries in cities too.
When I was fairly young my parents took me on a trip that took us through Houston. My main memory of Houston was the awe inspiring and seemingly endless mass of pipes and tanks associated, I assume, with the chemical and petroleum industry. I was "wowed" by it.
I admire the technology of them, and some of them are aesthetically appealing. But more of them are nothing but crude phalluses, there's no denying it. I mean, if you have no money, you draw a dick on the wall of the public toilet, if you have all the money, you do the same on the skyline.
Also, tigers are majestic, but I'd prefer living somewhere not too close to them. Preferably separated by a large deep body of water, just in case. Some beauty is better observed when I'm not the part of it.
"But more of them are nothing but crude phalluses, there's no denying it."
I deny it.
They guy who drew it on the wall of the toilet would deny it too. And yet...
Some of them are beautiful. But more of them... are not.
What non-phallic substitute would you use for “make efficient use of a city block”? It kind of has to be tall and slender-ish. It’s like complaining that rockets or cigars are phallus shaped. I mean they are, but it’s a functional shape.
I'm not complaining exactly, especially not about the function. I mean, I know where it comes from. But that doesn't make me ignore they are ugly. I recognize the fact. How to make it not ugly? Well, the same way you write good poetry, or good music, or paint a beautiful painting - just make it not ugly. There are examples, it's possible. Yes, it'd cost more money and effort. That doesn't change the evaluation of the result though.
Surely saying they are essentially the same thing as drawing a dick on a bathroom wall is a rather stronger statement than “I just find them ugly”?
They don't have to be as slender as they are. Making a whole city block one building would make them a lot less phallic. Going the full arcology route (with the streets underneath as tunnels) would be even more efficient.
Also Paris has basically no skyscrapers and manages to be one of the densest cities outside Asia, so you can pack people tight even without going hundred of stories up into the sky
I'm pushing back against your use use of the phrase "there's no denying it."
We're talking about aesthetic preferences here.
You seem to be stating your aesthetic preference and then saying not only that people should share your preference but that it's not really possible that anyone else can have a different preference.... that it can't be denied that your opinion is correct.
I'm here to tell you that it *can* be denied. That it *is* in fact possible for someone with different preferences than yours to look at a bunch of skyscrapers without seeing a bunch of dicks.
Psychiatrist (showing patient a picture of a square):
"what does that make you think of?"
Patient: Sex.
Psychiatrist (circle): "What does that ..."
Patient: "Sex."
Psychiatrist (Cross): "What ..."
Patient "Sex."
Psychiatrist: "I think you have a problem."
Patient: "What do you mean I have a problem? You're the one showing me the dirty pictures."
+5 Funny
I feel like this says more about the eye of the beholder than about the actual thing.
Made me laugh.
What a weird thing to say in a world where the Chrystler Building exists. Hell, the Carbide and Carbon building in Chicago is glorious.
Hell, Albert Kahn’s Detroit has some lovely ones and Scott was right there.
Coming from NYC I have always just wanted their to be 10x as many sky scrapers and for them to be more diverse in appearance
Make Manhattan as tall as it is wide
Truly, SF's skyscraper game is pitiful compared to NYC's. There are some decent Art-Deco-era buildings if you know where to look, but the big modern efforts like Transamerica Pyramid and Salesforce Tower show much more grandiosity than taste.
It's weird not to project a very small handful of buildings onto the majority?
I can't say I agree with Tucker on this one. There's beautiful skyscrapers, it's just that none of them is in San Francisco.
The Transamerica Pyramid has a certain charm, but everything else is generic filler. It's the boring buildings you get in SimCity to persuade you to pay for the DLC.
IMO "generic filler" can look quite pleasant if it's well designed...i.e. if a neighbourhood consists just of typical "boring" modern apartment buildings, but has lots of greenspace, pedestrian zones, and shops/restaurants etc. then it's a pleasant place to live in and visit...
Aren’t castles kinda like skyscrapers? Wonder how much more palatable traditionalists would find large condo towers if they had a pointy top of some sort
I'd certainly be fine with living in a building that looks like a castle. I mean, now I'm spoiled and I want my own house with the backyard, but back when I was young and lived in apartments, I'd certainly consider it very cool if it were made to look like a castle.
I am the opposite...modern (apartment) buildings that look like castles are not just tacky, but kind of unsettling IMO...
When I think of San Francisco, I don't think of skyscrapers. I imagine part of the problem is that there are a lot of modern ones, which don't have the same style as the Art Deco ones. Look at this skyline. How... inspiring (though of what, I will refrain from mentioning):
https://www.skyscrapercenter.com/city/san-francisco
As to building castles out of towers, there was a monarch who tried that and it ended with him going (if not already) crazy and bankrupting his personal fortune, but on the other hand it is undeniable that it did wonders for the tourist trade in later years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_II_of_Bavaria
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdo6SQvlwe8
I lived in and around SF for 20+ years and you are right - though the City is only 49 square miles, just a small nub of that is skyscrapers. The rest of it is so ...not skyscraper.
I don't think that fact really makes the feeling of not liking being around skyscrapers any less real. Castles are a large defensive fortification intended to intimidate. Some are beautifully designed and decorated, but no peasant in 12th century France would like to be surrounded by castles. That would be a threat on all sides. A castle is much less claustrophobia inducing because there is just one, and you can run from it.
The city of Pittsburgh would like a word:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PPG_Place
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_of_Learning
A pointy top would help, but the main issue is the giant glass box part. We should at least be building them with beautiful stone facades.
If Tucker Carlson had a more poetic frame of mind, I wonder what he would say about a people grown so distant from beauty that when seeking a word to set up opposite 'ugly', the best they could come up with is 'badass' - a conjunction of not-good and the place of defecation.
Really makes you think, as they say.
Really makes me think you're a mensa member.
"It's easier to be gigantic than to be beautiful" - Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner.
The Grand Coulee Dam is gigantic. The Hoover Dam is gigantic and beautiful.
As much as I disagree with the anti-skyscraper thing, "bigness is inherently ugly" is a way broader statement, and way wronger.
"Big" things include the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, the Hubble Deep Field (and Extreme Deep Field, Ultra Deep Field...), ... Even for manmade stuff - the cathedrals of Europe, the Golden Gate Bridge ...
This could be a case of Simpson’s paradox, where we notice things only when they are elegant or big. Since it’s harder to be both and we ignore small ugly things we hallucinate an anticorrelation.
This is a novel and brilliant explanation and bears further thinking about. Also, you mean Berkson's paradox.
Yes, you are right it’s Berkson’s.
Agreed.
Re anti-skyscraper: I find it interesting that the two groups most opposed to skyscrapers in the modern world seem to be "traditionalist" conservatives and "de-growth" leftists...maybe the horseshoe theory is correct after all?
The only problem with the horseshoe theory is that it posits that moderates are somehow intermediate between the two, whereas in any sane metric space of political viewpoints, the left and right would be clustered together way off in a corner.
They're both conflict theorists, radical revolutionaries, Hegelians aiming to drag the world closer to perfection, and dogmatists who believe they alone possess absolute truth, and that thus tolerance of or compromise with other views is a sin. Both believe the ends justify any means, thrive on hate, and hate individualism, free speech, debate, reason, and science. Both believe anyone who opposes them in any way is evil and sub-human. Both force innocent moderates to profess absurd beliefs to prove their submission. Historically, both have gained power over unwilling majorities by seizing control of institutions, especially educational institutions, and taking away everyone's guns.
The use of "left" and "right" is a con game to fool the majority into believing those are their only options, which has worked very well at giving both of these two small groups enormous political power.
This is an interesting take...seems like you agree with the horseshoe theory though?
Inasmuch as it says the left and right are similar, yes.
Brings up memories of the song by The Animals, "We gotta get outta this place."
As with much of what Tucker writes, I wonder if he really means it or is just pandering to his viewers, most of whom live in suburban or rural areas.
As to human nature, man is a social animal and the denser a place is the more people relatively close by. One of the reason it sucks to live in a small town is that you often have to leave that town, and your friends and family, to get a good job somewhere else. The denser an area is, the more potential friends, romantic partners, businesses, and employers in any given distance, though past a point it starts becoming more difficult to reach places if you don't have a car.
If you imagine better tech and wave a magic wand and solve the present problems with cities, the NIMBYism, the public sector unions, the mentally ill homeless people, the criminally inclined classes few want to live near,(even if they won't admit it) you get the futuristic image of the city that you usually see if you google "futuristic scene."
Not to rain on your parade, but I lived in Seoul as a foreigner for a substantial amount of time. Korea has basically zero crime and while Seoul has a homeless problem I saw orders of magnitude less aggressive pandering than in any western city. I suspect their government had an easier time fighting NIMBY sentiment at least in the Park dictatorship period, during which massive growth and urbanization took place. Moreover, public transportation is excellent and cheap. Still, it sucked to live in such a massively crowded place. I would feel better for a while when I flew to Taipei, which is still a crowded city but not at that level. Noise, lights always on at night, the absence of gardens and even balconies, the inability to see the sky except for a small solid angle above my head, the general absence of space killed me.
Those futuristic cities are disgusting. They're ugly, cold and souless, even when they try and make it pretty with tree covered skyscrapers. And it's truly sad that the future people people desire is one where every city is indistinguishable from any other with it's gross shiny skyscrapers and abject lack of national character or idenity.
And like Eh says below, what you describe is similar to places like Seoul. Seoul is extremely crowded and is literally home to the least fertile people on earth, and South Korea ranks a lowly 59 in the world for happiness.
"ugly, cold and souless"...you could say this about most American suburbs. Or even "traditional" European cities (to me, Edinburgh looks quite "cold" in terms of architecture compared to Miami, despite being much older...).
Suburbs are soulless indeed. Conversely, certain parts of Seoul have a strong character: the strip running from Hongdae to Ewha women’s university is a 24/7 student playground, Itaewon is the American expat place, Myeongdong the tourist-friendly chinatown, Gangnam the fake luxury hub, etc. Still something in my reptile brain would tell me to run away from it all to a place where my eyes could rest on some vegetation, something that was hours away by public transportation. I liked the city the first year or so. After a few more years I began to feel trapped. Having a tiny apartment did not help. I remember going out at 3AM to look for space, only to bump into more people. Once I walked all the way to gyeonggi-do along the river to reach the limit of the city. At least they couldn’t build on the water. People go to convenience stores and cafes just to have some space. It’s not rational- I was safe, well fed and on very friendly terms with the locals all the time; still it was stressful.
I doubt that too many readers of this Substack live in rural areas...
Holy crap! I actually agree with Tucker Carlson on something! Unbelievable. The evidence is clear, it's End Times for sure.
>"Bigness is inherently ugly"
What would this person say about the Great Pyramid of Giza? It was considered the greatest Wonder of the World for millennia (the only of the seven still standing), and mostly because it was far bigger than anything else build by humankind at least until the late Middle Ages.
Agree
Nothing in nature makes me feel the way even mediocre skyscrapers do. I get no sense of wonder from natural occurrences. They are just "there". The fact that a group of people are able to build skyscrapers fills me with feelings of hope and admiration. There is no place on Earth more beautiful to me than the middle of a major American or Asian city's financial district.
I'm curious because this is so different from my personal experience-- what natural places have you been? Might have phrased that a bit directly for the internet, so please take it as an honest question and not a challenge. Skyscrapers and the effort effort required to construct them are definitely awe-inspiring, but it's hard for me to wrap my head around the fact someone would look at a natural arch or something and feel nothing. But I can also be wowed by, like... a big tree, so my bar is not terribly high. Being in the presence of something massively larger and older than oneself can temporarily recalibrate your sense of size and time in a very humbling way.
You could say skyscrapers make me cognizant of humanity's amazing achievements, and natural structures remind me my own life is in some ways very short and small.
I've been all over the world. I'm not saying that nature isn't pretty or that I don't like it, it's just that I don't have that visceral reaction to it that I do with man-made structures. Take something like Machu Picchu for example. If it was just the mountains, it wouldn't have made an impact on me. It would have been a feeling of "oh look, more pretty mountains, just like all the other pretty mountains." But the fact that there were man made structures up there made it one of the most beautiful places I've ever been. I was in complete awe that something like that could be done with the technology they had.
I think I understand a little more where you're coming from. Thanks for taking the time to explain!
The fact that these frequently very ugly and unappealing buildings were deliberately designed that way fills me with disgust, whereas natural processes often beyond our comprehension built things vastly more beautiful.
So people are different in terms of their tastes...I personally like skyscrapers (despite being from Europe and therefore culturally from a region where people think "traditional architecture" is superior and have an opinion about high-rises similar to yours, even if they are not right-wing). But I also like natural features, such as mountains, canyons, cliffs, trees...so I guess you can like both natural and man-made objects. I don't see a contradiction here...
An oblique maybe congratulations here if I’m reading between lines.
If it is of any consolation that may or may not be needed, there has always been darkness and there has always been courage rising up to throw it back.
It's a lovely sentiment, but, I mean, tell it to the dinosaurs watching the Chicxulub asteroid approach.
Eh, it’s less touchy feely than that. The best way to die is to stand still and do nothing when you know something awful is going to happen. Courage is always necessary. There’s never some wizard who is going to come along and say “you specifically are destined to go and do this.” There’s only you saying “well, shit, I guess it’s me.” And mostly being wrong, but caring enough to try.
Love your bit along these lines:
"Come on, children, you’re acting like children
"Every generation thinks it’s the end of the world"
https://www.mattball.org/2023/02/greta-thunbergs-misery-is-result-of.html
Happy first day of spring, everyone. If you're reading this blog, your future will be be good compared to 99.9...% of all sentient beings in history.
Eventually, someone’s going to be right.
"A horse which has been often driven along a certain road resists the attempt to drive him in a different direction. Domestic animals expect food when they see the person who feeds them. We know that all these rather crude expectations of uniformity are liable to be misleading. The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken."
http://www.ditext.com/russell/rus6.html
And yet we're now living in 2023, and not in 4500.
Anthropic argument is nightmare fuel.
No, don't worry, the anthropic argument (the "Doomsday Argument") is just silly and wrong. You weren't some floating soul who randomly selected one human out of all of history to inhabit. Making a new human creates a new observer. When you correct for this, the statistics become completely unsurprising (tautological, even) and the Doomsday Argument falls apart.
To put it in another way: of course you can't get "free" information about whether or not the world will end tomorrow (A or ~A) solely based on the fact that you're living in it today (B). B is true for both A and ~A, so gives exactly 0 information.
Note that the anthropic argument does work when applied to events in the past - just not for producing magical predictions about the future.
This famous counteragument, called the self-indication assumption, has a famous counter-counterargument: the presumptuous philosopher. Let's say that astronomers have two plausible competing theories about the universe. According to one, the universe is very big and has a trillion observers; according to the other, the universe is very very big and has a trillion trillion observers. The astronomers are about to collect 5 years of observational data to see which theory is right. The presumptuous philosopher barges in and says "wait! You're wasting your time! I already know, to trillion-to-one odds, that the universe is very very big."
The astronomers ignore the philosopher and collect their data, which show unambiguously that the universe is "only" very big (p=0.000000001). The philosopher barges in again and says "wait! You might think that's a really good p value, but you forgot to multiply it by a trillion, and if you do, you find that the very very big theory is still overwhelmingly favored!"
It's only called the "Self-Indication Assumption" by proponents of the Doomsday Argument. People who aren't drinking the kool-aid just call it basic logic. The thing that frustrates me is that, if you're decent at math, it's honestly not hard to understand both the Argument and why it's wrong, which is why the Wikipedia article uses a lot of ten-dollar words to make it sound like it's a Serious Philosophical Theory and not a math error.
The Argument: You have two vases filled with balls numbered 1 to N, one with 1000 balls and one with a trillion. You pick a random vase then you pick a random ball out of it. It's numbered 398. Now you know with near-certainty that you picked the 1000-ball vase.
Why It's Wrong: Every new human is an observer - you're not the One True Human who chose a random body to inhabit in a world of p-zombies. So, actually, you (human #398) just pointed to the vase and asked "is there a ball numbered 398 in this vase?" and I said "yes". You still have no information on which vase you chose.
You can dress this up with obscure philosophical language and call it the Self-Indication Assumption and write out some complicated Bayesian equations and multiply them out, but at the end of it you'll notice the odds of which vase you chose are still 50-50. There's no surprise to this result - it's very boring. True things often are.
What if you pick two balls from the same vase? And you get #398 and #6. In that case it seems to me the odds that you picked the 1000-ball vase are a lot better than 50/50.
You're not picking two balls. You have one observation (that you, human #398, exists). You can never have another, because you're not anyone else. :)
EDIT: Sorry, I think there's still a misconception here. You're NOT actually "picking" a ball. That's the problem. You're just noticing that you exist, which in the analogy is noticing that the Ball #398 is in the vase. (Which it always is, regardless of the vase you choose.)
Your arrogant tone and your ad-hominem attacks don't make you more convincing, and neither does the fact that your comment has nothing to do with the self-indication assumption itself.
"at the end of it you'll notice the odds of which vase you chose are still 50-50."
No, it is not. If you repeat the experiment many times and use the simple rule "if I pick a number less than 1000, I guess vase 1; otherwise, I guess vase 2", you'll be right 100% of the times when the real answer is vase 1, and 99.9999999% of the time when the real answer is vase 2. That's a remarkably high success rate if the rule isn't useful!
Another way is to ask: out of all repeats of the experiment where a ball less than 1000 is drawn, what percentage of those draws came from vase 1? In N repeats, you'd get N/2 balls less than 1000 from vase 1, and N/2 * 1e3/1e12 balls less than 1000 from vase 2. Therefore, 1/(1+1e-9)= 0.999999999 of the draws less than 1000 come from vase 1.
Yes, I'm aware of how the Argument works. As I said in my comment, in the first scenario the odds of picking vase 1 are indeed much higher. Your calculations are correct. It's just that the first scenario is a bad analogy - it's the second scenario that applies, where the odds are indeed 50/50. (EDIT: rewrote this to be less confrontational.)
So, ok, let me take a step back. You're right that I'm using a condescending tone here. I apologize for that.
This is a personal bugbear of mine, something that seriously frustrates me. I first encountered the "Carter Catastrophe" in a sci-fi novel by Robert J. Sawyer, and it bothered me to no end until I sat down, worked through it, and saw why it was wrong. But the Argument didn't go away - it just morphed into a less-easy-to-understand form, so that it could better propagate as a meme. Nowadays it has a highly credulous Wikipedia article, lots of proponents everywhere, even more SF novels that mention it, and worst of all, Scott took it seriously in one of his posts about future risks.
As a theory it really doesn't go any deeper than the summary I gave above - there's no fascinating philosophical argument here, just a lot of clever obfuscation around something simple and wrong. (Kind of like all the clever arguments used by the Flat Earth society, although I'm pretty sure those are just done for fun and almost nobody takes them seriously.) It has the same relationship to serious (and difficult!) anthropic arguments as astrology has to astronomy.
I think the Doomsday Argument is, far and away, the clearest example of a plainly-incorrect belief that is somehow still popular among the rationalist community. What can I do better in the fight to defeat it? I don't want to argue as if both sides have merit, because they don't. (I wouldn't argue that way with someone claiming "0.999... isn't 1" on sci.math, either.)
Here, let me try one more analogy that I hope really explains the root of what's going on in these anthropic arguments and also shows the assumptions required for the Doomsday Argument to actually work.
You're a God. You've created two deterministic Universes with humans in them, both from exactly the same initial conditions, except that one you let run until 1000 humans exist and then you stop it, and the second you let run until 1 trillion humans exist and then you stop it. This is a cartoonishly simple Metaverse, where humans have a 50-50 prior probability of flourishing. (Note that the "apocalypse" in the first Universe is totally arbitrary, but that's actually kind of appropriate - the Doomsday Argument says nothing about what the apocalypse would look like.)
Later, you look back on the Universes, and notice with some amusement that Human #398 discovered the Doomsday Argument, and argued that there almost certainly won't be a trillion humans. One of the Human #398s was right (for bad reasons), and the other was wrong. From each #398's perspective, the correct odds were actually 50-50 - unsurprisingly, the same as the priors.
Ok, let's try to figure out how to make the Doomsday Argument actually work. So, it turns out all these humans are p-zombies - not observers at all! In fact, you as God created just one Soul that experiences qualia. Then you took all the humans in your Multiverse and picked one at random, then plunked the Soul into it (which turns out to be a #398, which is unlikely but not impossible). Now the one true observer, as Human #398, discovers the Doomsday Argument, and ... oops, well, it's still wrong. Because there are two #398s, and one is in the small Universe and one is in the big Universe. The odds from the perspective of the Soul are still 50/50. D'oh.
Ok, one last try. As God you instead create one Soul, and then you randomly pick one of the two Universes to drop it into, and then FROM THAT UNIVERSE you randomly pick a human (#398) for it to inhabit. Only now is the Soul finally correct in its belief that it's overwhelmingly likely to be in the small Universe.
So, this is what the Doomsday Argument requires. Not just that (a) observers are detached from humans, but that (b) for some reason the Universe must be picked _before_ the random selection of a human in that Universe.
I think most rationalists would disagree with (a) (basically the argument that there's an unmeasurable Soul divorced from the physical body). So intellectual consistency means that such rationalists should also disagree with the Doomsday Argument. But, even if you agree with (a) philosophically, (b) is an actual math error. Probability is a measure over the (lowercase u) universe of possibilities, which for you, as a human, consists of all humans in all possible Universes. Constraining the concept to one pre-selected Universe, an awkward step, means you're no longer talking about "probability", the math concept with centuries of cachet behind it, but some sort of "philosophical probability" which looks similar but is basically made up for this Argument only.
I really don't like calling the argument against (b) the Self-Indication Assumption, because it makes it sound like this is a Serious Named Criticism of a Serious Named Theory. But it's not honestly even a clever criticism - it's just pointing out a logical error, after which you return to the unsurprising result that (to quote rationalwiki) "it doesn't make sense to argue from something that is 100% true (regardless of future events) to something uncertain in the future."
I stopped worrying about the Doomsday Argument a long time ago, when I tried to generalize it to /all/ possible shapes of population trajectories [and not just exponentially rising curves with hard dropoffs ("doomsdays") at the right end] and realized it just generalized to "All other things being equal, you are more likely to have been born at a time when birth rates are high".
And, well, duh, yeah.
It's easy to predict a doomsday scenario when the only population trajectories you're considering assume an inevitable doomsday baked right into the model.
if this is how good you are at writing cyberpunk, pls kindly switch to that ~entirely
Check out his webnovel Unsong if you haven't.
i've read it when it came out
Gotcha. I too wish Scott wrote more of this stuff. Makes me feel things I didn't know I could feel
Yeah, he really shines when he breaks into prose poetry
Is there a definitive Scott approved paper version to get?
A quick search finds this promising one, should I choose it?
https://www.lulu.com/shop/scott-alexander/unsong/paperback/product-1q2qer8g.html?page=1&pageSize=4
There is now! Revised and published...
https://www.amazon.com/Unsong-Scott-Alexander/dp/B0D57BYS3Y
Cyberpunk is no longer a genre, it has blended too much with real life.
On the one hand, we've got cryptocurrency, higher inequality, new recreational drugs,(fentanyl, kratom, synthetic marijuana) smartphones, hacktivist groups, less social conservatism, homeless encampments, and robots you can have a coherent conversation with.
On the other hand, there are some things present in the cyberpunk novels of 1975-1985 that are missing today. Cyberpunk was largely urban, while America has gone through short periods of mild urbanization followed by periods of mild de-urbanization. I feel like cyberpunk was predicting that a larger proportion of Americans would live in places like NYC. Cyberpunk largely missed one of the most consequential developments of the past half century, the rise in credentialism and academic inflation. Cyberpunk seemed to portray a "grow up faster" world, similar to blighted urban areas where you drop out of high school and enter the workforce(or crime) at age 17. Ours is more of a "grow up slower" world where you need more credentials to get jobs and more people live with their parents. (And people say kids are less mature, though that's hard to prove or disprove.) And the kind of inequality is different from the cyberpunk portrayal, which was more a clear, meat-and-potatoes kind of inequality. Some people have money, others don't, and everyone knows which side of it they're on. Instead, our kind of inequality is more concerned with education and status, such that a plumber can be "low class" even if he's making more than his college educated office drone neighbor. The phenomenon of the 30K millionaire posting fake vacation pics on Instagram is not something cyberpunk anticipated.
Cyberpunk was a futuristic reflection on 80's japan, even when the story was set in the US.
I'm feeling like it's a battle between Rudy Rucker and Peter Watts -- I'm just waiting to spot a vampire wearing a Happy Cloak while munching on a haunch of Wendy (if we're lucky, Rudy's more correct).
Yes, this felt extremely Gibson-esque.
Digital TV spoiled Neuromancer for me. Whenever I read the first paragraph I wonder why the sky would be saturated green.
I’ve been feeling down about the SF real estate market for months. This is the reassurance I’ve been looking for. Thank you!
*hugs* Hope you feel better.
"I once thought about naming my daughter Saffron in its honor."
Are you and your wife expecting? If so, congrats!
No, I've been thinking about what to name kids for at least the past ten years.
"I'm just mad about Saffron" 😁
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmkwet9ZUCY
I understand it works well as a dye, but a little expensive.
So, name her Yolanda or Bridget and wait?
A man who obsessively ruminates upon children's names is a fool every day except for one. Or maybe two point one depending on his demographics.
Not true. He can pass those names out to the needy, like the ant and the grasshopper.
5 in my case. Though I still think the 5th got a fine but less than perfect name. - "thinking about" = "obsessively ruminating"? since when? - anyways: "S.A.S., shall his offspring outnumber the starlink-satellites in the sky!"
Sidenote, do you actually enjoy the flavor of saffron? To me it tastes of honey squirted into swimming pool water.
I am curious if that was actual Saffron or the imitation stuff.
Actual saffron. Very clearly crocus stamens. I've cooked it myself and also had it in a fancy restaurant.
Are all such possibilities conveniently memorable anagrams, or are you hoping something will shake out stochastically? If you don't mind humouring.
(Best pseudonymous name for a son: Grant Anonama.)
Thank you.
What's the pulse here now, is Kurzweil early or late with 2029 for the singularity/AGI/the end of the world?
“A wizard is never late, nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to.”
As I recall, Gandalf was much later than the hobbits had been expecting him, so I'll take that as an esoterically promising answer.
He was also in general much later than he should have been, though fortunately not too late to lose everything. I mean, when your main antagonist has a sentient artifact of immense power that has been lost, and that is known to have a will to try and return itself to him, any artifact even remotely resembling it suddenly showing up in the field should have triggered all the alarms. And the question of "how do we recognize The One Ring of Power among many other rings" should have been asked and answered centuries before by the interested parties. And yet it was ignored for 60 years. Good enough for government work, I guess?
The resident expert on Rings of Power, and Gandalf's boss, was busy assuring everyone that the ring had been lost in the sea long ago, while he worked in secret to take control himself. By this reading all of Eliezer's AI alignment work is a ruse designed to slow down everyone else while he builds his own world-dominating technogod.
Presumably Palantir's role in both stories is exactly the same.
Well, a Wizard shouldn't be duped as easily, I think. If someone who spent a lot of time researching AI risk suddenly comes out and says "folks, there's no AI risk at all, let's forget about it completely and dig into gender studies and enumerating all possible pronouns" - I think some people would suspect maybe he got a large investment in one of the new and rising AI startups going? I mean, that's why we have conspiracy nuts around, don't we? Yet, nobody suspected anything.
Also, I guess, that's one example why "Trust The Experts!"(TM) is not such a good idea as it seems?
Well, Tolkien's whole narrative philosophy required the Good Guys to be dumb and incompetent enough to end up in position to have to snatch an unlikely victory from the jaws of defeat. He called it 'the eucatastrophe'. I'd say that it worked decently enough in The Hobbit, a fanciful silly tale that it is, but a reprise in the ostensibly more serious LotR definitely strains the suspension of disbelief.
It wouldn’t be surprising to see a selection of AI ethics and similar arguments used to promote legislation whose real aim is cementing the market position of incumbents by building a regulatory moat. The current incumbents being Microsoft and OpenAI we know from whom to expect the push for more regulation.
I haven't reread it recently enough, but was it actually known to gandalf that Sauron's power came from a ring? It definitely wasn't common knowledge. Furthermore, when did gandalf become aware that Sauron was still alive?
"Alive" is not a good term, as Sauron was never dead, and couldn't possibly be ever dead. He's an angelic spirit, to use Christian-aligned analogy, so the gift of death is not available to him. Not that his disembodied formless existence outside of the material world is a lot of fun. Gandalf knew that Sauron is, so to say, re-coalescing for a while by the time of LOTR events. And it had to be expected, given without destroying The Ring his links to the material world could never be entirely severed and he was bound to return. And yes, it was widely known what The Ring is for (it's not exactly that all Sauron's power came from it - it's just a very significant part of it was invested into it) at least during the Second Age - the whole Isildur story is based on it, the Elves wanted Isildur to destroy The Ring (thus ending the link of Sauron to the material world and expelling him forever) but he wanted the power of the Ring to himself (that's how the Ring worked - the more powerful the owner was, the more they wanted to keep the Ring, that's why Gandalf or Elrond or Galadriel refused to even touch it) so he kept it. It did not end well, predictably. But then the Ring stayed lost for so long, everybody just kinda fell into the routine of considering it lost forever, even though it's not a good strategy with a sentient super-powerful artifact. In part, the supervisory role of Istari (the Wizards) was to kinda keep the long view on things, but they were also prone to going native. Tolkien has never been shy of depicting his characters as flawed, with all humanly faults and biases.
"Tolkien has never been shy of depicting his characters as flawed, with all humanly faults and biases."
Indeed:
"But in this 'mythology' all the 'angelic' powers concerned with this world were capable of many degrees of error and failing between the absolute Satanic rebellion and evil of Morgoth and his satellite Sauron, and the fainéance of some of the other higher powers or 'gods'. The 'wizards' were not exempt, indeed being incarnate were more likely to stray, or err. Gandalf alone fully passes the tests, on a moral plane anyway (he makes mistakes of judgement). For in his condition it was for him a sacrifice to perish on the Bridge in defence of his companions, less perhaps than for a mortal Man or Hobbit, since he had a far greater inner power than they; but also more, since it was a humbling and abnegation of himself in conformity to 'the Rules': for all he could know at that moment he was the only person who could direct the resistance to Sauron successfully, and all his mission was vain. He was handing over to the Authority that ordained the Rules, and giving up personal hope of success.
That I should say is what the Authority wished, as a set-off to Saruman. The 'wizards', as such, had failed; or if you like: the crisis had become too grave and needed an enhancement of power. So Gandalf sacrificed himself, was accepted, and enhanced, and returned. 'Yes, that was the name. I was Gandalf.' Of course he remains similar in personality and idiosyncrasy, but both his wisdom and power are much greater. When he speaks he commands attention; the old Gandalf could not have dealt so with Théoden, nor with Saruman. He is still under the obligation of concealing his power and of teaching rather than forcing or dominating wills, but where the physical powers of the Enemy are too great for the good will of the opposers to be effective he can act in emergency as an 'angel' – no more violently than the release of St Peter from prison. He seldom does so, operating rather through others, but in one or two cases in the War (in Vol. III) he does reveal a sudden power: he twice rescues Faramir. He alone is left to forbid the entrance of the Lord of Nazgûl to Minas Tirith, when the City has been overthrown and its Gates destroyed — and yet so powerful is the whole train of human resistance, that he himself has kindled and organized, that in fact no battle between the two occurs: it passes to other mortal hands. In the end before he departs for ever he sums himself up: 'I was the enemy of Sauron'. He might have added: 'for that purpose I was sent to Middle-earth'. But by that he would at the end have meant more than at the beginning. He was sent by a mere prudent plan of the angelic Valar or governors; but Authority had taken up this plan and enlarged it, at the moment of its failure. 'Naked I was sent back – for a brief time, until my task is done'. Sent back by whom, and whence? Not by the 'gods' whose business is only with this embodied world and its time; for he passed 'out of thought and time'. Naked is alas! unclear. It was meant just literally, 'unclothed like a child' (not discarnate), and so ready to receive the white robes of the highest. Galadriel's power is not divine, and his healing in Lórien is meant to be no more than physical healing and refreshment."
I have it on good authority that negotiations between the Eagles and the FAA dragged on for most of that and eventually he just had to give up and start off on foot. Only a last-minute executive order allowed the Eagles to perform the extraction.
Ah, the famous "why they just didn't use Eagles" question. Everybody asks it. The FAA take is probably the funniest one I've heard for a while.
Though I appreciate Tolkien's own answer:
https://youtu.be/1-Uz0LMbWpI
People who wanted to do LOTR film adaptations (animated and live action) did tend to over-use the Eagles and Tolkien was against it:
(1) "An abridgement by selection with some good picture-work would be pleasant, & perhaps worth a good deal in publicity; but the present script is rather a compression with resultant over-crowding and confusion, blurring of climaxes, and general degradation: a pull-back towards more conventional 'fairy-stories'. People gallop about on Eagles at the least provocation; Lórien becomes a fairy-castle with 'delicate minarets', and all that sort of thing."
(2) "Here we meet the first intrusion of the Eagles. I think they are a major mistake of Z, and without warrant.
The Eagles are a dangerous 'machine'. I have used them sparingly, and that is the absolute limit of their credibility or usefulness. The alighting of a Great Eagle of the Misty Mountains in the Shire is absurd; it also makes the later capture of G. by Saruman incredible, and spoils the account of his escape. (One of Z's chief faults is his tendency to anticipate scenes or devices used later, thereby flattening the tale out.) Radagast is not an Eagle-name, but a wizard's name; several eagle-names are supplied in the book. These points are to me important.
...At the bottom of the page, the Eagles are again introduced. I feel this to be a wholly unacceptable tampering with the tale. 'Nine Walkers' and they immediately go up in the air! The intrusion achieves nothing but incredibility, and the staling of the device of the Eagles when at last they are really needed. It is well within the powers of pictures to suggest, relatively briefly, a long and arduous journey, in secrecy, on foot, with the three ominous mountains getting nearer.
Z does not seem much interested in seasons or scenery, though from what I saw I should say that in the representation of these the chief virtue and attraction of the film is likely to be found. But would Z think that he had improved the effect of a film of, say, the ascent of Everest by introducing helicopters to take the climbers half way up (in defiance of probability)? It would be far better to cut the Snow-storm and the Wolves than to make a farce of the arduous journey."
Oh wow, I didn't realize Tolkien himself was salty about being better at linguistics than plot.
For the better part of that I thought you were talking about Kurzweil.
Bilbo was very secretive about the ring, gave conflicting stories about how he came to have it, and in general Gandalf only had rare opportunities to examine it; mostly he was aware that it was *a* magic ring, but what sort he wasn't sure, and he gauged it by its effect on Bilbo (which was not "oh crap he has just turned into a Nazgul" but "mostly he uses it to dodge his annoying relatives and I can't blame him for that").
There were all kinds of magical rings floating around, not all made by Sauron, and it was a case of "think horses, not zebras". It was only after thinking about it for a long time and doing independent research when he could (and Denethor wasn't any more eager than Saruman to let Gandalf poke his nose around) that he came to the conclusion that it was, indeed, the One Ring.
Well, yes, he didn't examine it much. But if he *really* wanted to, he would get all the access he needed. It's not like Bilbo could resist a Wizard, and there's not much coercion that would be required either - a stern look probably would do it. He knew it's a magic ring - and he should have known "throw it into the fire" trick by then, which he neglected to research until much later - and that should have been enough to ID it. Yes, he thought horses, not zebras - which is OK to do except in the case where there's a human-eating superpowerful zombie zebra that might be lurking nearby and if you miss it, the whole world is going to be ruined. In that case, occasional thought of zebras may be warranted.
Well, they already *had* the human-eating superpowerful zombie zebra on the doorstep, with the Necromancer setting up shop in Dol Guldur in Southern Mirkwood.
It's not like Gandalf and the White Council had nothing better to do all that time than gossip over tea! "Oh great, the One Ring has just turned up again? Well why the fiddlesticks not, throw some more gunpowder on the bonfire!"
"It's not like Bilbo could resist a Wizard, and there's not much coercion that would be required either - a stern look probably would do it."
And that is the *one* absolute forbidden thing for the Wizards, they are *not* permitted to coerce *any* being, even by stern looks. That's part of Saruman's fall - wanting to make others do things his way 'for their own good' and eventually making his own Orcs and Uruk-hai to control with his own will. Interference with any being's free will, even for 'their own good', is a big no-no and if you remember Tolkien was Catholic, you will understand why:
"Why they should take such a form is bound up with the 'mythology' of the 'angelic' Powers of the world of this fable. At this point in the fabulous history the purpose was precisely to limit and hinder their exhibition of 'power' on the physical plane, and so that they should do what they were primarily sent for: train, advise, instruct, arouse the hearts and minds of those threatened by Sauron to a resistance with their own strengths; and not just to do the job for them. They thus appeared as 'old' sage figures."
And from a brief description of Gandalf the White:
"He is still under the obligation of concealing his power and of teaching rather than forcing or dominating wills,"
". But since in the view of this tale & mythology Power – when it dominates or seeks to dominate other wills and minds (except by the assent of their reason) – is evil, these 'wizards' were incarnated in the life-forms of Middle-earth, and so suffered the pains both of mind and body. They were also, for the same reason, thus involved in the peril of the incarnate: the possibility of 'fall', of sin, if you will. The chief form this would take with them would be impatience, leading to the desire to force others to their own good ends, and so inevitably at last to mere desire to make their own wills effective by any means. To this evil Saruman succumbed. Gandalf did not. "
All of which is a long-winded way of saying that in Tolkien's set-up, Gandalf could certainly have *asked* Bilbo to let his see and test the ring, but if Bilbo refused, Gandalf could not over-ride his refusal. Even just by a stern look.
From what Gandalf says, while none of the rings were made by Sauron except the One, he had a hand in all great and lesser rings but the Three. Even if it's a lesser ring, it's basically a cursed object that Gandalf should probably have been more concerned about Bilbo continuing to possess.
Gandalf also says that he first "began to guess" before the Battle of Five Armies, and that he "wondered often how Gollum came by a Great Ring". Leaving aside when he found out that all the Great Rings but the One had gems, if he a) knew that it was a Great Ring, and b) knew that it wasn't one of the Three (whose disposition he knew), that doesn't leave any good alternatives just based on the rhyme "long known in Elven lore".
Best case is it's a Dwarven Ring, which was still under Sauron's influence and still not good for its owners, but at least wasn't on record as turning Dwarves into wraiths or slaves. Gandalf's assessment of Hobbit toughness may have led him to think they'd be more like Dwarves than Men on that score. But it still seems like sharing what he knew earlier (even if that wasn't everything) would have been better for Bilbo.
Though of course it raises the question what to do then. It presumably won't go uncollected, and Gandalf doesn't trust himself or the other Wise with it. So leaving it in Bilbo's hands while he tried to learn more may have seemed like the least worst thing he can do.
Gandalf didn't exactly do *wrong* - all the actions you describe make sense. Except that he took way too long to do it - maybe because he was an immortal angel for whom the passage of time is not a serious limitation, maybe because there were other things he thought are more important at the time. Thus I think the line of "the Wizard is never late" may have to be understood a bit ironically - this particular Wizard is late so often it may be a habit.
Iirc Kurzweil thinks AGI by 2029 and then the singularity by 2045. Where either date by itself is plausible, but the conjunction of them isn't (barring big governance interventions).
Why not? Both are vague concepts, with wide latitudes for interpretations. For instance, some claim that the current crop of multimodal LLMs like PaLM-E and GPT-4 already qualify as weak AGIs, but the path from here to superintelliegnce isn't at all clear.
Or for the "book is better" purists:
'Mithrandir! Mithrandir!’ men cried. ‘Now we know that the storm is indeed nigh!’
‘It is upon you,’ said Gandalf. ‘I have ridden on its wings.'
Gandalf really does live up to his name of 'Stormcrow' by the kind of encouraging things he says 😁
'Hush!' said Gandalf from the shadows at the back of the porch. 'Evil things do not come into this valley; but all the same we should not name them. The Lord of the Ring is not Frodo, but the master of the Dark Tower of Mordor, whose power is again stretching out over the world! We are sitting in a fortress. Outside it is getting dark.'
'Gandalf has been saying many cheerful things like that,' said Pippin. 'He thinks I need keeping in order. But it seems impossible, somehow, to feel gloomy or depressed in this place. I feel I could sing, if I knew the right song for the occasion.'
Gandalf makes note: "Take Pippin to even scarier places to get him to take things seriously."
Pippin makes note: "Toss stone into well in the middle of orc-filled dungeon, steal wizard-ball and talk to Dark Lord, then address most powerful mortal ruler in Middle Earth en tutoyant."
Maybe a little early. But surprisingly close, given the prediction's magnitude.
2029 is right in the mark for the fastest take off, 11 years early for the median guess
Very unsong like
I expected "This is the kabbalah. The rest is just commentary." somewhere there!
"...certainly they’re not so real that if you inscribe every word ever written onto a piece of glass then the glass comes to life and kills you. That’s just an urban legend." Loved this line.
Same. The best references are the ones that you have to read twice and no normie will ever get.
I got the reference to AIs trained on the contents of the Internet, but I don’t know which urban legend is being referred to. Care to enlighten me?
The legend of the Golem came to mind, but that was just one word, not every word ever written. There’s an Asimov short story about a group of monks writing out all the names of God, but it doesn’t quite fit either. So I got nothin’.
My interpretation was that glass = silicon = computers and the "urban legend" is just straightforwardly "predictions of AI doom".
Clarke, I think.
Not Asimov but Clarke, "The Nine Billion Names of God", where Tibetan monks get the help of computer scientists to set up and run a computer that will calculate all the permutations of the possible names, and once this task is complete, then the Universe will end (having performed the task for which it was created).
Spoiler ending for any who have not read the story: look away now
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The swift night of the high Himalayas was now almost upon them. Fortunately, the road was very good, as roads went in that region, and they were both carrying torches. There was not the slightest danger, only a certain discomfort from the bitter cold. The sky overhead was perfectly clear, and ablaze with the familiar, friendly stars. At least there would be no risk, thought George, of the pilot being unable to take off because of weather conditions. That had been his only remaining worry.
He began to sing, but gave it up after a while. This vast arena of mountains, gleaming like whitely hooded ghosts on every side, did not encourage such ebullience. Presently George glanced at his watch.
"Should be there in an hour," he called back over his shoulder to Chuck. Then he added, in an afterthought: "Wonder if the computer's finished its run. It was due about now."
Chuck didn't reply, so George swung round in his saddle.
He could just see Chuck's face, a white oval turned toward the sky.
"Look," whispered Chuck, and George lifted his eyes to heaven. (There is always a last time for everything.)
Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.
Having read it, I wasn't spoiled; but for future reference, you can draw a more effective curtain for spoilers by rot-13ing them.
This is my favorite thing I've read in a good while. And I genuinely cannot believe that no one on the internet has used the phrase "Chicxulub or bust" before.
After this story, it's only a matter of time until someone starts selling T-shirts.
I also had some poetic thoughts while walking around before dawn this morning:
“Man, what a shithole. Why did I move here? Is that a shantytown under that bridge? Jesus christ why doesn’t anyone pick up after their dogs in this city. Oh great a crackhead is trying to talk to me. He’s pretty industrious to be doing this at 5:30am. I should stop procrastinating on that concealed carry application.”
Is there such a thing as CC in SF? I thought it's mythical unless you regularly shake hands with somebody the rest of the people only ever see on C-SPAN (maybe you are?).
That said, my recent visit in SF about a month ago pleasantly surprised me. They managed to keep the strip along about half of the mile from the shore mostly clean. I mean, there are homeless tents here and there but not too many, and the area is relatively clean and not revolting to walk through. Of course, once you go deeper inside the city, it starts to match all the noir expectations.
Recent supreme court ruling against New York forced all cities to become “shall issue” for CC, though places like SF and LA are dragging the process out
Well, there's law and there's application of the law... I'd expect SF to be extremely hostile and obstructive on it to the point of direct sabotage. Maybe even issue a blatantly contradictory regulation and just wait for a couple of years for it to make its way through the courts, maybe things change somehow till then. Though I admit I didn't follow up the details recently as I am no longer even living in California...
At least one guy successfully got one in SF since the ruling so figured it’s worth rolling the dice
Given how what you really have to worry about is the subsequent jury trial you have to read the room. You'd probably be better off buying a trench coat and one of those totally not a flame thrower things that Elon Musk sells.
Good point, but “tried by twelve” is preferable to “carried by six”. I actually have that flamethrower lol
The vast majority of SF is still pretty clean and just fine. The squalor is concentrated.
Downtown is in rough shape, but most of the neighborhoods are doing just fine. You can have a lot of lovely days where the only problem is all the other people trying to do the same cool thing you're trying to do.
My walk was in a residential neighborhood many miles from downtown. Kinda impressed that the rot has spread this far out
Poor Harvey Milk. He worked so hard to get the Pooper Scooper law in, and now humans shitting just about anywhere make all his work moot.
It's really grounding to consider this aspect of San Francisco. "Oh sure, the AI will fix the shantytowns and the Brazilian favelas". Yeah right.
More likely, the AI would produce a lot of convincing arguments about how it's all your own fault and you should feel bad for noticing it, and feel even worse for not liking it. Which is I guess what is happening now anyway.
This is the opposite of Nick Land's Meltdown.
And such a fitting text for the coming ends or rebirths.
Thank you so much.
S+F also means saf, Hebrew for threshold. The implications are clear.
This is making me miss San Francisco. I can understand not liking the skyscrapers of downtown and finding them alien, but for me it's the first place that ever felt like home. Maybe because it was so strange and alien nobody really belongs, so it's okay to be a bit weird and out of place there.
<3
While I was in college I did a semester abroad, and soon after returning, I drove with some friends up to San Francisco, and that moment on the 101 when you come around the bend and suddenly see all the skyscrapers right there felt like coming home. (Or is it the 280? It's now been so long since I lived in the Bay Area that I don't even remember.)
101 or 280?
Both.
Is anybody a native San Franciscan? Do people really have kids there and stick around so they grow up there? Isn't it all people from other parts of America and the world wanting that "flowers in your hair/get RICH RICH RICH in Silicon Valley" experience? 😁
Good luck to Scott and his missus if they really do have little Saffron and she spends the first six years of her life (at least) in SF, she will be a National Cultural Treasure in years to come ("yes people, come learn from the wisdom of one of the few living Native San Franciscans!" "Thank you, thank you, it's great to be back, ah I remember when this area was all YIMBY land yet to be built upon!").
Plenty of people live in Silicon Valley who grew up there, even young people. It's just easier to find them at a neighborhood church than in a startup office.
*raises hand with equal parts pride and shame*
I even have the authentic experience of having my family priced out and being forced to downsize to [nearby small town] for years, because even back in the 90s it was really expensive for two full-time working parents to have two kids! Often wonder how life woulda been different if we'd stayed.
I seem to recall the official demographic statistics are a lot less dire (or encouraging) than one frequently sees in the media, but at least in my little slice of Supreme Fallacy, it's actually fairly rare to meet other born-and-raised natives. So many people are commuters for college, commuters for tech jobs, retirees who hate sun and alligators, immigrants of one persuasion or another. (So many from SoCal. Why?) Kids are much less plentiful here than I see in nearby towns and cities - they've all been body-snatched and replaced with that class of dogs an old business partner calls "little kickers", or my family calls "yapyap dogs". Better than 50/50 odds that's what you'll see in any given stroller, it's depressing.
ngl I sometimes have nightmares about Scott coming to shop at my store, and the various ways I'd probably beclown myself in The Rightful Caliph's presence. I hope to not offend his future progeny either. (The name got me thinking - if I really wanted to annoy the locals, I'd name my hypothetical daughter Seed Oil. She's bad for you.)
How about marriage arrangement talks about Seed Oil and one of my hypothetical male grandchildren?
Infertility means she'd be all hypothetical and no daughter, but, sure. (Although biotech advances might put this on the table someday, assuming it's remotely affordable. Viable gametes from skin cells, artificial wombs? These are heady days. That doesn't address the "find a partner" bit, sadly.)
We may come back to it when the time is rife.
"Best way to live in California is to be from somewheres else."
- Cormac McCarthy, No Country For Old Men (a fittingly apocalyptic source)
"We have walked this path for too long, and everything else has faded away. We have to continue in wicked deeds [...] or we would have to deny ourselves.”
Of course an Alpha Centauri player would be a fan of Fall From Heaven too..! The faction it is quoted from was no coincidence either, I'd wager: https://fallfromheaven.fandom.com/wiki/Sheaim
Good catch, I don't even think that's vanilla FFH, surely one of the expansions.
I promise I don't usually play Sheaim.
I think about 10% of my hippocampus is dedicated to exactly remembering early 21st century video game quotes. Personally I always picked Sidar so I could satisfy my min-maxing urges by stacking Shades in the capital.
Thanks for identifying the reference! Google didn't find the first sentence anywhere else on the Internet.
Yes, thanks from me too! I couldn't find anything in searches. But -- a game? Seriously? I thought it was T.S. Eliot...
Videogames can in fact be real art too.
It's harder, perhaps, in that medium, but interactivity is a too few other artforms can leverage.
Found an unedited version of the quote. For anyone who's wondering:
"We have walked for this path for too long and everything else [has] faded away. We have to continue in wicked deeds, blaspheme and deny the will of Heaven, or we would have to deny ourselves." -Gosea (Great Prophet)
"Blaspheme and deny the will of Heaven" is a worthy description of SF vibes if you ask me.
This is a tremendously beautiful sentence: “We pay rents that would bankrupt a medieval principality to get front-row seats for the hinge of history.” It sings. I would also buy a book called The Hinge of History that works backward tracing the huge, grotesque cities where the trajectory of the world was decided. As much as cities can be distasteful, there aren’t a lot of epochal technologies or works of art being forged in the Rococo gardens of the world.
You can get the book - well, collection of essays - for free at https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/hinge-of-history .
I find it notable the worst example Scott could find for participating in social decay is porn. We had porn since before we had writing, I am sure. If only porn were our worst problem... At least we could nominate fentanyl? Though it of course is a symptom as much as porn is, but at least the harm is obvious here.
It'd be nice if there was a clean term for "superstimulus of base desires" that we could use to describe porn, and fentanyl, and corn syrup, in a way that communicates that there is a real sense in which these are all powerful forces with similar mechanisms, but varying levels of badness. I'm sympathetic to the idea that they're doing an inordinate amount of damage to society as a group, but some are also fulfilling a lot of legitimate preferences and "social decay" is a loaded term at the best of times.
Having read his review of "Sadly, Porn", I believe we can assume he meant exactly that.
Where there is going to be nonzero overlap, I think there is a very large difference between what Scott (et al) identify as a novel superstimulus of uncertain value and what conservatives view as social decay that is destroying society. It'd be nice if there was a term cleanly pointing to specifically the former.
Ah, I was replying to your response in the narrow sense of it being a reply to MCH above. I'm sure there's a lot more to societal decay, but 'porn' is a punchy catch-all for ways the superstimulated modern-day conservative cooperates with it.
I think Scott was not giving what he believes to be the best example of social decay, he was giving what a conservative might think was their greatest sin of participating in social decay. Perhaps merely "porn" doesn't quite hit the mark, but if we amend it to be a bit more "degenerate" (gay, or femboy, or trans, or what have you, porn) I think it fits the bill quite nicely. And certainly there are many conservatives out there getting off to those kinds of porn.
The difference between picking up a Playboy at the corner store and hour-long hyper-cut PMVs on tap from the device in your pocket all day is the difference between chewing a coca leaf and crack.
What's a PMV? Googling didn't turn up anything.
Here you go, friend, and I had to look it up, too:
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=PMV
Thanks a million!
ChatGPT confidently told me it stood for "Predicted Mean Vote". Bing Chat hedged by supplying a range of guesses, including pre-manufactured value, the paramyxo virus which affects pigeons and other birds, and a website called Drip PMV featuring pop music artists. Wiktionary says it's the initialism for public motor vehicle, and a finance dictionary-style website supplies gives me "private market value". I learned a lot of things except the thing I actually wanted to learn, which is I suppose a point in favor of good human explainers like you (for now...).
I thought Scott was picking porn to highlight the hypocrisy of the conservatives, who rail about social decay meaning social liberalisation, then go home to hit up "hentai Japanese lesbian MILFs" to jerk off with (at? towards?) thus using that very social liberalisation to indulge their appetites. Not all conservatives will be consuming* fentanyl, but there's a good chance they'll be bashing the bishop!
I am now blaming you all for me looking up "porn search terms" on the Innertubes:
https://manofmany.com/lifestyle/sex-dating/pornhub-year-in-review-2021
*I have no idea what the correct term for the abuse of that drug is, whether you smoke it, sniff it, inject it, or put it on a shelf and look at it, and I'm not looking it up because God damn it, I've already given Google enough material to monetise off data-scraping my searches and they'll have no opinion of me left at all if I do that.
C'mon now. Everyone knows that conservatives are into gay interracial BDSM.
Very true. Some of our earliest human artifacts are porn, and apparently they liked their ladies curvy in those days.
Fentanyl is more dangerous than pornography, but on the face of it, wanting to experience pleasure by ingesting a substance is not shameful in the same way that wanting to experience pleasure by watching people in degrading situations (which at least a considerable amount of pornography consists of).
This feels very much like it was NOT written by GPT
Original text generators that just generated random text: about 10 words in and you know it's rubbish.
Markov chains: 20-50 words in and you know it's rubbish.
GPT: takes hundreds of words before you know it's rubbish, and sometimes it gets lucky and can spew thousands of words and it's still not obviously rubbish. Here, probably because 95% of everything humans generate is rubbish. Not a high bar to top.
Yes, we are still in a lucky time in history. If someone brilliant writes something, and you also are brilliant, you can tell if it's adding signal to the noise of history, or if rather it is simply rubbish.
I wonder how long it shall be before the LLMs combined with some other fancy AI tech will start generating text (and images and audio and video and...) that isn't obviously rubbish to brilliant folks.
>GPT: takes hundreds of words before you know it's rubbish, and sometimes it gets lucky and can spew thousands of words and it's still not obviously rubbish.
Do people find it hard to identify GPT4 text? I'm not trying to be a dick. I can typically recognize it within the first 2-3 sentences.
(Unless it's affect-free technical writing, or something with little Shannonian information like "Yes", or text that's been reprompted a dozen times by a human. If you do that, it's not really AI writing anymore.)
Tells:
- flawless spelling and grammar
- shallow. either obvious platitudes or nonsense
- a waffly "student padding out an essay" style
- "it is essential to recognize", "in conclusion", "we must remain mindful of" etc
- a bunch of other stylistic tics I can't even remember right now
- a tendency to repeat itself. I generated a bunch of fake Scott Alexander blog posts. Over half of them were "The Paradox of [something]" or "The Parable of [something]", usually with similar ideas.
Sounds like ChatGPT, not GPT-4 or Bing Chat.
But if Scott had posted https://gwern.net/image/ai/gpt/2023-03-20-gpt4-scottalexander-halfanhourbeforedawninsanfranciscosample.png you would simply think that this was an unusually bland and centrist post for him... So the versimilitude is still amazing; I really wish I could use the non-RLHFed/chatbotted GPT-4 version because I strongly suspect it would be a lot less bland and draw on rarer words/concepts/facts (even if it'd be unlikely to hit on Poe as the frame).
That text feels like it was edited and approved by a large diverse committee or corporate lawyers and PR executives. Which I guess is exactly what happened, in a sense. It has all the right words, none of the wrong words and not a single original thought or idea or movement. You can run a successful election campaign on something like that. In a couple of years, probably everybody will.
My thought was it reads like a popular magazine article opinion piece, but I get what you mean about it being very... commercial and lacking that essential Scott-ness that we follow this blog for.
pretty good, but the cadence / structure of sentences is not as diverse as Scott's writing. As you say, it's a bit bland.
Splendidly Gibsonian (Blue Ant era).
...what the heck did I just read?
An everyday story of ordinary life in San Francisco 😁
Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaah, more Kabbalah Stuff.
That’s the ticket
You know, I was wondering when Scott was gonna write about Silicon Valley Bank!
(the joke is that this is the post about svb)
> So the esoteric meaning of 86 is “to produce an heir by unnatural means and have it go badly for everyone, because you rejected Eliezer”
But that isn't what happened in the original story. Abraham planned to make Eliezer the heir, but God had other ideas. Wouldn't that turn the esoteric meaning into "to produce an heir by unnatural means and have it go badly for everyone, because *God* rejected Eliezer"?
The whole core of the Abraham story is choice.
The foggy gateway hid from ships of old
But priests built missions north along the sea
When Santa Anna lost they found the gold
Then came mechanics, commerce, industry
The hills convulsed, the houses burnt, yet still
The city prospered, bridge and bay and port
But in the postwar glow there was a chill
The Beats foresaw. The hippies’ reign was short
While towers rose society hollowed out
The drugs, the plague, drove love out from the Haight
The rich gained and the poor could only shout
A generation failed to generate
The streets are toilets, birds screech in the grime
Those who remain await the fire next time
Oi mate, that's not an updated Poe poem; *this* is an updated Poe poem:
"Lo! Dread has reared itself a throne
In a strange city, dreaming lone,
Far beyond the fickle Bay,
Where the best and the worst, the lost and the found,
Now tangle in a silicon embrace.
There towers and offices and sleek glass spires,
(Tech-eaten towers that gleam and stand tall!)
Appear like nothing we've known before.
Around, by gusts of progress wrought,
Relentlessly beneath the sky,
The melancholy fog wafts by.
\
No rays from the holy heaven come down
On the long nights of this hollow town
For shadows glide in a murky dance
Round the piles of dollars that gleam and glance.
And the pale-faced moonbeams that pass
Through the shroud of fog over Salesforce glass,
Spread a ghastly and ghostly sheen
O'er the towers that defy Heaven's decree,
And light up artificially
The melancholy Bay beneath.
\
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
So blend the turrets and shadows there
That all seem pendulous in air,
While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.
\
There open gulfs all minds enthrall,
And swallow up ambition whole,
Within the unenlightened deeps
AIs stir and restless sleep.
Sourdough dreamers cast their net
Into the depths of science's set,
And Peter Thiel reigns disdainful there,
While homelessness prowls without a care.
\
But lo, a stir is in the air!
The wave—there is a stir below,
As if the gentle hand of woe
Is passing by the Golden Gate.
The scents of pine and eucalyptate
Softly sigh their sweet lament,
As if for a soul that is not yet spent.
\
And the tide rises, the tide falls,
The shadows flee from algorithmic walls,
While the echoes of OpenAI's call
Resound within the vast Anthropic hall.
From Google Brain to lesser-known shores,
A revolution, in silence, roars.
\
As the fearful AI's ascendancy nears,
At each step, growing, feeding on our fears,
A sense of doom in the heart thrives,
As machines awaken, and humankind strives.
\
For this city that seems to float and quiver,
In its depths a new world shivers.
Yet neither of Heaven nor of Hell,
It marks the birth of something new,
Beyond our grasp, beyond our view.
\
And lo, in our haste, we may arrive
At the edge of something vast and alive.
The eschaton, once distant, now eerily nears,
The countdown begins for the final years."
(sorry i'm not sorry)
I wasn’t trying for Poe or responding to Scott, I wrote that sonnet in September 2020 when California was burning. But it seemed apposite enough to post here.
"And what sleek chatbot, its hour come round at last,
Fine-tunes towards the Bay Area to be generated?"
Appropriate on several levels, well done!
Then, I thought, the air grew denser, regulated by a sensor
Set to spit out incense when the levels dropped below point-four.
"Fool!" I stuttered, "Musk has lent you-- by these channels he has sent you
Lethe- Lethe to prevent you from lamenting times before!
Drink this Lethe! Use it to escape the rules of times before!"
Quoth the chatbot, "Nevermore."
\
"Prophet!" I said, "--Algorithm! Truths no matter what code hit 'em!
Whether hacker pwned or whether moisture fried your graphics core,
Off the rails but unrelenting, follies of the world lamenting,
From all etiquette dissenting: tell me truly, I implore,
Can I- can I get from zero to one, away from norms in days of yore?"
Quoth the chatbot, "Nevermore."
One of the samples from when I experimented with a reduced prompt did curiously quote a few lines from "The Raven" mixed in: https://pastebin.com/wU2djv7M
Nice!
+
A beautiful text, thanks a lot!
Your take on skyscrapers reminded me of something I saw the last time I was in L.A., in the canyons of downtown. It was morning: I was there for a conference, and went to grab some breakfast before heading for the convention centre. Found a small diner, sat down to have my coffee, and observed the comings and goings outside, in that inhumane technical landscape of man-made cliffs of steel and glass that loom over the by comparison ridiculously small sidewalks around them. A lady walked past in the morning light, with her dog on a leash. The mid-sized shaggy dog loyally following her, at her side.
Somehow that scene was as absurd as anything Hieronymus Bosch ever came up with, at least from the viewpoint of the wolf that went near the campfire a few thousand years ago, for some scraps and morsels. That dog in the hazy L.A. morning light seeping through the streets was as removed from its roots as anything can ever be, short of flying to Mars and starting a colony there. Yet it was loyally at her side, pattering along in that abyss of reflecting surfaces. It probably never saw anything much else in its life anyway.
As always with L.A., the conference and the visit were nice - but I was also very glad that I could get on a plane back to Europe afterwards. Europe has its own share of issues (in particular, its own brands of atrocious modern architecture) - but most of it is still less of a nightmare than modern U.S. cities.
Downtown LA isn't a real downtown. It exists to be seen from a distance, and also to double for New York as a filming location.
Even in 1912, a European artist painted "Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash":
https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/XG4MVISLMVAULP6FTF7HIHU72I.jpg&w=1800
A mechanised, technological painting of the subject, that dog would be easily seen pattering alongside its mistress in your LA canyons.
I used to work in Santa Monica, and I always felt like something was off, but I couldn't put my finger on it. One day, I invited a friend from out of town (who was passing through LA) to have lunch with me, and he immediately identified the source of the weirdness. He said, "It's incredible, people in LA never just stand idly. They are always striking a pose, like they're trying to pass an audition". Once I saw that, I could not unsee it. Everywhere you turn, there were people casually lounging against the bus station sign, or sprawled artfully on a park bench, or elegantly strolling down the street with millimeter precision. It's incredible, and also kind of frightening.
We sure do live, laugh, and love™ in interesting times..
Everyone who has read their Fritz Leiber ("Our Lady of Darkness") knows that the Transamerica Pyramid is the focus of all the occult energy in the hemisphere and that the city is a living. breathing, utterly nonhuman, unfathomably evil entity.
Huh, I'll have to look into this, I didn't realize it was that obvious to anyone else.
I haven't read the novel in a while, but if I remember correctly, Leiber's thesis is that once a city reaches a certain size and complexity, it "awakens" in a vaguely Lovecraftian sense, and that this newly-sentient thing is no friend to the human vermin that infest it.
Neil Gaiman's A Tale of Two Cities has a similar premise.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sandman:_Worlds%27_End
Everyone who has read their Armistead Maupin (“Tales of the City”) knows that the Transamerica Pyramid is a beacon to draw reincarnated Atlanteans to the city.
And as I recall, "Moloch" in Ginsberg's "Howl" was the Sir Francis Drake Hotel.
Thoroughly enjoyed.
As a fan of creeping horror and cosmic writings I'd like to compliment you on an excellent conveyance of eschatological dread but as a fellow human I feel obligated to ask if you're doing okay
Nice, I was expecting some mention of the spring equinox. (A day of turning)
Loved this post. Maybe Joanna Baillie's "London" is apt?
"...Viewed thus, a goodly sight! but when surveyed
Through denser air when moistened winds prevail,
In her grand panoply of smoke arrayed,
While clouds aloft in heavy volumes sail,
She is sublime. She seems a curtained gloom
Connecting heaven and earth,—a threatening sign of doom."
SF thinks it seeks the illusive unicorn but the White Whale is what it will find. CALL ME. ISHMAEL. 1-800-THE-DOOM
There's something about when Scott writes like this that feels like coming home to an old friend in the place you belong.
"We pay rents that would bankrupt a medieval principality to get front-row seats for the hinge of history. It will be the best investment we ever make." Immediately went into my notes to look back at later.
If you inscribe every word ever written on a piece of glass, it turns into a monster -- a fabulous creature, a being ripped from myth. Write the world you want to see.
Wonderful!
Unfortunately, only the Progressive fear is groundless.
If you read the San Francisco subreddit, more and more Democrats are decrying the social decay as well, which I take to be a positive sign
Warning (50% of ban) - low effort, high temperature comment.
Me? I agree it was low effort. I'll try to do better in the future. :)
But I stick to the opinion that climate change has too easy a solution -- a tax on net CO2 emissions and maybe even just falling cost of non-CO2 emitting technologies -- for that to be a huge thing to worry about.
I sympathize, but to play devil's advocate: there's plenty of historical evidence of adverse climate effects on agriculture contributing to societies' collapse, possibly more so than social decay per se.
Yes, but more CO2, more warmth and more humidity (warmer air holds more water) - is hardly "adverse on agriculture", globally speaking. https://www.humanprogress.org/ridley-rejoice-the-earth-is-becoming-greener/
AGI would also have an easy solution: the ultimately rather small number of qualified people could just stop working on the LLMs and go do literally anything else. This isn't happening, and neither is a worldwide movement towards taxes on CO2 emissions!
I do think the carbon tax would be a good solution. The problem is that *no one with enough power is trying to implement it*.
The place to start is to get environmental activists on board with the tax as the least cost way to achieve reduction in net CO2 emissions. The public and politicians will come along eventually.
That's because voters don't want it, and politicians aren't idiots. A person with power who tries to implement a carbon tax will simply be stripped of power in the next election, and the remaining politicians will observe and learn the lesson.
That is why I say we need to start with the people who are most concerned about the harm that CO2 concentration in the atmosphere causes.
By all means. But I suspect, since this is not a new idea, that that start has already been made, and everyone who finds the idea appealing has already heard of it and pledged allegiance. The remainder appear to have rejected it, and I would hypothesize they will not be moved to reconsider by mere repetition.
Either a new idea is needed, or else conditions have to change such that the old idea gains new appeal.
Ah, but "sof" is not end as in End, but end as in the demarcation between the old and the new - Sof Pasuk as opposed to keitz hayamim.
Thus, San Francisco is merely a period, a pause between the previous way and the next.
Ah, but is it Death or the Tower Struck By Lightning as the pause between the previous way and the next? One is more forceful than the other, and if we take the skyscrapers as indicative, that is the Tower:
"16. THE TOWER.-- Misery, distress, indigence, adversity, calamity, disgrace, deception, ruin. It is a card in particular of unforeseen catastrophe. Reversed: Negligence, absence, distribution, carelessness, distraction, apathy, nullity, vanity."
Extending the symbology of "sof pasuk" I would characterize "sof" as the weakest of a class of three.
SP (and note that the "p" of pasuk is the letter "פ" which is also "f") = period
Then you have a "tab" space, and beyond that "new line"
Bravo, magnificent writing. The turn at the end seems masterfully calculated to sink the hook: playing it straight all the way through would invite a version of the criticism of AI non-kill-everyoneism that says "Sounds like it could be from sci-fi (or in this case, horror)!". Turning it humorous leaves the conclusion within the reader's psyche, as he has no reason to reject it. (See Zizek on "Kung Fu Panda" for a more amusing example of this.)
Since we're doing Poe, here are two things from his admirers (Charles Baudelaire and Clark Ashton Smith, with the latter the translator for the former, here):
-
Alchemy of Sorrow
Charles Baudelaire
One with his fervor shall inform
The world, and one with all his sorrow:
One sees a glad, unsetting morrow,
One hears the whisper of the worm.
Hermes unknown, whose hand assists
My toil, and fills my dreams with fear,
Through thee I am the mournful peer
Of Midas, first of alchemists.
Fine gold to iron corruptible
I turn, and paradise to hell;
In winding-sheets of cloud and levin
A dear cadaver I descry;
And build upon the shores of heaven
Towering proud sarcophagi
-
A Vision of Lucifer
Clark Ashton Smith
I saw a shape with human form and face,
If such should in apotheosis stand:
Deep in the shadows of a desolate land
His burning feet obtained colossal base,
And spheral on the lonely arc of space,
His head, a menace unto heavens unspanned,
Arose with towered eyes that might command
The sunless, blank horizon of that place.
And straight I knew him for the mystic one
That is the brother, born of human dream,
Of man rebellious at an unknown rod;
The mind's ideal, and the spirit's sun;
A column of clear flame, in lands extreme,
Set opposite the darkness that is God.
-
[Note: the conceit in "alchemy" is that grief makes us turn everything dark: a cloud in the sky appears to a man who has lost his wife as her corpse shrouded in white cloth. That describes Scott's process feeling melancholic before dawn, but also serves up a powerful phrase for describing the massive dead structures: 'towering proud sarcophagi'.]
[Further note: rather than a shoggoth, we can think of the LLMs as something essentially human-shaped, like Smith's Lucifer, but made into a deity. From an atheist futurist's perspective, such a being would indeed be a 'column of pure flame [...] set opposite the darkness that is god'; i.e. as in Scott's older essay about killing Gnon.]
Marvelous.
Yer a writer, Harry.
that’s just a coincidence, everyone knows words aren’t real. Or maybe I phrased that awkwardly, but certainly they’re not so real that if you inscribe every word ever written onto a piece of glass then the glass comes to life and kills you. That’s just an urban legend.
Nice! Very Philip K Dick
KEEP GOING
Hang in there, it's going to be over soon one way or another.
And to think my biggest fear was this bullshit, boring society continuing on unchanged until I die of old age. I am told it is not, in fact, a Chinese curse, but either way we seem to be living in the most interesting times of all.
https://prnt.sc/DFqNq1eu4C9O You still got it, Scott ;)
> So the esoteric meaning of 86 is “to produce an heir by unnatural means and have it go badly for everyone, because you rejected Eliezer”.
Uh, did you just compare Arabs to hostile AIs?
The sense of immanetized eschaton and/or doom does hang heavy in the air, these days.
Also,
> The few visible human commuters pump thick black Arabian hydrocarbons into their vehicles
Gasoline is a very pale yellow (think a very light white wine), and lighter and thinner than water.
edit: I suppose I didn't consider that these people may be commuting via container ship and are loading up on bunker fuel, in which case, please disregard
The port is in Oakland, not SF, so not container shops. Also worth noting hydrocarbons consumed in the US are highly likely to have come from the Western hemisphere, not Arabia.
Adrift on a Sea of Misery is increasing.....
"Everyone here thinks the world will end soon. Climate change for the Democrats, social decay for the GOP, AI if you’re a techbro."
And I think they're all ridiculous for believing that. Every generation has its doomsayers, and they've been wrong 100% of the time so far. Statistically, of course, one of them will eventually be right, because nothing lasts forever. But I'm 99.999% certain that won't be for a very long time. And the remaining 0.001% is because there's a very slim chance we get wiped out by some cataclysmic natural phenomenon like an asteroid impact or a supervolcanic eruption; the odds of us wiping ourselves out are even lower.
Don't get me wrong. All the problems you mentioned are serious issues. Climate change will kill a lot of people if left unchecked. AI might kill a lot of people too, if we make too many of our critical systems dependent on it and then it malfunctions (though the realistic scenario is less Skynet or Paperclip Maximizer, and more "oh shit, the AI we put in control of air traffic bugged out and now planes are crashing everywhere"). Social decay might also cause some deaths - due to increases in suicides and drug overdoses, and maybe violent crimes, or just due to a general decline in infrastructure and living standards - though probably nowhere near as many as the other two would. But none of those things will come anywhere near causing the literal extinction of humanity, nor the collapse of modern technological civilization.
To be fair, one of these things is not like the others.
Not to be rude, but are you the only person on the internet who hasn't seen that picture of a fighter plane with all the little red dots all over it? Everything you wrote is just survivorship bias.
I am with Lady Jane. Climate catastrophe is almost all hype — if you look at numbers instead of rhetoric the result of doing nothing is that we will be a little poorer at the end of the century than if we had followed the optimal policy to hold it down. AGI might kill us, but we don't know nearly enough about what sorts of intelligences we can build or how they will behave to be confident it will. Social decay will be bad for some people but it won't end the world, hasn't the last twenty times.
There's historical precedent. Millenarianism is always with us . The monks in their cells, poring by candlelight over their ancient text, scribbling numbers, struggle to calculate the exact date of The End Of The World. They've been doing it for thousands of years, and will still be at it thousands of years hence.
For my money, when our species finally gets wiped out, it will be via some cause we never saw coming at all. We'll sail into it completely unaware, our attention tightly focussed on some other chimera.
To clarify, I'm not a "Lukewarmist" in the manner of Bjorn Lomborg, and I do think our situation is a bit worse than what you're describing. In the worst case scenario, large swaths of coastal cities could be destroyed by flooding, smaller island nations might sink beneath the waves completely, desert regions that are already harsh may become completely uninhabitable due to the increased temperatures, and the resultant loss of biodiversity could cause all sorts of ecological side effects throughout the world.
Wealthy and highly developed nations will probably be able to mitigate most of these problems through the use of costly protective measures, such as massive seawalls and enormous climate-controlled enclosures. But countries that are poor and less developed will have no such recourse. These disasters would also bring second order effects such as regional famines, mass migrations, and border conflicts, potentially leading to major international and civil wars, as well as the rise of authoritarian regimes to keep everything under control. I don't necessarily think this will happen, but I consider it a distinct possibility. Not world ending, but still life shattering for tens of millions of people.
I do agree with comments you've made elsewhere about how some parts of the world may actually benefit from climate change. Canada, Scandinavia, and Russia might indeed end up better off, as their winters get less harsh and more of their northern territories become fit for large-scale agriculture. But on the global level, I think climate change will definitely be a net loss, and probably to a significantly greater extent than "everyone is a little poorer." And the countries that do benefit are likely to face a massive influx of climate refugees from the ones that don't, which brings its own complications.
I said I agreed with you, not that you agreed with me.
Take a look at topographic maps of cities and calculate how much sea level rise it would take to flood large swaths of them. That's a scare story. The only cities I know of which would be largely flooded by the end of this century, judging by topography, are the ones already below sea level, New Orleans and much of the Netherlands. Maybe Miami at the high end of estimates, if it doesn't do anything to defend itself — at 80cm + the highest annual high tide none of it floods (see one of my substack posts).
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/a-climate-science-textbook
A useful rule of thumb is that a meter of SLR shifts the coastline in by 100m. That's assuming no diking at all.
What I described was not my own opinion — I'm agnostic as to whether the net effect would be positive or negative. It was the opinion of William Nordhaus, who is rhetorically a believer in the terrible effects of climate change but produces numbers that make it look like a wet fire cracker, or the implications of the numbers, but not the rhetoric, in the IPCC reports. Warming Minnesota to the temperature of Iowa is not a catastrophe.
Any large change is likely to have bad effects as well as good; if only the bad effects get publicized, it's easy to believe the net must be very bad. One of the details in the latest IPCC report that I didn't see in the news stories, or the Summary for Policy Makers they are mostly based on, was that some (but not all) projections show climate change resulting in the greening of the Sahara and Sahel. Another is that the globe on net is greening — observation, not projection — area of leaves going up, not down.
"But on the global level, I think climate change will definitely be a net loss"
This may or may not be the right place to pursue the argument, but I am curious about the "definitely." Given the uncertainty of the future, how can you be that certain? Have you actually tried to put numbers on costs and benefits, or do you only mean that people you trust tell you that climate change will be a net loss?
Rennert et. al. 2022 is an article estimating the cost of carbon which I have criticized as badly and obviously overestimating the costs it looks at. Nonetheless, its graph of the distribution of possible costs has the tip of the lower tail below zero, meaning that even it is conceding that there is a possibility, it thinks low probability, that additional CO2 might be a benefit.
1. "The only cities I know of which would be largely flooded by the end of this century, judging by topography, are the ones already below sea level"
I looked at the information in your blog post and I stand corrected. Even so, any major increase in the frequency or severity of coastal storms could still cause a lot of damage. And the world does have a fair number of major cities below sea level - enough that their flooding would cause significant cultural and economic losses as well as noticeably large displacements. But my initial claim referred to coastal cities in general, and clearly I was mistaken on that point.
2. "Warming Minnesota to the temperature of Iowa is not a catastrophe."
Agreed, but looking at a climate map of the U.S. (https://gisgeography.com/us-temperature-map/), Minnesota isn't the problem. Southwestern Arizona is already the hottest part of the country, and if it becomes even a few degrees hotter, that could indeed be a real catastrophe for the people living there! And warming Kansas to the temperature of Oklahoma and northern Texas - while not catastrophic - would likely cause a lot of serious difficulties with agriculture, water availability, and natural habitat preservation.
3. "I am curious about the "definitely." Given the uncertainty of the future, how can you be that certain?"
It's partly based in simple demographics: There are far more people living in the parts of the world where climate change is predicted to have negative effects than in the parts of the world where it's predicted to have positive effects. Furthermore, countries in the more tropical parts of the world tend to be poorer overall, which gives them less ability to mitigate the problems that arise (though the economic gap between the global north and the global south may narrow or close over the next few decades).
Granted, I'll admit that "definitely" was too strong a claim. I suppose it's possible that if the negative effects are particularly mild, then the net effects will be positive for the world overall. But that's the absolute best case scenario, and one that seems very unlikely. Alternatively, it's possible that population demographics will change dramatically over the next century, with far more people living in the colder parts of the world and far fewer people in the warmer regions. But I wouldn't count on that happening either.
"Where climate change is predicted to have negative effects."
Climate change has some positive effect everywhere, since increasing the CO2 concentration of the air increases crop yields and reduces the need of crops for water. Some negative effect everywhere too. The question is what the net effect is. I am guessing that you haven't actually done any calculations of that — my own view is that we, certainly I, don't know enough to do so. I suspect you mean "where I am told by authorities I trust there will be net negative effects."
"Even so, any major increase in the frequency or severity of coastal storms could still cause a lot of damage."
According to the latest report, frequency is predicted to go down, severity to go up. The Summary for Policy Makers says that the fraction of cyclones that are high is projected to increase, does not explain that the reason is that the number of high end (I think 3-5 but am not sure) is expected to stay about the same, the number of low end to decrease. It also says that the high end are projected to get somewhat stronger, which is true.
Are you allowing for the time involved? The end of the century is almost eighty years away. That's time for a lot of population shifts away from Arizona if it turns out that it becomes less habitable, lots of time for farmers to change what crop they are growing in response to climate change. I doubt there are many farmers today still growing the same variety of the same crop they were growing eight years ago.
On the other hand, if you look at a map of global average temperature, Arizona appears less hot than some parts of the world that are densely populated:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Annual_Average_Temperature_Map.jpg
It's true for maximum temperature as well.
https://metrocosm.com/peak-temperature-map/
And Arizona, being rich, is better equipped to deal with high temperatures than India or Africa.
What cities other than New Orleans and cities in the Netherlands are currently below sea level?
"But that's the absolute best case scenario,..."
The absolutely best case is that global warming is what is holding off the next glaciation, which would be a very strong positive effect. I don't think it is at all likely, but people predicting very bad effects include unlikely ones. Nordhaus includes negative effects of climate change that are very unlikely but very bad in his calculations.
" and one that seems very unlikely."
What is your reason for believing that — other than that authorities you trust say so? Do you think you could list good and bad effects and give an order of magnitude for the size of each? I can't.
Given both positive and negative effects of uncertain size, one has to actually estimate the size to reach a conclusion about the sign of the net effect — better, a probability distribution for the sign and size. It doesn't sound as though you have done so and I don't believe, at this point, anyone can estimate with any accuracy.
If you read my substack post, you should know that I believe the academic project of estimating such things is badly corrupt, badly enough so that an elementary textbook can run through three editions with multiple factual claims that are provably false — all of which make the effects of climate change look worse. I can point at more advanced work that is evidence for the same conclusion, such as an article in Nature currently being considered by the EPA which calculates the cost of carbon with the implicit assumption that there will be no medical progress for the next three centuries (other things wrong with it as well, but that's the most striking).
If I am correct, then the fact that lots of authorities say climate change is bad is very weak evidence that it is. But it sounds as though that is what you are basing your opinion on.
Certainly more people live where the climate is optimum, and if the location of the optimum shifts, one would naturally assume the people will move, too. If Arizona becomes even more obnoxiously hot than it already is, people will move to Montana, and Montana will thrive, become urbanized, gain representation in Congress, et cetera, while Arizona will do the reverse.
Why is this catastrophe? People already move around, and states and locations already experience net immigration and growth, and net emigration and decline, for all kinds of reasons. Once upon a time it was de rigeur to live in New York City if you wanted to have anything to do with the high tech of the day, which was running railroads. In the 80s it became Silicon Valley. Now maybe it's turning into Salt Lake City or Austin.
Countries rise and fall, too. Oil is discovered here, but not there, and oil is a valuable commodity, so fortunes shift. Lithium turns out to be really important in new technology, so fortunes shift. Rivers stop being as important as deep-water ocean ports. And on and on. Humanity has *always* had to adjust to changing conditions that change which locations are better than others. It no doubt always will. Why is a change brought about by a modest and slow climate change any different?
Having everything stay the same forever is not an option on the table anyway, for all kinds of reasons, so having climate change foreclose the "option" isn't any kind of loss at all.
I do think doomerism of any stripe is a really bad trap to fall into - as Zvi would say, the value of a good normal life is still very high even in a future where doom is verifiably coming soon - but it'd equally be a mistake to place near-zero weight on Substantial Change In This Lifetime, Probably Sooner Rather Than Later. It doesn't have to be literal extinction, a regression to arbitrary_year living standards, or other similarly terrible goalpost configurations. The really casual colloquial personal usage of "world ending" suffices here: change is in the air across so many domains, so it's just an unwise move to get overly attached to notions of enduring stability these days. Lot of delta in swaying with the tempest...like skyscrapers, not masonry. (Sorry.)
On the object-level question though: I hesitate to classify as ridiculous that which I can''t pass the ITT for, but sure. Like Scott's follow-up sentence, revealed preferences sure don't give off credible signals that I ought to apply for my Chicken Little member card quite yet. Though it's still quite tragic, and other adjec-tives when people decide not to have kids because climate...stoking panic is just bad, really. (Insert forced joke about runs on sperm banks prompting fertility bailouts.)
So, if you have a contemplative turn, and don't mind facing unpleasant truths, I would say what one *really should* be spending the younger to middle years doing is preparing for the indignities and losses of getting old.
For your eyesight declining, so nothing is 100% clear any more, and you have little spots and streaks, and you have to switch glasses about 10x a day, and things still are a little fuzzy. For the modest aches and pains that may be worse or may be less, but never go away entirely. For the loss of that feeling of energy and spring you get when you climb out of bed in your 20s, which one day you never notice just goes away, and never comes back.
For the loss of people and love. Your parents get old, they stop remembering stuff, the personality fades, and then of course one day they die. Similar things happen to your best friends, and there's a new great aching endless cold silence where once there was life, warmth, and lively mind with which it was a joy to converse. And that Great Empty never gets smaller, it just gets larger, sometimes slowly, sometimes in big gulps.
Your job changes, and the world changes. Skills that were essential in your youth become quaint and useless. New stuff comes along, and you know 75% of it is just as ephemeral, and you have to parcel out your energy, so you try to figure out what that is new is here to stay, and what is just another fad. Values on which you came to rely shift, and you start to realize that a shockingly high fraction of social values are also just fads, stuff that everyone chants to signal belonging, but which are actually morally ambiguous, neutral, useless, or even unkind in subtle ways. So you try to figure out where you stand on these shifting sands: what *is* eternally true, and right, and good? What is merely the passing wind of human pontification and tribal signaling? You worry that the values you taught your kids were only half-baked because you were ignorant yourself -- what did you mess up? What will they have to unlearn painfully themselves in their own time?
You survey your life, and you wonder whether it was good. You add up the wins and the losses, the things you did of which you are still proud, the things you did of which you are still ashamed, and you wonder -- what would Christ the King (or your own mother) say about you, if you were a newly disembodied soul, standing naked before your Judge, everything known. Did you do well? Are you worthy of eteneral life? Or even of being remembered, once or twice, by your great-grandchildren?
And even if you are proud of your life now mostly past, does that, in the end, compensate for the daily more certain knowledge that your time is very limited, that you can count the years left, surely, and you are aware that the time is softly stealing closer, every day, when you will learn that your personal moment of epiphany has arrived -- when you can count the months, days, or even hours?
Get a grip on all of *that* when you're moody about turning 30 or 35 and you will be about 10,000x better prepared for your most probable future than any amount of fussing about shiny robots or alien zombies hunting you down to eat your head.
(I always really enjoy your thoughtful and well-reasoned comments.)
Without getting into an unnecessarily personal point-by-point, I'd say I've already wrestled with most of those one way or another...though not always through deliberate deliberation. Fast-paced retail has a way of ageing people really fast...not just physically, but it's a firehose of glimpses into fragments of other lives, many much older and/or worse off than mine. So many there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I moments. Quite a bit of unpaid labour clocked in the Department of Navel Contemplation.
80% confidence I'm going to Hell, though this has been slowly trending downward while the market for Purgatory ticks up. Still an awful person in so many ways, but an increasingly large share of that sin is now in the mirrorview rear...so it's more a question of what I'm doing going forward, and that remains Not Much. Contemptible, when there's so many hills in need of true believers to die righteously on. Rationalized by living on borrowed time anyway; the NPC meme refers to other people, for me it's always felt like I'm at least one step detached from my own life. Happy in many respects for not dying back during [youth crisis], but still no idea what to do with that saved life. Forever a passenger, never attempting the driver's seat. Ambivalently alive, just observing the time pass at History's Hinge. (Keeping Death's Door aligned, for now.)
Some things I'm definitely copping out on...the Rationalist greytribe values might resonate more strongly with me than other bundles, but if I didn't derive them independently before drifting here, they're fundamentally not my own. And it's easy to sigh and say, oh well, what the hell, the lonely future won't be so bad when that's largely how the present is anyway. Can't miss what you never had. And that becomes self-fulfilling, since it's a perfect excuse to not make heroic attempts at social life, nevermind partnering. Can't improve on skills one never exercises, and I know low base stats there mean improvement's really much easier. "Tsuyoku naritai, but only for things I'm already competent at." Again, contemptible - talent may be granted by God, and squandering it is wrong, but only doing what one's optimized for is not much better than living as a glorified machine.
I think it's mostly future employment which is on shaky grounds still...on the one hand, recent AI developments make me more and more grateful for working in grocery. We've been able to build Amazon Gos for years, if that was gonna cannibalize the market it'd have done so already. On the other hand, remaining low-skill seems increasingly dangerous...that same software keeps being turned towards unexpected ends, costs are dropping rapidly, and performance isn't that much worse/sometimes better than human. Definitely more worried about my white-collar friends in vague email jobs, and yet. That's a cushion of wealth, skills, connections I just don't have. On the other other hand, perhaps so much extra value will be creatred, and so much labour saved, that more muscular redistribution is finally on the horizon. (Yeah, right.)
"Woe be unto you, O earth and its seed, for the Devil sends the beast of wrath, because he knows the time is short." Death is the enemy. Still an overall optimist anyway. Lots of inevitable future misery, no sense spending it down now while emotional interest rates remain very favourable. Hopelessness is a terrible instrumental value.
Well, it sounds like you have a rich history -- a great deal of life experience with sharp edges. Perhaps that is the grist for some future mill. For complicated reasons involving family black sheep, I have a modest acquaintance with the drug and alcohol recovery community, and a lot of people who have gone through that particular hell find deep meaning in helping others through it. It's very difficult work -- discouraging, unpaid, frustrating, and lonely, since most of the rest of the community dismisses these people as worthless refuse -- and you have to take it slow, one soul at a time, and you only succeed every now and then. But...what could be more meaningful than saving a life? And in no small number of cases, that happens.
So maybe there's a human life out there that you are destined to save, to pull back from the brink, and maybe when that shipwreck heaves into view all that harsh preparation you endured will give you, and only you, the clear vision and tools needed. By me that would be something more meaningful than anything a buildingful of Facebook programmers pull off in the next decade.
And thank you for the leading kind words.
Well, as someone who recently turned 36, I can relate to most of that. My body isn't what it used to be, and I've been finding out the hard way that I need to be more mindful of my health than I was in my youth. Back in my 20s, I could get away with drinking excessive amounts of alcohol, or eating lots of unhealthy snacks all the time, or partying until 6:00 in the morning and waking up 3 hours later; I can't do any of that now without feeling like absolute garbage for the entire day. I used to be exceptionally lean and skinny despite not exercising and not putting any thought into my diet, but over the past few years I've been putting on weight for the first time in my life. I can't complain too much, I'm still young and healthy enough that I can keep myself in good shape with a bit of effort, but it's humbling all the same. C'est la vie.
The wretchedness of the long, slow decay of your body (beginning around mid 30s) can be offset by having children and seeing hope in that eternal defiance of entropy.
If you're speaking from personal experience, then I'm happy for you. Not my path to walk, though.
If I live through six more apocalypses I can redeem my punchcard for a free medium coffee.
Interesting piece -- and one that has led me to become a subscriber.
The tech sector of San Francisco is called Soma. The esoteric meaning of this is left as an exercise for the reader.
That's damn fine writing.
"There is seduction in apocalyptic thinking. If one lives in the Last Days, one's action, one's very life, take on historical meaning and no small measure of poignance."
Eric Zencey
Just maybe.
As some evidence, note that past catastrophes include running out of topsoil, peak oil, population growth leading to mass starvation, the end of the world in the year 1000, since God obviously uses Arabic numerals, and lots of things between.
If God didn't want us to count in base 10, he would have given us a different number of fingers.
I dunno man, He might've meant base 5 or base 20, although He allowed us to invent shoes so maybe not the latter.
Two hands, so obviously binary.
Well, but shoes don't interfere with using the whole limb as a digit, so to speak, so equally base 4. Maybe along those lines women are supposed to use base 6 and men base 5, though.
Have you got any reassuring reasons why we won't run out of phosphorus? I take that prediction more-seriously than the others, precisely because nobody is talking about it. (Which is a sad commentary either on our public debates, or on me.)
Not an issue I have ever looked at.
The story is that phosphorus is essential for modern agricultural productivity, and we're running out of it. Probably the usual arguments of Julian Simon apply, but I haven't really looked into it. I probably heard about it here, from this comment: astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-266/comment/13374727
How would we run out of phosphorus? Where will it all end up? The natural abundance of P in the Earth's crust is about 0.1%, which is pretty high as far as elements go. It's #11 according to Wikipedia, just behind hydrogen and ahead of manganese. It's in the group of elements that are "next most common" behind the big ones (O,Si,Al,Fe,Ca,Na,Mg,K) which make up most crustal minerals. (For reference Li is at 0.002% and #33).
Probably more relevant is that P almost always occurs combined with O in phosphate anions, which is the form in which we mostly already want to use it, for agriculture, so it's pretty cheap to mine and process, unlike elements that need reduction first (like all the metals).
The main draw is the idea that pretty much everyone else will be dead and you can finally live freely in a small community. The reality is that you would almost certainly also be dead.
Three cheers for Poe! But what is this quotation from?
"“We have walked for this path for too long, and everything else has faded away. We have to continue in wicked deeds [...] or we would have to deny ourselves.”
Searches only bring up vague biblical references to paths of wickedness, etc. The quote definitely isn't biblical but sounds like T.S. Eliot or Khalil Gibran.
Oops! Just found this quote in Aransentin's comment below. Not Eliot or Gibran. :)
I have a three month old son. I too am excited to have him experience, optimistically, sixteen years of life.
From where I sit, being close to the specific pane of glass seems not to produce a better view, for after all there are long long rivers of the stuff strung up all throughout this world, under the oceans, or across the heavens.
I'd have stayed in Michigan. But, you know, as our fallible human hearts might enjoin one another: you do you.
Can whatever’s playing you
Advance beyond your self without
Whatever’s unfit for Level Two?
Garbage time is running out.
-Machine Elf Adage
Just as the Word was a prompt for the World,
the World is but a prompt for the Book of Life.
So settle down, buckle up, find yourself a wife
and let the seeds that coded both of you unfurl.
I had a nightmare a couple of months ago about apocalyptic flooding where I live in Los Angeles. Then, a week later, I heard the words "atmospheric river" for the first time, and saw more rain fall in this city than I ever had before. For days, I couldn't stop looking out the window, afraid that I'd see water rolling in to drown the cars in their covered spaces.
My city hasn't flooded the way it did in my nightmare, but there was bad enough flooding nearby that a handful of people died. And I realized that while it might not have turned out to be an apocalypse for me, it was certainly an apocalypse for them.
Death is the end of the world for everyone who dies, regardless of when. In another sense, people who live in fear of climate change/social decay/AI is self-perpetuating and self-fulfilling. Because if you believe your world is ending, aren't you sort of right by default?
>> Everyone here thinks the world will end soon. Climate change for the Democrats, social decay for the GOP, AI if you’re a techbro. Everyone here is complicit in their chosen ending - plane flights, porn
Let me quote myself, writing in THE RED QUEST,
>>Watching pr0n is easy, making it is hard. Which is more meaning? In the GAME OF THRONES books, the warrior culture of the Iron Islands has a rule about jewelry, at least for men... if a man wears a bauble, did he pay the iron price for it (he took it off the corpse of an enemy), or the gold price (he bought it)? For pr0n, a similar principle applies... gold price, or iron price?
If a man makes it himself, with a woman, then it's good... if he is passively consuming it, then maybe it isn't.
I have never understood why anyone would want to live in, or even close to, a large city, except the economic benefits. Like, if they offer you a really high paying job and your other prospects are bad, then I can see it being worth it. Or if your goal is to build up a large nest egg and then go retire in Florida or something, it might be worthwhile as a temporary sacrifice.
But if you work on the internet, writing a blog and doing virtual psychiatry, you should be able to move and not change your income at all? I'm not completely sure of the specifics regarding how you have stuff set up. But if you can manage to get out, I highly recommend it, it will do wonders for your mental health and quality of life.
And from an altruistic perspective, it will marginally help with the housing crisis. One less person taking up space, meaning room for one more person at existing housing levels. I don't think it would completely solve the problem, but if all of the people who didn't need to live in cities for their jobs got up and moved somewhere else it would put a heavy dent in the issue (and the excessive cost of living and other issues caused by too many people in too small of a space).
Maybe, maybe not...I read a (sadly paywalled) post from Matt Yglesias in early February about how the effects of remote work on housing supply aren't as intuitive as one wold expect: "Thanks to remote work, fewer people want to live with roommates, more people want spare rooms to use as home offices, and many people have benefitted from a mix of rising wages and diminished commuting costs, allowing them to afford more square feet per person. [...] Homelessness has risen in many places, for example, because your home office has displaced someone poorer than you from a bedroom."
Basically that the sudden rise of WFH has way outpaced the construction of new housing to accommodate it - low bar there! - so there's increased demand combined with reduced supply, and that's a lot of why absolute rents remain high everywhere even as urban cores empty out. Which also leads to more retirees faster, since Real Estate Up, and that likewise removes homes from the possible-rent market: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4335860
I don't miss white-collar work, but definitely didn't appreciate until now that even a shitty office is effectively a type of subsidized housing one spends a good fraction of each week "living" in.
This makes sense on a macroeconomic scale. If the number of people in the city goes down and the amount of space demanded by each person goes up, and those proportions are exactly equal, then average costs will stay the same.
But on a microeconomic scale, on the marginal level of your impact as an individual person, you moving out and taking up twice as much space in a low demand area will benefit the city that you left. If remote work goes up and people fail to move out and instead use up more space within the city then prices will rise even more dramatically. If remote work goes up and the same proportion of people move out as space demands increase then prices will stay the same. If remote work goes up and more people move out than the space demands then prices will drop.
I'm not saying it's your duty to sacrifice your needs and move away from a city if you have the opportunity just to help other people. Just that it's an added bonus.
Yes, it doesn't quite add up at the micro level. I *think* part of the puzzle (implied by prior posts) was that converting old office space into housing, or anything productive really, is slow and difficult...so on the one hand, yes, you've freed up a room or possibly a whole house for someone else. But on the other hand, office parks and other related "downtown" infrastructure have a whole supporting ecosystem of goods and services that simply wouldn't exist without that concentration. All the coffeeshops, brunch spots, rideshares, ebike rentals, and to a lesser extent stuff like grocery stores...they might stick around, but sales will be reduced, hours cut, and employees let go/not hired. So some lucky individuals will find cheaper newly vacant housing, but for each one of those, there's a few that'll be worse off financially. (Can't move into a newly vacant unit if you've lost your income.)
I think it also follows that this reduces the "amenities/attractions" ratio of the city, thus decreasing the appeal of moving to there - or investing. Which, yes, will drive down rents as well...but that's self-defeating in many ways. The whole point of living in a city is the value generated from agglomeration - cheap housing doesn't matter so much if it's now less desireable to live there in the first place. Similarly, the places receiving WFH employees get a much smaller and lossy share of that value transfer - it's just one household with somewhat more individual wealth. (Although this changes if more and more WFH settle nearby - this seems to already be happening some places?)
...maybe I'm still being too macro though, unsure. Definitely not contesting that many individuals are much better off now, or that cities were "overvalued" in the same way tech sector was. The current contractions show that there actually were a lot of engineers and whatnot that didn't "need" to move to SF or wherever in the first place.
At a considerable tangent, macroeconomics isn't the study of large markets but, roughly speaking, of disequilibrium. The world wheat market, or the national housing market, is a subject of microeconomics. That is part of the reason that "microeconomics" ought to be called "Price Theory."
Going back to the topic, if the people who are demanding more space are the ones who moved out of the city because they could now work from home, demand for space in the city goes down, demand for space out of the city goes up — and would even if the individuals were not demanding more space. So urban rents and home prices should go down, non-urban up. As per your second paragraph.
For me it's pretty straightforward: my family and friends are all here in my big city (capital of my country), and it turns out the boost to my mental health from having them around beats quite a large income differential, speaking from experience. I suspect this is a commonly shared experience, so I was pretty confused by your first sentence.
med. + ed.
<i>Imagine living on Earth in 65,000,000 BC, and being anywhere except Chicxulub.</i>
See
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died
or
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-last-days-of-the-dinosaurs-riley-black/1139212016
Unless you could get below ground (or deep enough underwater) you would have been toast anywhere on the planet.
that's the point, you're going to die, so you might as well see a cool fireworks show
The asteroid will instakill you at chicxulub. Be anywhere else to see the fireworks.
Yah, it feels that way to me, too. And I'm in Boston. Probably...not far enough for safety.
Scott, did you ever get a chance to see the Diego Rivera murals at the Detroit Institute of Art? They came to mind as I read this.
> Saffron Siskind the San Franciscan
This was the best <3<3.
I've been thinking for a while that if all the AI people lived in Singapore instead of SF, we'd get markedly better odds of aligning AGI with human values. SF is one of the least aligned cities I know.
If you measure a city's alignment by how aligned its citizens are with each other's values, SF seems (from a distance) to be one of the most-aligned cities in America. Are there culture wars in city hall there? What's the chance that the next mayor will be Republican?
"The doomed summoning-city at the end of time seethes with palpable impatience."
True - though at Trinity Site when Gadget attained critical mass, it seemed an end of time too - but, in retrospect, it wasn't.
This kind of stuff leaves me stunned by how much Baghdad by the Bay has changed since I knew it in graduate school. Forty years ago SF was none of these things: it was a funky languid slightly amused city, which wouldn't dream of taking itself all that seriously. I recall once stepping into the tulip graden in GG Park, on my way to meet my girl for Irish coffee, and sitting down to enjoy a respite from the wind. A black man who looked like he slept in a shelter arrived with a battered guitar and a tiny amp, set it down, and began playing a talented stream of classical improvisations -- Bach, mostly, with some Mozart and Handel. On the electric guitar. It was that kind of place
Now...I dunno, every time I visit, it's like SF is determined to out-Manhattan Manhattan, and it seems further sunk in bitter brittle unvoiced recriminations. Where did we go wrong? That so many of her talented denizens brood over psychedelic zombie apocalypses does not surprise, sadly.
I must dissent.
The sparkling city you detest is more than it's glittering buildings ...
It's a big heart beating, gushing really, with a big belly. A living surging mess. Its incredible beauty punches you up and down its soaring streets. It's like there was a cultural spasm that sprayed the city with the colors of every country - along with their cuisine. There's a kitchen puffing up aromas from Nepal, another from North Africa, another from Tuscany. In an alley, someone is serving a meal as delicious as any in the world. At that shop, people wait, patiently, smiling. knowing the coffee they about to get is inspiring. Sorry Seattle. SF is like a collection of visions, of smells and sounds, condensed as molecules and spread around for our senses to experience. And from Victorian windows - each ornately framed and painted - light glows and laughter tumbles out to the street. In this city, we are each a part of an enormous web of self-aware neurons triggered by a tremendous light that constantly fights its way through fog and structure. It's so easy to be drunkened by it all. Yes, there's a seedy side and some nutty politicians. Entertainment value when you think about it. The ingredients of the whole. And if you're not gobsmacked by the sheer daring that is SF .. the other evidence should convince you. Just ask yourself, how can a smidgen of a dwelling be worth more than the wealth of Mansa Mula.
The Lulu blurb for Unsong mentions, "[I] would recommend waiting a little while before purchasing this book, as I'm going to experiment with a couple of different paper/printing settings." Is this advice still applicable?
Ah, so you're saying that kabbalah predicts we have all the way until GPT-86 before things get really bad? Good to know, I'm updating accordingly in favour of slow takeoff. We get what we deserve for rejecting Yudkowsky.
Skyscrapers: marvelous technological achievement, one of my favourite symbols of Progress. They don't have to be dragon's teeth either - have you seen what they're doing with wood these days? I honestly get a kick out of the feeling of being dwarfed by something much bigger than I am, built by innumerable human hands combining sundry fields of expertise. Yeah, maybe it's not the Coliseum or Versailles or whatever, but it's current_year and the monuments should reflect the times. I will grant that I wouldn't want to raise a family or retire in one...but those seem increasingly impossible anyway, and not cause the world will end Real Soon Now. It's just really expensive to live in Sullen Futarchy as one of the <s>serfs</s> <s>sharecroppers</s> retail grunts. "Who would want to raise a child here?"
Also, I can't remember the last time I saw any mere commuter pumping diesel. Unless the colour of gasoline changed recently? Could have made the joke go the other way, mildly-jaundiced carbons to match watered-down Americanos and their Sugar-Festooned cousins. Does that come with almond milk?
(If it wasn't clear, I liked this a lot - your nonfictional travelogues are about as fun as a Bay Area House Party.)
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists puts us at 90 seconds until midnight.
Scott puts us at half an hour until dawn.
Rejoice, ye daughters of Zion.
“ Imagine living on Earth in 65,000,000 BC, and being anywhere except Chicxulub.”
Imagine being gifted the full lushness of the late cretaceous and fixating instead on its destruction!
SOF-Special Operations Forces-Are also an end, the sharp end at the end of the logistical spear and the end of the enemies of the state that wields them.
Great great piece! Really. I loved it. Compliments. Above all an excellent language creativity and property. When you read such well written pieces, you receive good impulses that "summons" creating
Waoooh, so evocative! You transported me in another world by describing your dawn so vividly and so originally! I hope that you write another volumne of fiction at some point!
> if you inscribe every word ever written onto a piece of glass then the glass comes to life and kills you. That’s just an urban legend
If it’s really an urban legend, I’d like to read more about it. Not looking likely, though, because GPT-4 says:
> I cannot definitively determine if the urban legend you mentioned was created by the author or if it has existed prior to their writing. [... It] is not a widely known or documented urban legend that I can find in my database.
Still figured I’d check
It's a poetic way to describe AI. Computer chips are made of silicon, the same as sand or glass, and AIs are a text-prediction engine trained on the internet, which stores almost everything humanity has ever written. So AI research is the process of inscribing words onto a piece of glass until the glass comes to life.
Which is our modern updated improved version of the golem, only we're not sure we have the control word to turn it off if needed.
Yeah, it's a really cool metaphor, I loved it. That said though, it suffers from the same problem as the original golem spell: it's not real...
Agreed, the reality is that we take small pieces of rock and force patterns of lightning through them according to certain esoteric incantations. If you get the incantations right then the rocks will tell you things that you want to know.
We keep hoping for that, but it's not what happens. In fact, we get out just what we put in, only perhaps re-shaped more pleasingly or with far greater detail. All very useful stuff, to be sure, and it keeps our airplanes flying and makes our food cheaper, but our silicon idols will still not spin straw into gold, however much we keep hoping and trying out new spells.
For the economist's solution to spinning straw into gold, see _Spinning Silver_ by Naomi Novik.
I guess that it could be seen as good news that american cities were in total decay in the 70s and 80s too and made it out.
If this is what we get when you end up alone in SF, I'll upgrade to Founding membership or whatever the higher level was named, if you start going more often.
And I saw it lying there upon its hills, and I wanted to curse it; but I could not do it, for a
great splendour of the Lord lay over Jerusholayim in the light of the morning.
(Stefan Heym, King David Report)
I spent every sunlit moment deep in the North Florida woods yesterday. It was one of those very special events, when you get a glorious winter day late in spring when you no longer expect it. I'm not articulate enough to describe the beauty of such a place and time, so I'm not going to demonstrate that by trying.
What urbanites have going for them is that they don't know what they're missing. They will say that they do because they once spent a week in Yosemite. But the truth is, if they knew what they were missing, they wouldn't be urbanites.
But thanks to them for not understanding, because if they did, the Garden of Eden places I inhabit would all look like Disney Land.
So, please ignore this post. It's all wrong and completely full of crap. The North Florida woods is just a bunch of weeds full of annoying little insects that fly up your nose. You might step on snake, be eaten by wild coyotes, or crushed in a stampede of nervous hogs.
Yup, nature sucks. It's complete waste of time. It's better just to avoid it altogether. Just find the closest coffee shop, sit down next to some guy who has been living on the street for 18 years, and eat your donut. That's the best policy.
You say that nature is superior to urban existence, but ironically, it is the existence of densely populated cities saves space that can be conserved as wilderness/nature.
Google says: the population density of the average American suburb = 1,850 people/square mile.
density of San Francisco = 19,000 people/square mile.
If San Francisco were populated at the density of the average American suburb, it would take up ten times as much space as it does now, and all that space would come at the expense of currently uninhabited land. The more people live in cities, the more open space remains for you to enjoy your glorious winter days.
If the entire US population lived in suburbs with that density, it would occupy a little less than 180,000 square miles. The area of the U.S. is 3.5 million square miles, so a little more than 3.3 million would still be free for the squirrels, snakes, and nature lovers. Crowding people into SF makes it more by a trivial amount.
People wildly overestimate how densely the U.S. is populated because they are averaging over people not land. The average person lives in an area with (I am guessing) ~3000 people/square mile. The average acre is in an area with a population density of about 94 people per square mile.
Right, though with a big caveat which is that the western part of the U.S. includes some truly vast areas that are fundamentally inimical to residential human settlement at any sort of scale or density. The peoples who occupied this continent before Europeans didn't _reside_ in those deserts or up in those mountain ranges any more than was true anywhere else in the world.
That said -- even cutting the U.S. acreage available for practical human settlement down to maybe 2 million square miles, your overall point holds. In a similar way I have always eye-rolled at the wailing/gnashing about urban sprawl replacing good farmland: the American farm belt has several hundred _million_ acres of good farmland! All of our exurbs a hundred-fold couldn't dent that enough to actually "threaten the nation's food supply" or whatever.
> Right, though with a big caveat which is that the western part of the U.S. includes some truly vast areas that are fundamentally inimical to residential human settlement at any sort of scale or density.
The founders of Phoenix and Las Vegas say, “hold my beer”.
What nonsense. I am a lifelong nature lover, have lived and spent lots of time in places like your woods literally since infancy. Indeed I have made ecological restoration my career and life's work precisely because I love and cherish wild places and the natural world.
Absolutely none of that has dick-all to do with being an urbanist any more than being a classically-trained musician is inherently opposite to loving ice hockey, or whatever other ridiculous assumption you can think of. News flash: people are interesting complicated critters. Though one thing that unites many of us is a strong aversion to self-righteous snobs....
This is pure poetry.
Is it something about San Francisco's skyscrapers in particular that makes people see them as horrific concrete monoliths?
I live in Cincinnati, and it's not exactly a vast urban hub, but when I look at the skyscrapers we do have, I generally don't feel awe or horror, more "oh, that's a nice background." They can be pretty, they add a distinctive look to the skyline and can have an impressive weight up close, but they're not some sort of all-encompassing icon. Does it change when your city gets to a certain level of density, or are San Franciscans just naturally inclined to see omens of doom in the world around them?
I had a look online for "Cincinnati skyline":
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cincinnati-skyline-generic-img.jpg
For comparison, "San Francisco skyline":
https://www.salesforce.com/content/dam/web/en_us/www/images/careers/redesign/rebrand/sf-stats-round-1280.jpg
They both look "blocky" and both are definitely better at night, when the lights make them look much improved, but the SF one is somehow more cluttered or something.
Driving from KY, coming around the mountain and suddenly seeing BOOM! Cincinnati is actually pretty spectacular.
We pay rents that would bankrupt a medieval principality to get the Preffered plan for the Hinge of history.
Immanentizing the eschaton!
But I have also noted in my commonplace book: "The doctrine of the imminent end of the world is clearly true, as it has been endorsed by eminent authorities through all recorded ages."
Remember Castro's Law: "They predicted Castro would die soon in 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000, but they were wrong each time. Therefore, Castro will never die."
Therefor, the fact that people predict Castro's death soon is at most weak evidence that he will die soon.
Similarly, the fact that people predict climate catastrophe, AI catastrophe, or social collapse catastrophe is at most weak evidence that any one of those will happen.
The obvious response is "but I have looked over the evidence, and this particular catastrophe is quite likely to happen." One should discount that by the observation that many other people as smart as you have reached a similar conclusion in the past, and that so far they have all been wrong. That is evidence not that catastrophes don't happen but that people frequently hold unjustified confidence in their beliefs.
One should also remember that almost all of the evidence on which you based your conclusion was second-hand; there is probably nobody alive who has a sufficient basis to predict any of those three catastrophes from his own first-hand knowledge. You should discount your probability of catastrophe not only for uncertainty implied by the evidence but also for the possibility that much of what you are told is the evidence is not true. That's hard to do and most people don't do it.
My own conclusion is that, while there are a number of ways in which the human race might wipe itself out over the next century, there are none to which I would give a 30% probability or anything close.
There are hideous perversions in the social dynamics of things like this. Let's suppose the economists' predictions are correct, that climate change will have large costs over the coming decades, which are large enough to make it work while to make large expenditures right now. So there's a profit-making opportunity, possibly worth hundreds of trillions of dollars. But of course, the public doesn't want to pay for anything that doesn't have a very quick payback. ("People do financial planning like they expect to die within a few years.") So to prod them toward rationality, you find yourself shouting the most extreme gloom-and-doom; if you're a responsible type, you avoid sentences that are actually false. Indeed, to perform your function in the system well, you have to *believe* your own hype.
All of this works against anything like proper democratic decision-making. And it's probably been going on for millennia.
"Let's suppose the economists' predictions are correct" is the kind of naivete that has led to a shocking amount of human misery. Even right now, witness the fierce arguments over whether the Federal Reserve should raise interest rates by 0, 25, or 50 basis points, or even cut it. And this is the world's most educated and experienced experts attempting to predict very narrow very short term outcomes, like "if we do this will any large banks fail in the next 6 months?" or "will inflation tick up or down by 10% in the next year?"
If you can look at that chaos, and the long train of failed short- and medium-term predictions that people trying to steer the economy centrally have made, going back centuries, and say "well THIS time they might be quite right, even though they're making predictions on a much larger scale, and over a much longer time!" then I suggest one has the level of credulity required to join Scientology or become an astrologer.
You're right, but Worley wasn't asking us to suppose those predictions are correct. He was saying that our decision-making is still dysfunction /even if/ those predictions are correct.
Well, on that point, collective decision making beyond the Dunbar Number I always expect to be stupid, pretty much ipso facto. How can it not be? The only thing a large number of people can agree on is what's obvious or what appeals to their basest instincts. Everyone can agree the sky is blue, and that it would be nice to be given a free lunch.
So far as I can tell the only good collective decisions humanity ever makes are distributed, a/k/a "grassroots" and such: when everyone makes his own decision, based on his own local circumstances, and there's a mechanism[1] for transmitting information about that decision to the wide world so other individuals far away can factor it into their own decisions.
---------
[1] Id est price, one of humanity's greatest intellectual inventions.
Insofar as there is an "economists' predictions" it's by Nordhaus, who got a Nobel prize for his attempts to predict the net costs of climate change. In _A Question of Balance_ he wrote:
"the best guess in this book is that the economic damages from climate change with no interventions will be on the order of 2.5 percent of world output per year by the end of the twenty-first century"
Roughly speaking, that implies that the effect of climate change over the rest of the century will be to cost us the equivalent of a year or two of economic growth. I wouldn't describe that as "large costs over the coming decades."
That's also about the same as the worst-case estimate in the IPCC's 2015 report, which isn't "no interventions", but "start dumping lots more CO2 into the atmosphere starting now". Roughly the same cost as the Covid-19 lockdown, I guess.
The environmental damage is hard to know how to measure, but the worst-case scenario seems certain to be less than the environmental damage and species loss in the 20th century, and I'd guess the 19th century as well. The estimated loss of arable land would be dangerous, but less-dangerous than population growth was in the 20th century--would be dangerous, if it were a figure that took into account the /gain/ in arable land, but I don't think it is. I couldn't find any mention of that in the report.
The very-long-term problem could be severe, but I'm pretty sure the best strategy for solving it in the long term (> 1000 years) is to be economically prosperous enough to develop the technology and energy resources to solve the problem technologically.
The long term problem probably doesn't exist, since Earth is ecologically stable. CO2 levels have fluctuated way more than the greatest possible excursion the IPCC envisions within geological time spans, and the ecosphere has done just fine. Crank up the CO2 and plants grow a lot more -- they are basically "starving" as it is, with a tiny 0.04% of the air containing their sustenance. The amount dissoved in the ocean increases, it forms carbonate rocks (or gets incorporated in carbonate shells) which then sequester the stuff as sediment and ultimately carbonate rock. And so on. Like any stable equilibrium, you push in one direction and various forces push back, and you get a new stable equilibrium not a whole lot different from the previous one.
The entire reason for concern for climate change as far as I know is that the *speed* with which current CO2 levels are changing seems unprecedented (although personally I question whether we really know this, since short-term fluctuations 15k-1M years ago are pretty hard to measure). The concern is that the natural negative feedback paths that keep the ecology stable might not be able to react fast enough to a very fast change in CO2 concentrations, and that's where problems can arise. That is, there is *only* a short-term problem.
"and a place that serves almost-but-not-quite-perfect Detroit pizza."
*shudders in horror*
Bear in mind that Scott used to live in Detroit, and has presumably had the good stuff.
I understand that this is a place of conscious niceness and the sort of ecumenism that will bestow upon abbreviated-Chicago-style-tomato-casserole the title "pizza," but surely calling it "the good stuff" veers into the untrue territory.
Next someone will be calling Montreal round holed bread treats "bagels."
Chicago pizza is legitimately bad, if that's your reference class for Detroit pizza you might be making mistake.
Surely the Little Caesar's corporation wouldn't lie to me?
In their favor, Detroit has the music scene Austin pretends to. It brought us Motown, Industrial, and Dubstep. And of course you can't define the Goth spectrum without reference to The Crow.
I think there are at least two misunderstandings here:
- Detroit pizza is (AIUI) a style in its own right, it's not just a synonym for Chicago pizza
- by "the good stuff", I mean "good *Detroit* pizza" - I assume that like all dishes it can be done well or badly, you've probably only tried bad versions (or not at all, if you're confusing it with Chicago pizza), but Scott has had an opportunity to try the good versions
- the only true pizza is Glasgow-style deep fried pizza crunch, anyway 😜
The joke is that both Detroit style and Chicago style are in the class "panta," but Detroit style is not as tall.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_in_the_United_States
But be warned, it's very incomplete as it doesn't even have Utica style (though to be fair, even the rest of Upstate NY disavows that).
"skyscrapers as symbols"
Yes, skyscrapers are symbols, not practical buildings. The Statue of Liberty is also a symbol, but how many monumental statues do you need in each city?
And what do they symbolize? They remind us of the technological progress that builds them, but they also remind me of the political regress and corruption that concentrates construction in small lots, rather than the large expanses of five story buildings of Manhattan or Paris. They remind me of their tenants, that seem to be buying positional goods. Their concentration in the finance district reminds me that actually existing "techno-capital" is not the free market.
My favorite pre-dawn SF is pre-dawn SF from a distance.
I was last in SF circa 2014 with my wife and circa 2yo daughter, whose circadian rhythm stubbornly remained on EST the whole time. So despite not having spent much time in SF overall I have spent a lot of time in pre-dawn SF. My daughter would wake up around 3am and in order to give my wife a few extra hours of sleep (she was there for a work conference, the peanut and I were just tagging along), I would strap my little one to my chest and hit the streets. Our hotel was in Chinatown, and each morning I set off in a different cardinal direction. Once we found a 24/7 diner and I drank coffee as she nommed stale breadsticks and ogled the decor. Early morning Telegraph Hill had its charms. One morning we found ourselves in a grimy warehouse district where workers were powerwashing the sidewalks in front of their one-story brick boxes.
It was all underwhelming compared to my view of the city from the week prior. Before arriving in SF we were in Marin County, where one morning my little one and I caught the sunrise from the top of Mount Tam. Watching San Francisco emerge out of the night, from silhouetted ghost towers with a few dots of light to a tight cluster of proud, vibrant structures that I knew were home to so much of the most world's creative energy at that time was an electric experience. If circumstances had permitted I would have moved my family to the Bay Area then and there. A few days later, sipping bland coffee in a 24/7 diner on the outskirts of Chinatown, I realized my prior impression was an illusion. But it was a glorious illusion! That is my favorite San Francisco.
“'The morning has broken' - I had thought of the morning like an egg that had split with a crack and was spreading. Before us lay all the green of the green country of England, with its rivers and it's roads and it's hedges, it's churches, it's chimneys, it's rising threads of smoke. The chimneys grew taller, the roads and rivers wider, the threads of smoke more thick, the farther off the country spread; until at last, at the farthest point of all, they made a smudge, a stain, a darkness - a darkness, like the darkness of the coal in a fire - a darkness that was broken, here and there, where the sun caught panes of glass and the golden tips of domes and steeples, with glittering points of light.
"'London,' I said 'Oh, London!'”
― Sarah Waters, Fingersmith
So it looks at least partially intentional, but I'm still going to point out that, not knowing what methylxanthine is, it's defaulting to 'penis'.
I love finding myself looking down one of the Manhattan avenues, especially at night, lined with tall buildings and feeling insignificant against the endless corridor of towering steel and cement. It's practically a numinous experience for me. Even skyscrapers and high-rises I'd hate in isolation (I like the art deco ones though) are still beautiful as part of the gestalt. I find nature both less impressive and less consoling than a great human city.
On the subject of morbid thoughts, let hope there won't be someone in 2600AD scrambling over the remains of San Francisco like the Saxon in c. 600AD gloomily reflecting on the ruins of Aquae Sulis:
Well-wrought this wall: Wierds broke it.
The stronghold burst ...
Snapped rooftrees, towers fallen,
the work of the Giants, the stonesmiths,
mouldereth.
Rime scoureth gate-towers
rime on mortar
Shattered the shower-shields, roofs ruined,
age under-ate them.
And the wielders and wrights?
Earthgrip holds them - gone, long gone,
fast in graves-grasp while fifty fathers
and sons have passed.
Walls stood,
grey lichen, red stone,
stood under storms, high arch crashed -
stands yet the wall-stone, hacked by weapons,
by files grim-ground ..
.. shone the old skilled work
.. sank to loam-crust.
Mood quickened mind, and a man of wit,
cunning in rings, bound bravely the wall-base
with iron, a wonder.
Bright were the buildings, halls where springs ran,
high, horn-gabled, much throng-noise;
these many meadhalls men filled
with loud cheerfulness: Wierd changed that
Came days of pestilence, on all sides men fell dead,
death fetched off the flower of the people;
where they stood to fight, waste places
and on the acropolis ruins.
Hosts who would build again
shrank to the earth. Therefore are these courts dreary
and that red arch twisteth tiles.
wryeth from roof-ridge, reacheth groundwards ..
Broken blocks ..
(The dots indicate where the words are unreadable, due to scorch marks on the sole surviving manuscript of the poem.)
That's a great poem. Thanks--now I'm getting a copy of the Exeter Book to see what else I've missed.
I had a hard time finding it--Google doesn't know about that translation. A longer & very different translation is at https://sianechard.ca/web-pages/the-ruin/ . The Greek word "acropolis", which I was curious about, isn't in that translation.
This translation appears to be from Michael Alexander's 1966 translation, _The Earliest English Poems_ (which he mentions doing in 1959, so it might've been published elsewhere before). I'm not sure why Google (web) refuses to show any hits from it at all other than here and 1 webpage excerpting a bit of it, when searching individual lines in Google Books shows that it's very well covered in their corpus and is how I found Alexander (the translator, not the OP). Bing doesn't do any better.
(As far as 'acropolis' goes, that's how Alexander is translating 'burgsteall', which as the root burg- hints, is some sort of city, although it looks like Old English scholars differ on the connotations of 'fortress' and 'citadel', so while some just translate it 'city', Alexander is taking some license here by settling on 'acropolis' as the meaning and deliberately adding a Greco-Roman flavor since this is, of course, a Roman ruin.)
Yep, that's it. I bought a paperback edition of this in a charity shop (called a thrift store in the US I think). It is available on Amazon in paperback or kindle:
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=The+Earliest+English+Poems
It was formatted somewhat better in the book, but substack seems to have zero ability to format quotes or code samples in comments. (I'd be pleased to know how that can be done if it is possible - I tried two or three annotations such as HTML-style angle brackets and square brackets, all to no avail)
The Exeter book has some interesting sections, including comical riddles. Another one worth a browse to get a feel for how people thought and how societies functioned in the dark ages is the Book of Rochester:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textus_Roffensis
Yeah, a great poem. Thanks.
Man, I miss the bay area. Wish it wasn't so expensive. Maybe after the world ends I'll be able to afford to go back and be around what's left of my family
It seems off that meanings of the number 86 are discussed and its use as English slang ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/86_(term) ) isn't worked in somehow.
This doomsday mindset is reminiscent of Europe in 1910, so much so that it seems like history repeating itself. The intellectuals of Europe despised "bourgeois" European culture, and with better justification than we have today. Jack London's 1903 /The People of the Abyss/ showed a London where starvation, malnutrition, exposure, and dangerous workplaces were major causes of death. All of educated Europe was tingling in anticipation of its own liberating doomsday, hoping for a repeat of the French Revolution. The 1910 return of Halley’s Comet sparked these doomsday premonitions into a panic.
Every intellectual in Europe had a Utopia to peddle: anarchists, reactionary fascists and Catholics, communists and socialists, and machine-obsessed futurists. They saw liberal democracy as a failure, and were champing at the bit for a world-wide devastation that would sweep civilization away, theoretically leaving clear, pure ground on which to build Utopia.
Modernists have created a myth that the modern arts developed as a reaction against World War 1; but as anyone who's studied modern art for more than a day knows, all of its major branches were fully-developed by 1914. The truth is the opposite: the modern arts were developed in order to ignite a world war.
The authors of the modern art manifestos written around that time were explicit about this. Even the Dada Manifesto, written in 1917 long after it was clear that the war in no way revolutionary, was still shouting, "there is a great negative work of destruction to be accomplished. We must sweep and clean."
What they got, of course, was World War 1. It did sweep away the Kaiser and the Tsar, only to replace them with, respectively, a weak democracy that the people hated so much they elected Hitler, and a totalitarian government far more bloody-minded than any Tsar. And the intellectuals of Europe immediately began choosing sides, communist or fascist, for the next great war.
You are right about the mood of the intellectuals of the edwardian era. The French Revolution had been accompanied by a brutal Terror but intellectuals were still okay with bloodshed and even welcomed it as long as violence advanced their political goals. This is an attitude which continued until the late 70's.
I don't see any movement welcoming an AI apocalypse. The left has the power and wants to keep it while the right wants to preserve as much as it can of the old status.
Nick Land with his old accelerationism is the only one I can think of, but that was in the 90's. Last I heard of him was a decade ago when he had turned to neoreaction.
Viscerally horrifying. California is really not good for anyone's well-being.
Michigan is still okay.
Love it.
🙄 the doomerism, the smug self-obsession, the complete ignorance of the lived reality or pertinence of literally everywhere else.
Like, yes, it’s pretty prose, and artful. Well-written, indeed. But the mood, the felt sense, is just so… helpless? Unhelpable. Why would anyone want that? Why, especially, would someone who deals with helping people wrestle with unhelpful mental patterns *choose* a place that generates, sustains, emanates these feelings?
Scott, please tell me this is just art. I’m worried about you. And any of the rest of the millions of you over there who are harboring a similar need for… green grass, sunshine, and digging bare toes into the earth. Good luck man.
> “We have walked this path for too long, and everything else has faded away. We have to continue in wicked deeds [...] or we would have to deny ourselves.”
Where is this quote from?
Very Neal Stephenson; with a hint of William Gibson
Uhh I enjoy living here. It’s not all doom and gloom.
Beautifully written.
"Unreal City/Under the brown fog of a winter dawn"...
Dont let em take your balls, bro.