This doesn't really make sense, because Trump didn't actually do almost anything he promised. No one was reacting to the consequences of his pre-election stuff becoming real, because basically nothing changed.
It’s a whole lot easier to be in favor of “restorative justice” when you’re not getting robbed at a convenience store by someone with a mile long rapsheet
>especially if you take it in the amounts required for the main effect which AFAICT is the only reason anyone drinks the stuff. If you're drunk, you're not drinking in moderation.
In my social circles, drinking to get drunk tends to be a very occasional indulgence if it's engaged in at all. My own use of alcohol, and that of most of my friends who drink, is what would be considered "microdosing" for other substances: enough to subtly feel the effects, but a small fraction of what it would take to get drunk.
It's one thing to say "I can't do this because reasons", and quite another to say that nobody else really does this. Lots of people, myself included, enjoy drinking in actual moderation without ever getting drunk by any reasonable definition. And surely you've noticed many, many people having a drink with dinner at a restaurant while not being conspicuously drunk.
Same here. Especially true once you pass your mid-twenties. At that point “drinking to get drunk” often makes you utterly miserable for a full day or more. But “drinking to get a mild buzz”, which may be just a couple strong beers, can still be quite pleasant, as can “a couple fingers of whiskey as a nightcap after a tiring day”.
Plenty of people treat beer and wine as simply an enjoyable beverage, with the intoxicating effects only a secondary consideration and often observed as much in placebo effect as anything else.
I mean literally 2 and it’s not something I do every day or even most days. Although a glass or two of wine a day is de riguer in lots of places, many of which we consider quite healthy generally. Treating it as a beverage, not an intoxicant.
5-6 beers in one day, if it’s spread across the entire day, is of course not enough to make you really intoxicated. Nor is it healthy as an everyday thing but I don’t think anyone is saying it is. If nothing else the caloric load is gonna be bad for you at that point.
Didn’t claim whisky before bed was healthy either, but it’s also not “drinking to get drunk” which you seemed to be saying was the only reason anyone consumed alcohol.
My understanding of the difference between modafinil and armodafinil is that modafinil is 50% armodafinil and 50% another variety with a shorter half-life. So in theory it should be easier to sleep after a morning dose of modafinil. But in practice, when I tried both I couldn't detect any difference.
Some people actually like the taste of wine, for example, and don't drink it for the purpose of getting drunk. Of course, having that kind of norm around is still risky, and supposed health benefits are dubious at best, but it's not outright hypocrisy/ridiculous per se.
You may be correct that these things can't be calibrated but is blatantly untrue to say the only options are "whatever speed of research comes out of scientists freely moving forward, or nothing."
If you want to be taken seriously maybe don't exaggerate for comic effect when making a key point of your argument.
"Handing it to china" is also kind of an absurd thing to say. They have a tiny fraction of AI researchers and processing power compared to America, and have not shown any particularly world-changing examples of scientific innovation or engineering achievements despite strong cultural efforts promoting engineering and research.
I immediately clocked you as making a forceful, mediocre argument to cover for a less forceful, still mediocre argument and wrote off the whole exchange. I'd say that does count as interpreting you correctly, but I don't think the rhetorical style accomplished what you wanted.
His argument didn't seem either mediocre or overly forceful to me. It *is* weird for Rationalists to be anti-regulation and pro-development for every other technology, yet take the complete opposite stance on AI. It *is* unrealistic to think that scientific progress is a dial that can be turned and fine-tuned to precisely the speed you want. It *is* naïve to think that Rationalist arguments for AI safety will stay within the Rationalist community, and won't be taken out of context by people opposed to AI in general for any number of political, social, or economic reasons, or just out of simple closed-mindedness. And it *is* perfectly reasonable to think that China will gladly step in to fill the vacuum left by Westerners abandoning an entire field of research, especially since that's exactly what's happened with genetic engineering.
They did nuclear weapons decades ago, a space station is a worthless showpiece, and the gain of function research relies on western biotech, reagents, machinery, and training.
If all it took was "running some computer code" OpenAI wouldn't be spending literally billions of dollars on development and hardware.
Conversely if *you* want to be taken seriously, consider the implications of what you're writing before starting a comment with "This is obviously false."
So far no. But it's a lot easier to catch up to, then pass, the West if the West has chosen to stand still.
Especially if the best researchers from the West all move to China to keep going.
Hardware is more of an issue, but again China won't stand still in this respect.
The only secret of either the Atom Bomb or LLMs is that they can be constructed; once that is known anyone who wants to pay the price can get there eventually.
I think the nuclear power situation is not as bad a sign as all that. In the last few years, political opinion and policy have both shifted in the right direction. A big part of the problem is that nuclear power plants are lumbering elephants, and doing anything significant with them takes years if not decades.
Looking at Germany, the majority of Germans now support nuclear power. But shutting down a reactor is planned years in advance (even delaying that by a few months was difficult). Starting them up again is a possibility, but will likewise take years of preparation.
In the US, policy has been moving pretty fast in the right direction. The inflation reduction act included billions in support for existing reactors, plus DOE research money for advanced reactors. There has been effort on regulation, too: Congress passed the Nuclear Energy Innovationd and Modernization Act (almost unanimously) in 2019, to smooth the way for advanced reactors. Now they're working on another piece of legislation (the ADVANCE Act) to fix up some of the details that weren't working out the way they planned. And the NRC commissioners have responded to changing political winds by pressing for faster approvals.
The statistic you're looking for, by the way, is "until this year, no new reactor that started its licensing process after 1975 got approved, constructed, and went into operation". There were lots of designs and some construction permits approved in that time, but they mostly got cancelled for economic reasons. There were also a number of reactors that got finished during that time, but had started the licensing process before 1975.
On AI, we have the CHIPS act's major embargoes on semiconductor technology going to China, which is a brilliant move that I would not have expected to be so effective. And the administration's rhetoric on AI risk has shifted to hedging (e.g. "we live in a world that already has other existential risks") rather than outright dismissal. The people in power are showing themselves to not always be morons.
I think the cultural treatment of nuclear power has already improved a lot. But yeah, physical reactors take a long time and a lot of money, and there are many things that could go wrong before we reach that point.
This is a silly standard. Congress spending other people's money is not news. It barely counts as PR. Is the NRC going to adopt sane regulations around tritium release? Are they going to scrap LNT? Are they going to allow physical testing (with reasonable and not the currently obscene requirements for permitting)?
No. They aren't. Nothing even approaching this is coming. Instead, congress will throw a little more money at the problem. All of this money will be eaten up by the DOE/NRC bureaucracy. Projects will be announced on paper which will then go nowhere. I'll happily bet that the NRC won't allow a molten salt reactor to begin contributing to the grid within the next thirty years (even though piles of companies have been working on this for ~two decades already and we had working reactors back in the 60s).
"Is the NRC going to adopt sane regulations around tritium release?"
Yeah, they voted to regulate fusion facilities under byproduct material rules, so they won't have to go through most of the licensing that fission plants require.
"Are they going to scrap LNT?"
Not any time soon, but honestly it shouldn't make that much difference. Even under the LNT assumption plants can be very safe.
"Are they going to allow physical testing (with reasonable and not the currently obscene requirements for permitting)?"
This one I don't know a lot about, but I wouldn't bet on it. Better get real good at simulations.
"All of this money will be eaten up by the DOE/NRC bureaucracy."
Some of the money they're trying to do with the ADVANCE act is to reimburse advanced reactor applicants for all the NRC fees, so that would be good.
"I'll happily bet that the NRC won't allow a molten salt reactor to begin contributing to the grid within the next thirty years"
Terrapower's Natrium is liquid metal, not molten salt, but I think it's likely to get on the grid next decade. The licensing process for molten salt reactors may be slower, but it won't be *that* slow unless the money dries up.
Fusion byproduct rules: again, I'll believe it when I see it.
LNT: depends on the plant. And the problem isn't that plants can't be built to LNT standards, it's that they cost an order of magnitude more when they are.
Simulations: don't work very well. Devanney has a lot of good information on this topic.
The government paying NRC fees: this has been the racket for most of this time. The DOE/Congress ponies up more funding for nuclear development. The nuclear companies take these funds and use them to pay NRC fees. The NRC eats these fees. The NRC stops getting these fees once the plant is approved so their incentive is to keep projects at the edge of approval... forever.
Terrapower: they actually have two proposed reactors. One is the liquid metal reactor you refer to. The other is the MCFR: https://www.terrapower.com/our-work/molten-chloride-fast-reactor-technology/. Note that this one too got government funding (in 2020, long before the Ukraine war and the ensuing energy crisis). And so the racket continues.
To be fair though (and to steelman @Drethelin 's point), the GMO/nuclear power/gene therapy markets are heavily regulated. You can't just engineer some random fruit in your backyard and start selling it; you have to get it approved by the FDA to make sure it's not toxic. Similarly, you can't build a nuclear reactor on your ranch, although that probably has more to do with the difficulty of procuring fissile material. And of course you cannot experiment with medical treatments with zero oversight; we've been there, it doesn't look pretty.
So, I don't think it'd be unreasonable to expect some regulation of AI deployment. For example, even though it is relatively easy to engineer AI to track every person everywhere in nearly real time, we probably shouldn't allow anyone to apply this functionality to Americans, regardless of what China is thinking.
That "shouldn't allow" is doing a lot of work where it's unclear if "allow" is up to any gov't, group, etc. If you're successful in forcing people (e.g.) to use worse tech for AI research, they will. AI finds a way!
Um. Have you actually looked at that list of reactors under construction? The only ones I see in The West is Vogtle in the US, Hinkley Point in the UK, and Flamanville in France. Vogtle and Hinkley Point are widely recognized as total boondoggles that will never give positive returns. France has EDF which at least has a history of building reactors (and pointedly ignoring US regs) and it hasn't been doing that well lately (see French nuclear capacity factor for the last year). The vast majority of the reactors under construction are: China and Russia (through Rosatom). China might just be a majority by itself (though I haven't bothered to count). Given that the parent comment joked about the overlords in Beijing... It seems like they're just right and Nuclear has indeed been utterly strangled in US aligned countries.
Really, you can't call yourself informed on this subject unless you've gone through the stuff Devanney has written. Start here: https://jackdevanney.substack.com/.
Devanney is knowledgeable, but take him with a grain of salt. He has very strong opinions that color his analysis. He tends to really lean on particular aspects of regulation (LNT and ALARA) that are not nearly as important as he'd like to think, while de-emphasizing major economic factors related to construction management, loss of the nuclear-skilled workforces in western countries, and ever-cheaper alternatives.
I don't buy that. You may be able to argue about the relative importance of regulation but the overall cost comparisons between the US and say China are too large to wave away. And really, the whole rationale for all the regulation is radiation risk so what would possibly compete in importance with (1) the way we determine harm from radiation exposure and (2) how much regulation requires utilities spend to avoid said harm.
Re. cheaper alternatives: I think he's too optimistic there. Intermittent sources are not in any reasonable sense an alternative to base-load power (as Germany is finding out the hard way) and grid-scale power storage is a pipe-dream. And that's even if we pretend we only need a week of storage (in reality, output is highly seasonal so we really need three months of storage at least).
About reactors under construction in the west: Few days ago, the finnish Olkiluoto EPR started to commercially produces electricity, 14 years later than according to the original schedule. It is the 1st european EPR to be commercially operational (2nd worldwide after the chinese one), and will produce about 20% of Finnish electricity.
Yeah J. Devanney is great, the whole LNT thing is costing us plenty, and making most people scared for what is really no reason. It's hard to know how to change all this. How do you help the public become less scared of nuclear fission?
Man, the question of whether schools should have a prohibition on professors and grad students dating was the topic of probably the single nastiest extended argument on the internet I've ever seen...
Really? Wow. I don't remember seeing this issue particularly explode anywhere on the internet. Was this one particular fight happening in one particular place, and if so, could you provide a link?
Yeah unfortunately it was on Facebook, which admittedly only sort of counts as the internet. As such it would be very difficult to dig it up and link it, and likely it wouldn't display even with a link. :-/
I take that back, I found it and it turns out it was posted publicly! Kind of wary of linking to Facebook even if it was, strictly speaking, posted publicly; it's not really the sort of thing I want to bring more attention to -- especially as Facebook doesn't seem to have any sort of "this is sufficiently old that you can no longer comment or vote" window like Reddit has? That seems weird, it has to, right? But this post is from 2015 and it still seems to allow commenting... (well, OK, maybe it wouldn't if I actually hit enter, but I'm not going to try that; I should try that out on something else, I guess).
It's not as long as I remembered. Only 66 comments. Obviously seen way longer arguments on e.g. Shtetl-Optimized. But, a lot of those comments are directly responding to previous ones, so that's kind of notable.
I guess it's not really the nastiest, when you consider the other arguments I've seen on related topics, especially on, again, Shtetl-Optimized. I guess it really stood out to me as being *surprisingly* nasty, i.e., I wouldn't have expected this particular narrow matter to be such a flashpoint.
Anyway on rechecking it, guess I was exaggerating. It was still memorable to me, anyway!
Yeah, I was thinking of Shtetl-Optimized and was trying to implicitly ask, "Really, more nasty and extended than the Comment 151 Debacle of early 2015?" (Although arguably that thread itself was somewhat productive and wasn't even especially nasty by internet standards.)
I'm familiar with the concept of anti-fraternization in the military: if a commanding officer dates a subordinate, that can lead to bad outcomes such as preferential treatment, worse treatment if the relationship goes sour, jealousy/lower morale from other subordinates, and the potential for unwanted, coercive power dynamics in the relationship.
That's why the military bans such relationships.
I don't see why similar bans in civilian settings are controversial.
I can see why plenty of onerous rules that are necessary in the military should be controversial in civilian settings. Military discipline is strict because the stakes are high, and you need to know that your CO has your back when you're in a foxhole and he's not thinking about how he can sacrifice your life to save his boyfriend.
The stakes in academic life are lower. Some student gets an undeserved A on one out of the thirty-six courses they'll need to take to graduate? Eh, big deal, it's the US university system and everybody gets an A anyway.
I would agree that I've seen many cases of professors-dating-students that I consider icky. But the fact that I personally consider a relationship icky doesn't mean it should be banned. Homosexuality is icky too, we don't ban that.
My theory is such bans are symptomatic of a society that no longer believes much in romance, in true love, in soul mates, etc.
If one did believe in true love and that dating perhaps means much more than just "these two people are shagging", then not being able to date one's boss, professor, colleague, what have you, might seem dystopian.
It's not EXACTLY that. It's more that ideologies (well, successful ideologies) start off with some flexibility as to human weakness and foibles, but then under appropriate conditions, develop a hardline that insists on the dogma of the ideology with no tolerance for exceptions.
Catholicism went through this with Calvinism.
Sunni went through it with Wahhabism.
Shia went through it with Khomeinism.
Similarly Humanism (ie the dominant ideology since the French Revolution) is going through such a hardline phase with Woke. The dominant theme of these hardline phases is that it's no longer important what most people want or think; what's important is the maximalist line that can be deduced from the founding axioms.
I *suspect* that what drives this hardline response is the rise of an alternative worldview that, even as it claims to be a perfection of the original worldview, is actually aimed somewhat differently, and is limited (for technical reasons) to a small group of elites. No matter what the elites say, it's easy for a different, larger group to hate on them and to channel that hate.
So with Calvinism it was Humanism as the bugbear that drove that version of the Reformation (as opposed to earlier Wycliffe and Huss mutterings) into overdrive. No matter how much Erasmus might claim that his goal was to perfect Christianity, the masses saw the project as "changing the world we know" and reacted with the usual "we need to go back to the ways of our fathers, only more so".
Likewise with Humanism, the bugbear is "technology" in some sort of generic sense. A feeling that science, data, algorithms, are creating a world where humans (and specifically the things that The Humanities consider important) will be sidelined by something else. No matter how much tech might claim that their goal is to perfect Humanism, the masses see the project as "changing the world we know" and react with the usual "we need to go back to the ways of our <non biologically but connected as family in some per-user-defined way humans who preceded us in time>, only more so".
Of course the science/tech project has been going on for many years, but it has became more obviously threatening in the past decade or so; just like Humanism had a reasonably long run before the zeitgeist picked up that it was in fact a threat.
Wouldn’t true love survive something like this? It feels like the kind of thing that would happen as part of a romance story, which for the sake of the story would lead to complications, but which true love would overcome. It would be sad, but it wouldn’t outrage anyone.
If I’m being charitable, it might be because we no longer trust our professors and our students to be good, so both people work to ensure the student learns more about the teacher’s subject than they otherwise would have. It’s now plausible that the teacher would teach the student less, because of the relationship (possibly in turn because university is less of a vocation these days). If I’m being less charitable to previous attitudes, we might be more upset these days if a teacher abuses their power over a student after a failed relationship.
I don't think it's all that controversial for a civilian organization to bar romantic relationships with actual subordinates. There's ,maybe a little controversy about banning professors dating their own graduate assistants, for various reasons, but a professor dating a coed taking one of his undergraduate classes has always been considered a bit unseemly I think.
But barring a relationship between e.g. a professor and *any* student goes beyond that, and some universities have moved in that direction. The military allows a captain to date or even marry a lieutenant who is not a direct subordinate. There is a rule against officer/enlisted fraternization, which makes some sense so long as those are meant to be distinct classes, but within the officer/enlisted ranks and outside the direct chain of command, all is fair in love and war.
"a professor dating a coed taking one of his undergraduate classes has always been considered a bit unseemly I think."
No it hasn't. This was considered *absolutely normal* less than a hundred years ago, and not too many years before that it was considered an abomination since women weren't allowed to attend college at all and the professor would necessarily have been dating a man. (Well, thus technically not a coed, I guess.)
What changed is that the original morals were essentially male: that it's fine for a guy to take whatever shots he can. The new morals are based on the anxieties of middle-aged women, whereby every configuration of older man/younger woman is *innately* suspect and the task is just to come up with a reason for why it should be forbidden. (Also why it's "more okay" for older women to date younger men: this obviously doesn't trouble the self-image of middle-aged women, and men just think it's fine for them to take whatever shots they can.)
Because restrictions on liberty should always be questioned and meet a high burden of necessity. Especially on sex/romance, which people care about A LOT
Also from ah object level, romance typically blossoms between people who encounter each other organically and does not respect arbitrary bearacratic regulations. Like e.g. from people I know in the military have told me everyone is fucking anyways, antifraternization rules are necessary to protect the vulnerable but are not(or should not be ) stringently enforced
"Traditional" Irish custom; a ring with a heart on it - by choosing the hand you wear it on and the orientation of the heart, you can discreetly convey your relationship status. At least in theory. The issue of course is the same one Pear will face, ie ~no one actually uses the them like that.
Pears are fantastic. The only problem with pears is the timing. Eaten too early they're hard and bland; eaten too late and they're brown mush, but in the ideal time window they're one of life's peak experiences.
The problem is that the time window when they're fantastic is far too short. A bit like relationships.
Women won’t wear it - it’s an invitation to be constantly hit on by the most socially inept guys, whilst removing the ability to say you’ve got a boyfriend to politely decline.
However, the "I have a boyfriend" escape is already déclassé among the set who would buy such a ring. Easy enough for her to say that she is gay or that she and her partner(s) are single in regard adding more women to the polycule, w/e.
<blockquote>Comments on social media accounts have pointed out the possibilities of how women who wear the ring might be solicited more often. On the other hand, men may not even buy the ring and simply seek ring-wearing women in their neighborhood and be more weird than usual.</blockquote>
Not judging. But to the extent a woman is willing to affirmatively asssume this risk, pear ring could provide a way of signaling that affirmation.
I followed Gwern at some point and have been puzzling for over a year now to try and figure out who he is (not like, his identity, I know he’s pseudonymous). What does Gwern do? What is his thing? Who is Gwern??
Regarding 35., there are some interesting stories regarding Stalin and litterature. A famous one is the relationship between Stalin and Mikhail Bulgakov (who wrote the falmous The Master and Margarita). It seems Stalin and him exchange letters and Stalin protected him despite Bulgakov being quite critical of his regime.
I was once in an Edinburgh Fringe show about Bulgakov and Stanislavsky. Dunno how accurate it was to life, but the story in the play was that Bulgakov wrote a play about Molière being persecuted by Catholics that was obviously *really* about artists being persecuted by Stalin; that Stalin liked Bulgakov enough at the time that he could probably have got away with it; but then Stanislavsky rehearsed the play for four years, by which time Stalin's mood had turned, and Bulgakov was ruined.
Stalin had eclectic reading habits. He amassed a personal library estimated to be approximately 20,000 books. Visitors who got a chance to peruse his library were surprised by how many of his books were dog-eared and annotated by his hand — so, his library wasn't just for show. After his death his daughter, Svetlana asked for his library, but senior party officials denied her request and they had it broken up. They may have been worried that it would become a memorial to Stalin at the expense of Stalin's successor, Khrushchev, who had little education and no intellectual pretensions.
Stalin studied at the Tiflis Seminary for almost 6 years. Reportedly, he was an avid reader and an excellent student. He studied the Russian classics (as well as political theory and history) while he was a student at the seminary. So, it's not surprising that he wrote poetry.
And I guess they're trying to reconstruct his library, now...
A lot of what we Americans think we know about Stalin is Trotskyite propaganda about how Stalin was boring, stupid, and uncultured. Stalin was highly intelligent, probably not as smart as Trotsky (who learned how to win the Russian Civil War by reading some books on war), but smarter than, say, the typical American president. Stalin was well read and is said to have had a funny prose style (in, of course, an extremely nasty vein). Apparently, there's a genre of sardonic literature in Russian that goes back allegedly to Ivan the Terrible in which political big shots make fun of losers they've defeated. Stalin was said to be adept at this style of prose.
I read Trotskys "My Life" few years ago, I guess it was not Trotksys intention, but I got an impression that Trotsky and Stalin were quite similar: smart risk averse pragmatists. And thats why Lenin liked them both, Stalin and Trotsky were only two who had permission to enter Lenin's office without prior appointment.
When I read it, it left me with the impression that Trotsky had a consistently high opinion of himself. Even if he was right, being a primadonna tends to alienate people. No wonder he lost to Stalin, who didn't enjoy being a star.
And btw, I am not sure that Trotsky was smarter than Stalin. Lenin and Trotsky were prolific wriers, wordsmiths by Nozik.Stalin less so. Though Stalin's "Marxism and the National Question" was a favorite of Lenin and Trotsky was a bit jelous because of it. Anyway, if one reads what these three wrote and said and talked before revolution, it is possible to make an argument that Stalin that in many aspects Stalin had bettter ability to forsee future revolution.
So, some people use artist names in AI art prompts, which is lazy even if you completely dismiss all ethical issues. Stable Diffusion (the FOSS one people use for porn) really incentivizes this in its prompting meta, because SD's prompting meta is generally a mess. One thing not that many people on all sides of this ideological hypercube notice is that *this is noise* -- for all but the most famous artists, the association between their names and their styles is pretty weak. It's less that SD demands you do that specifically and more that it's wound so tightly it wants you to write noisy twenty-billion-token prompts (though there is not *no* degree to which it wants you to do it). Glaze is built under the assumption it isn't noise, which means it doesn't actually do 'the thing it should do' all that much, but I'm no fan of prompting with artist names and would rather see fewer cringe prompts, and if all else were equal I'd be cautiously optimistic about something that could bring a ceasefire across various parts of the hypercube, even if it's placebo.
Here's where things get *really* funny, considering the copyright infringement accusations that fly around all AI art: Glaze infringed the hell out of its licensing. Not in, like, an ambiguous fight-it-out in the courts way, in a "massive chunks of plagiarised code in violation of multiple incompatible licenses" way:
This is fixed now, which is nice. Nonetheless, it's kind of incredible that people who take the hard "all generative art is plagiarism" stance did...unambiguous plagiarism.
I think any law which differs on artwork generated by artificial and wetware neural networks will be horrible even by IP law standards, not that that would stop any lawmaker.
The saner way (short of cutting down on IP law) would be to just apply existing copyright (and trademark?) law to computer generated content. So if you have just invented a distinct art style, other NN can be trained on that to also generate similar art. Of course, it is up to the other NN (or the legal entity behind it) to not actually copy their training data verbatim, or reuse specific characters (outside of specific cases like parody). Someone is probably already working on an AI trained to predict court rulings w.r.t. copyright infringement.
I don't think this is an accurate understanding of Glaze. The purpose of Glaze is to prevent _training new models_ (or dreambooth/LoRAs, for people who know what those are) based on art which has been Glaze'd. And the entire point of a style LoRA is to clone a specific style, which definitely isn't a place where that style is going to get lost in the noise. That is, the authors did not misunderstand the prompting meta; they were just responding to a different part of it.
Anyway, it does actually work pretty well for that specific goal, unless people go out of their way to defeat it. And yes, it can be defeated - though I'm not at all convinced by your linked blog post, since the image it's using can't really be said to have much in the way of a specific style to begin with.
In 10 years they will be in the same position as the news media; complaining when their art is NOT part of the "conversation".
Art, like news, is sufficiently fungible that AI can do just fine on the stuff it is allowed to touch, and soon enough artists will realize that the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.
According to this link, the increase in partisanship *is* universal and simultaneous across countries in a way that’s hard to explain without invoking the changes in media structure and funding.
I'd buy that. I think I'd read it was due to the death of classified ads somewhere else, but I can't remember exactly where to link to it. But a media property that's chasing subscribers instead of advertisers has a lot more incentive to cultivate passionate fans, and that means being polarizing.
In particular, selling classified ads in a particular city is a network business, thus winner-take-all. The winner pursues calm, objective journalism to avoid offending anyone. But everyone else pursues readers and is already polarized.
That sounds like an alternative newspaper, supported by niches of advertising banned by mainstream newspapers. But it's a pretty small niche, as you can tell by the fact that they're usually weekly.
That's wrong. The data under the link doesn't show the increase of partisanship.
When mainstream culture in a society shifts to worrying about discrimination and words sexism, racism, gender, privilege etc. rise in use it, doesn't mean that partisanship has increased. The increase in partisanship happens when one strong and influential part of society goes through the culture shift, while the other strong and infuential part of the society goes through the opposite culture shift, for instance as a pushback. The conflict escalates according to toxoplasma of rage dynamics, selection pressure for adversarial memes increases, good faith communication between people of both sides become nearly impossible. But still it's not an outright civil war and the power between two sides is more or less equal so the conflict is stuck in limbo.
And, as far as I know, USA is more unique than not in this regard. Has to do something with two party system and huge concervative lobby that managed to arrage an organized pushback against the culture shift, but couldn't actually win against the tide.
I think it took a long time to invent brazilian jiu-jitsu because unarmed one on one combat between people matched by weight is a pretty niche activity not subject to much optimization pressure.
Also short stories probably got replaced by tv episodes and comic books
BJJ is just realising the power of grappling, and grappling has existed for a long time just about everywhere.
A few theories on BJJ specifically:
1a. We got distracted by striking martial arts in the 20th century as their speed and direct power look more impressive.
1b. To make wrestling look more impressive, it was spiced up into "entertainment" in the form of Luchadores/American wrestling and this made grappling low status.
2a. The main distinction from other grappling styles is BJJ spends a lot of time on the ground (Judo/Olympic wrestling also had groundwork, but not quite to the same extent), the ground was not a consistent place in the past (uneven floors, grass vs dirt vs timber, etc), so practising there would add in a lot of noise and make coming to distinct techniques difficult.
2b. The ground was bumpy and dirty, and cleaning/mending clothes was a costly endeavour. As we came to have proper floors in e.g. boxing rings and cheaper/better clothes groundwork became more reasonable to practice.
Various forms of grappling already existed though, and BJJ became *far* more optimized than any of them.
My guess is that since it was honed on the street, that stripped away any bullshit (it seems to be a law of nature that left to its own, any martial art degenerate into stylized uselessness).
Very likely unarmed martial arts have made bigger advances in the last 30 years (post UFC 1) than in all of human history before it combined.
I'd hesitate to say that given we don't know what martial arts looked like in the Greco Roman era. Gladiatorial fighting, pankration etc, there has been a lot of knowledge lost in the industrial revolution. Just look at the work going into recreating mediaeval weapons fighting as an example.
This isn't to downplay BJJ - I did it for 5 years (and continued on with some casual MMA training for another 2 until I got injured). But we also had guys come in from other grappling arts and they certainly didn't get dominated like you saw in the early years of UFC. I haven't followed it for a few years, but when I got out, BJJ was far from dominant, as long as you had enough BJJ knowledge on how to defend against a few of the key attacks, you could make up for it in other areas of expertise. It was like a virus attacking a system which had lost its immunity. Certainly hand to hand fighting has seen some great developments in the last 20 years, but it's hard to call whether we're really seeing that much development in the last 2000 and if not, when we lost that knowledge. But maybe I'm just saying that because it's a more interesting question to me.
(Because I usually regard the rose tinted view of the past poorly, and think the drive for innovation has been a force for good in modernity)
Gladiator fighting is particularly interesting as in many cases, it was more like really dangerous pro wrestling. It has been speculated that one function of the silly helmets was to conceal that the fighters talked to each other to coordinate the fight. It would be super interesting to learn more.
When did your sparring against other martial arts begin? If it was post-UFC1, then they might just have realized that they were way behind the curve and had time to up their game. But yes, certainly, it seems to take considerably less effort to learn to defend against BJJ alright than to learn it fully (this was how the switch in dominance from BJJ to Greco-Roman wrestling in fairly early UFC happened - once heavier and stronger wrestlers knew the basic defences, that was enough to allow sheer physicality and wrestling skills to dominate). And BJJ seems much stronger than the Japanese version (that famous time Hélio Gracie lost, Kimura was a judoka, not a jiu-jitsu practioner).
One of my favorite speculations about gladiators is that they were fattened up quite a bit so that they could take impressively bloody but _comparatively_ less dangerous cuts to the flab.
They certainly believed that eating lots of fatty foods would coat the inner surface of their veins with fat and thus reduce bleeding after a serious injury!
They didn't know about blood circulation back then, so presumably had a mental image of blood being suffused in the body fairly statically, like sap in a tree. But it's strange, and not very creditable to the Romans, that it never occurred to a single person among the tens of thousands watching blood pumping out of appalling wounds in the arena that the heart might be pumping the blood around the body. They would have discovered circulation more than a thousand years before Harvey!
This whole idea is from one guy reading about gladiators' diet, thinking it sounds fattening, and making up a reason they'd want to be fat. Ancient paintings and descriptions of gladiators never show them as fat.
BJJ is far more optimized for something that most martial arts historically have had no reason to optimize for.
For one thing, we have to keep in mind that unarmed martial arts have been a pretty niche pursuit for most of history. For the last few thousand years, up to the last 150 or so in most of the world, if you trained to defend yourself in the sort of real combat situations you might be threatened by, and you didn't focus at least a solid chunk of your training on weapons, you were being an idiot.
For another, it's intensively focused on single-person combat. Multi-opponent combat is very far from a niche concern in modern self-defense situations. If anything, self-defense situations in which BJJ offers a viable combat plan are fairly niche.
For another, it's not really that interesting for most untrained people to watch. The space in which BJJ exists as a particularly effective form of combat training is competitive fighting sports. A BJJ practitioner pitted against a pure Muay Thai practitioner will tend to win. But Muay Thai is a sport intended to provide entertainment for spectators, and it's a lot better at that than BJJ is. Wrestling is comparably effective in competitive combat sports to BJJ in style vs. style matches, but wrestling has struggled throughout the world to establish itself as a viable professional sport without being turned into a fake performance made more theatrical than the real thing, because most people similarly don't find real wrestling that interesting to watch.
Finally, it's not even that dominant in competitive combat sports. Pit a pure BJJ fighter against someone who's been training for a similar amount of time in combat sports training which includes both grappling and striking, and the BJJ practitioner will tend to lose.
BJJ is highly optimized for competitive one-on-one unarmed grappling-based combat sports with a ruleset where wins are decided by submissions, but not throws or pins. Within a lot of other less limited niches, it's still considerably more effective than having no combat training at all, but it becomes far from optimized. And competitive unarmed grappling-based combat sports whose matches are decided by submissions rather than throws or pins (both of which are more legible to an untrained audience,) is not something most cultures throughout history saw any particular reason to have.
BJJ is *no longer* impressive on its own in MMA (because it turns out that the "mixed" part is really important). But no-one can deny that it was devastating in the comparatively free-form setting and context of very early UFC, because it demonstrated that essentially everyone else had been neglecting the ground game to a catastrophic extent (Ken Shamrock, coming out of Japanese pro wrestling of all things, was the only one from the outside who seemed to have a clue in the very earliest ones).
It's true that BJJ was quite dominant in the early days of the UFC, but first, grappling-based competitive arts were less popular than striking-based due to being less spectator-friendly, and second, the Gracies were curating the roster of competitors because they wanted a lineup which would make a good advertisement for their art. Not that they weren't legitimately skilled competitors genuinely winning their matches, but even at the time, it wouldn't have been hard to find much more credible grappling competitors to pit themselves against if they'd wanted to.
I wouldn't say "left on its own", exactly. More like "left untested", either in actual use, or in multiple types of rule-based practice (to highlight the effects of the rules). And there's the big lesson of judo, which is that there's no substitute for full force practice against a resisting opponent. So any system that relies on techniques that inherently damage an opponent, will produce less skilled practitioners. (Possibly unless you're a medieval psycho who tests stuff on prisoners and peasants.)
And there's historical context for why certain styles did things in particular ways. When the context changes, it can render the style less-useful to worse-than-useless. And when the context is forgotten, something that was once practical can wind up seeming like bullshit.
The full force practice is so important. That is why even though wrestling has no submissions or striking lots of high level wrestlers can transition fairly seamlessly to MMA.
MMA certainly highlighted the effectiveness of BJJ. but it also showed how tough homegrown American folkstyle wrestlers were. And it wasn't anything about wrestling techniques it was that those guys had been competing an insanly high level since they were like elementary school kids,
Seriously, that's insane. BJJ is still strictly limited, in terms of what's permitted, as is MMA. There have been people fighting for their lives (literally) without weapons forever. I think this is more of an artifact of people thinking boxing was real fighting, then realizing it's not even close. And BJJ is weird because it does not have strikes. So it clearly can't be the ne plus. And if you read all the histories, it really wasn't honed on the street, and also wasn't as effective as claimed (Gracie got beat, etc.). Don't get me wrong, I think BJJ's fantastic. But I'm pretty sure there were some Romans, Japanese, Indians, whatever, who fought truly no holds barred, who were unbelievably effective. Interesting side note: I suspect many unarmed combat forms are basically designed for stag fights, where the point is to prove how tough you are without killing your opponent or yourself. So the unarmed combat we're familiar with is all stylized dueling without weapons, not focused on what's really most effective, but picking a winner. E.g., even MMA doesn't permit eye gouge, small join manipulation, groin attacks, etc. If it did, then maybe we'd learn what really works.
Huh, according to Wikipedia, the only techniques that pankration banned were eye gouges and biting, but even those techniques were allowed in, wait for it... Sparta.
Yes. Grappling is a great way to get stabbed or kicked in the head by your opponent's buddies. If in doubt, just try fighting against 2 people sometime. An exception would be for police, who can generally count on outnumbering their opponents and controlling the territory, and who sometimes have an incentive to not kill their opponents outright.
Also bouncers (who sometimes even manage to find uses for *aikido* of all practices, because incompetent drunks turn out to be crummy fighters and getting a painful hold on them looks a lot better to other customers and the management than punching them).
Also, although drunks are slower in their reactions and less accurate in throwing punches for example, they also feel less pain! So I would have thought the emphasis when tackling them hand to hand should be on restraint rather than attack.
The "matched by weight" part isn't necessary for BJJ to shine through. The early UFC tournaments had no weight divisions, and Royce Gracie famously defeated much bigger fighters (such as Kimo Leopoldo and Dan Severn).
tapology.com gives the relevant weight of the three fighters as:
Royce Gracie: 176/180 lbs (apparently he put on 4 lbs between UFC 3 and UFC 4)
I loved those early, insane UFC tourneys. A hodge-podge of fighters - mostly capable, but many using styles and techniques that did them no favors and would shortly go extinct - engaging in sometimes wildly uneven fights (in styles as mentioned, but most obviously by weight), with little structure including no rounds or time limits.
The weight and style differences, and just lack of professionalism/optimization by the fighters (folks say stats/quantitative optimization ruins sports for spectators - not a problem here! To the contrary actually...), lead to wild scenes, often entertaining or outright hilarious, and sometimes disturbing or at least unsettling.
And above and at the end of all of them (at least it seemed like all of them - certainly a lot or most if them) were the Gracies. So many Gracies! It felt like if the Saudi Royal family (with its hundreds of princes we can't keep track of) had started a fighting circuit - but it also seemed all of them dominated, or at least won. Scrawny cousin you'd never heard of? He'll be getting a guy twice his size to tap out right about when you're finishing your sandwich.
It was entertaining if it was your thing. However, it suffered from the lack of structure; essentially all other successful spectator fighting sports have them for a reason.
The Gracies always would win, but their unbeatable technique was basically to get the other (usually bigger) guy on the ground, get leverage/advantage over him, and exploit it (meaning basically never let go).
They were like chess masters who'd gain an advantage imperceptible to you or me, but which they know guaranteed them the win - all they had to do was hold on and grind it out.
There was no time limit so the bouts could be long, real long, however long it took to grind it out, to get the other guy to tap out or for the advantage to grow large enough that Gracie could apply enough pressure, pain, or discomfort to force the issue.
More importantly, the bout was continuous not broken up into short rounds. The fighters got no break, and critically no reprieve. The fighters never had to stop so the fight never reset; there was no being saved by the bell. Instead, once the desired advantage or leverage was obtained - once Gracie had his opponent in the grip or position he wanted - it could be pressed/exploited for however long it took to grind out the win.
The result could be technically impressive, or just amazing at seeing how the little guy would do it again, but also dull. A friend described why she liked it once as she enjoyed watching fit dudes with little clothes on roll around and hug each other closely - real close - covered in sweat making their bodies slide against one another; she compared it (favorably, to her) to watching a certain style of low budget p@rn from the 70's, or amateur today, where the camera angle and perspective were off, and the actors untrained (or simply engaging in sex for pleasure, not to get the best movie shot so not engaging in it in a way that lets viewers see what's going on but yields little or much less pleasure), yielding scenes way too long and chaotic but entertaining, or at least interesting or worthy of curiosity, all the same.
UFC happened. Before that, competions allowing grappling were either local, like Brazilian full contact fights, or, like wrestling or judo, didn't allow or favor the sumissions that are the strong suit of BJJ.
I admittedly don't know much about unarmed martial arts or their history so perhaps there's an obvious answer "yes", but a question appears to me: DID it take that long? As I understand, plenty of other martial arts like military archery or jousting were widely practiced, then forgotten, and have since been reinvented in modern times. If my impression on that general trend is correct, it wouldn't strike me at all strange if pankratiasts of the Ancient Greece or practitioners of knightly martial arts in Medieval Europe did something a lot like BJJ, then the pressure to kill or incapacitate your opponents through whatever means necessary decreased and martial arts as practiced started optimizing showiness, display of manliness, safety, sportsmanship, etc (or, in parallel development, whatever works in unorganized street fight context), and once combat sports with rules similar to pankration or approximating real 1vs1 combat resumed, it was rediscovered rather quickly.
BJJ isn't really an art optimized by pressure to kill your opponent or incapacitate your opponent as effectively as possible. In that context, traditional jujitsu was more optimized, in the sense that it was a second-line measure after attempting to kill an opponent with your weapons, designed to account for an opponent who was likely trying to use weapons to kill you.
One thing that did take a fairly long time to invent was equipment for safe sportified martial arts practice where practitioners could train their techniques in earnest against each other without a high rate of injury. In Japan for instance, people were still practicing with bokken (solid wooden practice swords which could absolutely kill someone if you gave them a solid hit to the head with one,) until the 16th century. Other forms of protective equipment existed, and some parts of the world developed pretty effective nonlethal practice weapons earlier than that. But any martial art is made much harder to practice effectively if you keep getting injured all the time.
I would be somewhat surprised if medieval knights did something that looked like BJJ. They were trained, first and foremost, for real fights with weapons and armor.
I wouldn't necessarily assume that even pankratists did something that looked like BJJ. What you want in an MMA fight turns out to be a mix of boxing, wrestling, and BJJ. The Greeks had the first two, so I'd expect pankration to be mainly those.
There are surviving Japanese koryu martial arts that are focused on grappling while in foot soldier armor. (Not in place of weapons work, but as a supplement to weapons work.)
I'm not an expert, but I believe medieval knights did care a lot about the ground game. It's really difficult to stab or bludgeon a guy in full plate armor, so your best bet is to get him on the ground and stick a dagger through his visor.
Matt's perspective on why it took BJJ so long to get a foothold in North America matches this "lack of selection pressure" theory. It wasn't until MMA/UFC kicked off in the early 90s that you had radically different martial arts disciples pitted against each other to see what actually worked. Up until then BJJ got a lot of pushback on the grounds of "it focuses too much on what to do when you're already on the ground. Just keep your distance and don't let yourself get knocked to the ground!"
Short stories lost their ecosystem; there’s an old Orwell article (circa 1940?) about how no-one ever buys anthologies of them so publishers won’t publish those. They survived through pulp magazines (and literary magazines to a lesser extent), which have died out (probably due to comics books and TV).
In pre-modern times most combat research would have gone into armed combat, however I assume that basically every early society developed some type of proto-jiujitsu/wrestling. But due to low population, low amount of writing things down, and in general very little cross pollination of ideas since in those times techniques were often kept secret. But we know it happened, there are paintings in Greece of Olympians doing heel hooks - which are a somewhat advanced BJJ technique, certainly not something you would do randomly.
In the modern period many of these would have been wiped out by colonialism or corrupted by entertainment concerns. But many survived.
I think it's really important to finally recognize that BJJ is "Universal Grappling" in the sense of "Universal Culture", the BJJ of today looks nothing like what the Gracies did in the early 20th century. Modern BJJ is the composite of all those surviving proto-grappling styles, and massive amounts of research and optimization that have resulted from having a worldwide community, massive competition scene and internet connections blowing down all of the barriers to trade of ideas within martial arts.
Basically the amount of research in modern BJJis just implausibly higher than could have ever occurred in antiquity. But there was lots of stuff you would recognize as legitimate proto-jiujitsu all over the world, but just like most sports it didn't ever really get it's full development until globalization.
Tulsa article is very interesting, trying to think of a good pretext for forwarding it to some people I know.
One thing that the linked article didn't mention is that Tulsa Benevolent Dictator for Life George Kaiser is 79. I'd be worried about what happens when he passes; will his heirs just rug pull the entire city and move to a coast?
If those dense cities don't have any farms, then they have to import their food. In order to import food, they have to produce goods and services that farmers will trade for, or goods and services that are desired by other people who make goods and services that farmers want.
This is basic international trade economics, but with borders drawn around arbitrarily small regions instead of large nation-states.
So if these 15 minute cities don't have light-industrial zoning, then the economy will be propped up by finance types, or professional bloggers, or journalists, or any type of profession that generates revenue from outside the city. Those professions are not necessarily stable; what happens if the internet goes down for long periods of time?
These facts appears to be the reason that American cities have fluctuated between dynamic, energetic utopias (a la Thoroughly Modern Millie) and crime-ridden dystopias (a la Taxi Driver) over the past decades. Making cities even *more* insular might compound the problem.
Although I will concede that having grocery stores on the first floor of an apartment building is more efficient than zoning commercial buildings far away from residential building.
> Although I will concede that having grocery stores on the first floor of an apartment building is more efficient than zoning commercial buildings far away from residential building
Maybe, but it would suck to live on the second floor of such an apartment building. Why not put all the shops on a couple of blocks, then have apartment buildings surrounding that area (for people who want to live in apartments and be close to the shops), and then low-density houses outside that area (for people who want to live in houses and be further from the shops)?
Walkability vs city size vs personal space vs driveability is a set of tradeoffs, and I think there are much better ways of optimising for them all than are done in most cities I've visited, particularly in the US. But there's a certain contingent of "urbanists" who seem intent on optimising by throwing out one set of desirable aspects entirely ("no, you can't have a back yard or drive anywhere, be a good middle class peon and live in a pod"). The conversation on city design needs to move on from listening to these people.
Why would it suck? I've lived above 4 different businesses and the only one that was annoying was a pizza place that was open late because it got a lot of loud drunk people. I currently live across the street from a grocery story and I don't see any problems that would make me unhappy if I lived above it instead.
Why would it suck ? I've lived right over different kind of stores all my life and it was great ! By comparison the couple years I lived in a residential block it was really annoying to have to walk 15 minutes every time I forgot something at the grocery store.
Why would it suck? I've lived above an 7-day retail store for the last 15 years and it's fine. And getting better: we don't get nearly as much noise from the pub down the street as we did ten years ago.
I think the answer that seems lacking from (what I can see) in a lot of US new builds is the absence of courtyards and interior balconies. It’s a brilliant urban innovation that is very common in Europe - you have one side of a complex facing the street (and with all the amenities that come with it) and relatively private internal space.
Townhouses - on this front at least - are even better. Nearly all the rowhomes and townhouses you see in the UK have fairly ample gardens and backyards. I’d venture that a fair number offer the same amenity value as (larger) lawns and backyards in suburban residential developments.
> Maybe, but it would suck to live on the second floor of such an apartment building.
That's usually where the owners of the store would live. Since they would close their own store before going home, they wouldn't be bothered by the noise from it.
I'm confused - I thought 15 minute cities were just normal cities, but subdivided differently. maybe a little denser, and maybe less freedom of movement. How does this change the fundamentals of food procurement? Everywhere has to have money or else it will be poor (with difficulty getting food being one subproblem of poverty) but modern cities don't seem even close to not being able to produce enough (financial) value to feed themselves.
Cities thrive off the network effects of large amounts of people living and working together, that's essentially what a city is.
Reimagining a city as a 15 minute walled garden that outsiders can't enter without being fined sounds great if you're a remote worker, but I am skeptical that arrangement can create the sort of exponential economic activity on suhc a smaller footprint.
To me the 15 minute city feels like trying to isolate a small rural town experience in the middle of a big city. You can get to anywhere in e.g. Grand Junction CO in 15 minutes, but why would you want to? The big benefits of big cities are only possible with the large catchment areas big cities provide
In the DSL thread that was the planned implementation of the concept in Oxford. Divvy up the city into bits and fine people for driving between them (unless of course they're well connected enough to get an exemption).
Oxford was not saying "this is how we become a 15-minute city", but "because we already are a 15-minute city, we can do this" where "this" was an effort to stop people driving longer distances on local roads. If you wanted to drive from your section of the city to another section, you had to use the highway; if you drove on the local roads, then you would be fined - though everyone got a number of free days, and licensed taxis were allowed to do so at any time.
Note: Oxford has a highway that completely circles the city; one of the objectives was to get people to drive out to the highway, drive around, and then come back in. This was because residents got annoyed at the amount of traffic in their neighbourhood from people who were just driving through, not starting or ending in that neighbourhood.
Also, Oxford has a pretty good public transit system, has lots of cycle lanes and is pretty walkable - and you could always get the bus, cycle, walk or even get a taxi to another neighbourhood.
Hmm. Yeah, well I guess that's what I get for reading and believing the first comment in the thread. (This time I'll be more sensible and believe the _last_ comment in the thread.)
I feel like if the goal is to encourage people onto the ring road then maybe that's better done by improving the quality of ring road and its connections, and maybe some strategic road closures through the middle. Looking at a map of Oxford though, it's a bit long and thin and the ring road is far away from most of it.
In any case it definitely doesn't seem to have anything obvious to do with the idea of a "fifteen minute city", except to the extent that the rhetoric around one is being used to justify the other.
Really? I'll have to revisit the plan. The restriction point I know best, at Marston Ferry Road, is a transition between the ring road and neighborhoods, suggesting to me that the plan will encourage the use of local roads.
It doesn't prevent you from driving anywhere in the city, it actually directs traffic towards a ring road around the city and fines people for driving through the city centre. The idea of this is to avoid congestion in the centre of Oxford. Since Oxford is a very old city and it wasn't designed with cars in mind, that might make sense.
From the article:
> However, it is important to note that travel to other areas of Oxford will be permitted by alternative routes, such as the ring road surrounding the city, at any time. Residents will also be able to apply for permits to drive through filters and into other neighbourhoods for up to 100 days a year, while Oxfordshire residents will be able to secure permits for up to 25 days a year. Free travel through filters will be allowed by bus, bike, taxi, scooter, and walking. Exemptions will also be provided for carers, blue badge holders, business, and emergency services.
"it actually directs traffic towards a ring road around the city and fines people for driving through the city centre"
I finally had a chance to revisit the proposal* and I strongly disagree with this assessment, which borders on bizarre. As you can see in the linked map below, the proposed filter sites actually discourage traffic to and from the ring roads.
Four of the filters sit on important routes between the A34 and the city center (ok, "centre"). Only one, at St Cross Road, will really change within-city traffic.
I don't follow your drift here. Look at the map that you linked to. Currently, if you want to travel between Osney and Marston, or between Osney and South Oxford, or between East Oxford and North Oxford, or between Marston and North Oxford, you might well do so by travelling directly (in the first three cases, through the "centre"). After the bus filters, you won't be able to do that, and you will have to use the ring road instead.
It looks like the western parts of Oxford will feel the impact of the filters the most*, to the extent that some of the trips you're talking about would definitely be affected. However, I think we may mean something different by "city center", which I think of as, roughly, the area bordered by the Cherwell on the East, the Thames on the south, the railway on the West and St Hugh's college in the North.
In that view, a trip from Marston to North Oxford doesn't even involve what I think of as the city center.
The trip from Osney (or West Oxford) to Marston, by contrast, could definitely take you through the city center (via the Magdalen bridge to Marson road, though that sounds punishing) or on its edge (via Banbury), but the A34 will often be the best choice for this trip anyway, unless you've got some intermediary stops like a visit to the Ashmolean (or really, anything downtown). But in that case, you're not considering the A34 anyway.
Similarly, if you wanted to drive from East Oxford to North Oxford today, I'd expect you'd try to get on Marston Ferry Road as soon as possible *instead* of going through the city center, but the St Clement's Street and Marston Ferry Road filters discourage this!
Finally, a trip from Osney to South Oxford certainly skirts the area I think of as the city center, but it's kind of a borderline case. If the goal is to reduce southbound traffic on Abingdon road, I guess I can see it.
I don't intend to be churlish, and I may be wrong about these! I mostly know Oxford as a pedestrian, cyclist, and bus passenger, and I'm not a full-time resident (I've lived there about two years, cumulatively). But, as I commented on Slow Boring when Yglesias wrote about this, I love Oxford, think it already achieves most of the positive "fifteen minute city" qualities, and I worry that a heavy-handed intervention will turn the city from an advertisement for livability into a warning against it!
* Depending on the implementation of the traffic circle filter in front of the business school. I can't tell whether it will prevent traffic onto Hythe Bridge Street only or Park End Street as well, which makes a difference).
>modern cities don't seem even close to not being able to produce enough (financial) value to feed themselves.
In Chicago last week, the newly-elected mayor mentioned poverty and financial insecurity as the primary driver behind the recent, gargantuan riot involving teenagers smashing cars and attacking bystanders. That riot accentuated the rising levels of crime in cities around the country, which exists in the shadow of sky-high crime rates in the 1980s and 1990s. All this crime has been caused by- or at least *claimed* to be caused by- inner city poverty.
So here's how I see it: if you or I live in a city, you should either be able to make money by typing on a computer, or you should live within 15 minutes of a group of people that can. In other words, the failure state of a "15-minute city" is that it transforms a part of a city into a service economy with nobody to serve, and exacerbates white flight, food deserts, and a cornucopia of other city-related problems.
I think a better idea would be to create a "15-minute commercial zone", where the most economically productive part of a city is rezoned to cater to its richest residents. E.g. grocery stores, hair salons, and strip clubs by the financial district, with public transportation to make it easy for workers in dense residential parts of the city to earn a living serving the richest residents.
15 minute cities (as in "a city in which you can access all amenities in 15 minutes", perhaps not some specific proposal under that name) are just cities the way cities have formed/been designed from the dawn of civilization, with the exception of post-war cities (mostly in North America) where laws prohibit mixed zoning.
Yep! Mixed neighbourhoods are organic. Traversable city centres aren't. In old cities, the centre is the oldest part and often predates the car. Allowing anyone to drive across means no-one can, because of congestion. You still need to allow traffic *into* centres., but the natural tendency to go from one edge to the other via the centre has to be articially discouraged.
The problem with that is that in dense, pre-modern city centres, you are essentially forced to choose between prioritising the interests of pedestrians and cars, which again, in dense cities are at odds (particularly when inner city congestion also diminishes the utility of public transport). You have to allocate priority to one, and (the qualitative benefits of car-free city centres aside) it is just more efficient to allocate that to pedestrians.
If the "city center" is sufficiently small, you've got a point. Otherwise I think you need to give transit equal weight (though on a per person rather than per vehicle basis). And there need to be time periods when service vehicles (trucks, etc.) get equal weight, here probably on a per pound basis.
> the natural tendency to go from one edge to the other via the centre has to be articially discouraged
You don't need to discourage it, you just need to build better alternatives -- a good road that bypasses the city centre. If there's no room to build a road, you build a tunnel.
You need the alterative, and you need people to know about it...it isn't obvious that you should head off in the opposite direction,and get onto the ring road.
Even in post-war cities, you can get to pretty much any amenity (if not pretty much every _place_) within fifteen minutes, it's just that the relevant mode of transport is driving, not walking. This is a good thing.
But timing isn’t the only consideration. There are exclusive benefits to walkability (public health and pollution reductions [as measured by say, emissions exhaust on city streets], lower total public transport costs [when public buses, or bicycles, are not competing with traffic]) that you don’t get with emphasising driving.
Ultimately, the fifteen minute city doesn’t restrict driving. I live in the original “fifteen minute city” (Oxford) and I’d venture that you could drive from nearly any point to another, via the ring-road, in not much longer than that time. Before this push, I spent over an hour on a 3km bus ride because of early morning congestion going into the old centre.
I'm sorry, but I feel you need to elaborate a point. Why is driving rather than walking a good thing? Sometimes it's necessary, but why is it a general good?
Off the top of my head: you don't get rained on, you can easily go places when it's -5F or +120F outside, you're much less exposed to random street crime, you can transport much more than can be carried in the hands (or a backpack), you aren't limited by age or infirmity and many physical handicaps (e.g. a one-legged person can drive a car 20 miles easily but walking even half a mile can be an agony).
Cars are what free old and infirm people and people with assorted handicaps to live independently. They allow women to traverse places that aren't super safe and contribute to their liberty. They allow civilization to reach higher levels of efficiency and comfort in places that have harsh weather some big chunk of the time. If economical mass-produceable reliable "personal transportation pods" that can be operated very simply, by anybody, had been invented only last year by Google, they would be celebrated as the most briliant and liberating innovation since the telephone.
Yes, people are routinely misinterpreting the idea as "splitting existing huge cities into small independent towns dotting the countryside". It would be called "15 minute towns" in this case.
A 15-minute city is just a regular city where each 1x1 block is zoned to contain things you need on a *daily* basis: a daycare, a school, a grocery store, a playground and a jungle gym, a community center, a cute local café (like someone quipped in the comments); and yes, the zoning might have to be denser to fit enough people to support these establishments. It doesn't mean, like Yglesias assumes, that every block has to have everything you might want from a city: a museum, a restaurant, a clinic, a movie theatre, an office block for a large corporation, a park, a factory etc. It's perfectly fine to take a bus/tram to the next block over to see a movie or to eat out or to shop for new clothes, to commute to a large office block or a factory across the river, or to travel across the city to visit MoMA or the zoo.
FWIW, some cities I'm familiar with have divided themselves into areas, and only those who live in an area have a sticker that permits them to park in that (residential) area. They've also turned a lot of streets into ... not dead ends, exactly, but mazes that only have a few entry/exit points. (The barriers are low enough that fire engines can ignore them, but if a non-emergency vehicle uses them it's a fine if they're apprehended.)
Depends on what you mean. Parking isn't checked after 5PM, so people still socialize pretty much ignoring the areas, except you need to learn how to get in and out, and occasionally through the maze. Lots of people don't like it, but lots of people do. I think most of the time most of the people like it.
"Parking isn't checked after 5PM, so people still socialize pretty much ignoring the areas"
Many Thanks! That wasn't clear from the earlier comment about parking stickers, which, if enforced 24 hours a day, would have impeded socializing between areas.
This is already often done in areas of new suburban development. The area I live in, for example, was built in the 1990s, and indeed my kids walked to the neighborhood school until high school, and there are at least small parks with play areas within stroller distance of almost every house, and you can walk to a grocery store and coffee shop if you like. Not a daycare, perhaps because walking to the daycare with your 1- or 2-year-old unless it's within a few hundred feet isn't realistic. Besides which, it's a pretty affluent area, and relatively few parents were interesed in warehousing the kids during working hours, sending them to Montessori when they were 3-4 until they reached school age was more typical.
But retrofitting this kind of organization onto an existing city, or even suburb, would be very, very expensive, so it's hardly surprising nobody's interested in that.
Typically cities are where the centers of production are (in America, suburbs and rural areas only survive at their quality of life because the federal government is de facto a massive engine for moving money from urban to rural areas). There's a reason the richest/highest QOL places in the world are city-states like Singapore or Monaco that don't have that kind of political extractive pressure.
You're valuing money over life support. Cities cannot survive without importing LOTS of food and water. Rural areas are where those are produced. Suburbs are parasites on cites, but occasionally grow up to be cities themselves.
If you're talking manufactured good, yeah, those are made in cities. But very little food or water is generated within cites.
And modern farming doesn't work without manufactured goods, equipment and planning. Everyone needs everyone else, and we use money to denote how much the traded-off things are worth in value.
Modern food production technically happens mostly in the cities, as the raw products are a tiny fraction of the food industry, and most of the value and labor is not in growing wheat or meat but rather in processing and packaging and retailing and (sometimes, but often enough) cooking and serving it.
When someone spends $10 on a lunch, that lunch generally contains less than $1 of stuff that the city had to import from rural areas, and all the rest was generated within a city.
Again you're valuing money over life support. Shaked has a good point, but most of what you're talking about can be done anywhere. It's done in cities because it's convenient. (Actually, a few decades ago most of it was done in "outer suburbia", i.e. at the edges of urbanized areas. Probably because land was cheap. I don't know about currently.)
The money extracted during the processing is NOT a decent measure of the amount of value contributed. It's a measure more of the amount of control exercised by a proportionally small number of people. When managers decide to give themselves a pay raise, they don't ask, or even inform, the folks working on the shop floor. The folks working on the shop floor don't have the same access to control over wages. This does not imply that management is that much more valuable, merely that they made decisions that favor themselves. The same dynamic exists at all stages of transaction. The guy growing the tomatoes knows that he must sell them QUICKLY or they will have no value at all. (Grain has less time pressure, but also requires more land per unit income.) But most of the value in the food is converting non-edible things (like soil and sunlight) into edible things. However because of inherent asymmetries in bargaining power, the farmer receives less cash per unit work than the purchaser. The main reason that distilling was placed under strict federal control was so that farmers couldn't convert grain into whisky, which had a higher market value, was easier to transport, and could be stored more easily. (Look up the Whiskey Rebellion. And note that rum was placed under no such restrictions.)
I can't see any more than some minority of current humans being really attracted to a 15-minute city. If you look at the actual trends of new development in affluent cultures -- where people pay a premium to live who can afford to buy what they want -- they are all in the opposite direction.
People want to live in nice quiet bedroom communities where the only thing within 15 minutes' walk are their kids' friends' houses, a park, a pool, and maybe a cute coffee shop. The grocery store wants to be located a little further, so the noise and cars and required larger transportation nexus isn't annoying, and although we would like it to also have a Home Depot, an optician, a pizza joint and an Olive Garden for out-of-town visitors (plus a trendy froyo shop and another coffee shop), we certainly don't want it to also include a bus or train station , still less an auto body shop, lumberyard, airport, or the factory to which many of us go to work each morning.
Perhaps there are people who think it would be really cool to mix residential, commercial, major transportation, and at least light industrial cheek-by-jowl, everything within a stone's throw of each other, but either there are too few of them or they don't make enough money, so no such places are being built.
There's nothing stopping both types of areas from existing in the same city. Denser stuff towards the middle, sparser stuff towards the outside.
When I was younger, single, and more noise-tolerant, I lived in a small apartment in a high-density inner area where I could easily stumble home from a hundred different bars and walk to my office. Nowadays I'm older and have kids so I live in a big house on a quarter-acre block in a quiet area. That's a reasonable set of tradeoffs, and in a well-designed city you should be able to pick any point on that spectrum that you like.
Hence why I said "minority" and not "zero." But even at that, what you describe is only a modest slice of the modern urban demographic -- hip twentysomethings who dig the city for its life. A much larger chunk are people who are older, and often with family, who are simply compelled to be there, because that's where the blue-collar labor jobs are, or the janitor/office manager/receptionist/maid/driver service jobs tending to the needs of the aristocracy. These are people who suffer with shitty urban schools and wretched urban crime in neighborhoods that sometimes look like Lebanon in the civil war. They would be ecstatic to have the choice you made -- but they don't. They don't have the reliable transport, they can't get jobs in front of computers in suburban office parks, and they can't save up the capital to buy property.
In principle, yes, one could imagine some in-between region, and every now and then it does seem to happen. Row houses in the (then) outer suburbs of Philadelpha and New York in the 1890s were one such appearance. A whole generation of poor immigrants got a house of their own for the first time, if only 100 square feet of yard, and reared a generation that went on to college and nice houses in the suburbs. The "ticky tacky" tract houses widely mocked by sensitive philosophes were another successful attempt to bring some the privileges of the middle class to the workers. They made houses cheap enough, in Detroit or Allentown, that guys with a high school diploma who turned a wrench or poured steel could afford one, and they got a shot at being middle class, and sending their kids to college to be doctors and engineers.
It doesn't seem to be any part of the current trend, and not even part of the current social philosophy. To the extent that the fate of such people is treated as anything other than a cynical political football, the intention seems to be to put them on some kind of corn dole indefinitely, to treat them as some kind of advanced class of pet, because we have no hope they can stand on their own feet ever.
Sorry, but there is. Land prices. Land prices tend to be a lot higher within cities than outside of them. If you're doing new construction, you prefer to minimize the cost of the land that you're going to build on. This is the reason modern suburbs exist. Go back a bit where transportation was more of a problem, and the suburbs were the poor areas. (I think 1800 is far enough, but most of my sources were older than that.)
> If you're doing new construction, you prefer to minimize the cost of the land that you're going to build on
That sounds like a general rule that "making stuff using cheap raw ingredients is more profitable than making stuff using expensive raw ingredients". The fact that the land is more expensive just gives you a higher selling price at the end.
I admit that this works weirdly in the US where a lot of inner-city areas are ghettoes. I'm still not quite sure how this is a stable situation. You'd think that a big one-off effort to push all the poor people out of a given inner-city area and gentrify it would be massively profitable.
Not sure about this. The most affluent neighbourhoods in the UK are in places like Kensington, which are predominately rowhomes and very easily check the “fifteen minute city” box (the absence of light industry aside). It’s a similar dynamic in much of continental Europe - the most affluent neighbourhoods are often proximate to city centres, and are significantly denser than their American counterparts. Yet, many of these cities score very highly on liveability indexes.
I grew up in Singapore, where space is at an enormous premium. Most people live in public housing. The very wealthiest live in landed houses. But even then, some of the biggest value-adds for a landed house are proximity to public transport and shopping amenities. The community the Prime Minister lives in - primarily large bungalows in the tens of millions - is minutes away from the city’s biggest shopping street, and a new MRT station. That is not for a (severe) lack of developable land for private villas further out. It’s just the most convenient equilibrium. (Arguably, Singapore suffers from a big “missing middle” problem, and I think that 5-6 floor apartments, or smaller townhouses, with courtyards and street access are nearly ideal).
I didn't say this is where the very richest already live. They do often live (or at least have a nice little pied-à-terre) in the city center, for access to major economic resources. And they can afford the enormous expense of a nice place to live in an area where land is priced by the square inch. Bully for them!
What I said is that these are not the places that are *growing* -- where middle-class yeomanry who have managed to scrape together enough capital to buy property are moving.
I mean, if you want to create places that appeal to the fabulously wealthy, and where the desperate poor need to live to service them, that's great, but as a member of the peasant class myself I think we do quite enough already for the wealthy, and my priority in land-use management would be to address the needs of those a bit further down.
Singapore is an exception in almost every important social and land-use way from the rest of the world, so whatever solutions work well there can be expected to be pretty idiosyncratic. They would no doubt be quite interesting, but not super transferable.
By car, of course. Getting to work by bus or train is what you do when you have no choice (you're poor), the public transportation options are fabulously plentiful and dense for assorted historical reasons (you live in London or Moscow), or when your time is insufficiently valuable that the extra time commuting costs less than buying (and maintaining) a car (e.g. you're a student).
The 15-minute concept was invented for Paris, another city with plentiful public transportation. Improving public transportation to the point where it is used by everyone goes hand in hand with 15MC.
Well, when the Singularity gets here and we can undertake massive infrastructure projects that cost $billions with legions of nanobots that can get the job done in less than the traditional 10 years and without making life miserable during construction, we can get right on that. Improving public transportation has been a social shibboleth since the 70s, and staggering amounts of public money have been spent on it, with practical results that total approximately squat.
Those cites that in 1975 had excellent public transportation systems on which big chunks of the population could rely remain that way today. Huzzah! And cities that in 1975 didn't have them...still don't have them. The car is more used than ever, particularly in Second and Third World nations that are trying to achieve First World comfort for their people. At some point, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results becomes the definition of madness, as they say.
I say to hell with subways, trains, and busses. It's been tried, and where it works, it's in use, and where it's not in use, it's because it won't work. Time for some new ideas. Maybe self-driving cars will be the ticket, although I doubt it. But there are loads of other possibilities, if you free your mind from the grips of the rail and bus and general contracting lobbies. Maybe better regional road design. Better intersections and signal control -- there are all kinds of Youtube videos by clever people on this, ideas that largely languish. Real-time traffic monitoring, with two-way communication between roads, signals, traffic info and individual cars -- even if they have human drivers, the drivers can make far better decisions and traffic can be optimized. Better mixes of private and some degree of public transport, like park 'n' fly, park 'n' ride, et cetera.
So this is why New York, Tokyo, Los Angeles, London, Mexico City, Beijing are all empty and no one lives there?
To come to your conclusion about peoples preferences would require ignoring the last 100 years of urban development trends in the west and ignoring the current regulatory regimes which encourage the specific types of development you are talking about while, in many place, out right banning the type of develop you think no one "wants".
Your counter-examples would make sense if I had said something as crazy as "and this is why all the cities are now empty ruins, because nobody at all wants to live in the city, not even the rats." As it is, you are arguing with something I didn't say.
...although, I might note just in passing that both of those big American cities are in fact losing population, good jobs, and wealth, to the point where even Democrats are a little concerned about the flight.
The implication of "people want to live in a place like X" is that they don't want to live in a place like Y. In this case the cities I listed are Y and X is the life you described (which does not describe a place I would want to live).
Not sure where you got the idea that people are fleeing those cities at a high rate. They both had small declines between 2020 and 2022, but I don't think we can take those years as typical due to COVID.
Sure, if by "people" we assume the categorical "every person now alive." Since I'm not psychologically rigid to the point of dysfunction, I don't mean any such thing, and instead when I say "people want to do X" I mean "quite a lot of people, enough to signficantly influence trends" but certainly not "every single person on Earth, with no exceptions."
That being the case, it is entirely possible that there are human beings who don't fit my description, and who prefer to do something else. Indeed, you'll note I started off my comment by saying that I certainly concede the existence of a significant minority of people who really love living in cities. Hence the continued existence of big cities (1) comes as no shock to me, and (2) contradicts what I said in no sense at all.
As for the "small" declines, they don't seem "small" to the people with actual cash (as opposed to ideological viewpoints) at stake:
RE: Stop AI Development for 6 months, for those interested, Lex Fridman has talked with Max Tegmark who is the father of the letter (if I understood correctly; he is at least the President of FLI) and he elaborates on his reasons for the letter and what he hopes to achieve (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcVfceTsD0A, time stamped).
Interesting tidbit - he (obviously) feels like all the companies are bound together in a race to the bottom and hopes that the letter will break this system... and the main analogy he uses for this (and for most of the talk) is Scott's very own Meditation's on Moloch article (start at about minute 40 for full context, reference at 41:30). So, @Scott, how do you feel about this? It appears you contributed to the letter indirectly as well :P
29. I still want to see this data broken down by places that instituted the Counter-Reformation voluntarily and places where it was enforced after being conquered by Catholics. There would be no significant reverse effect because the Protestants mostly lost those wars in terms of net territory. The conquest of Prague alone could skew data significantly. Meanwhile places like Italy, Vienna, Paris, etc all continued on. They did eventually suffer their own declines. But mostly due to things completely unrelated to the Counter-Reformation. Italy had an economic crisis. Paris had Louis XIV being Louis XIV and insisting that "absolute monarch" really means absolute. Including over the universities. Poland had The Deluge. Etc.
Diets: my understanding is that due to rebound weight gain outpacing weight loss, dieters tend to gain weight over time faster than comparable non-dieters. This is deceptive, because the first diet tends to yield better results than subsequent attempts , giving the impression that better adherence or finding the 'right' diet that's easy to adhere to will change things. They don't, and the the cycle perpetuates.
Creating more diets to try will only contribute to accelerating obesity long-term through the cycle of dieting.
I think that the whole popular concept of a "diet" is wrongheaded and invites failure by default. It's like people think that if only they can suffer through a couple of months of torture their permanently slimmed down self can get back to the good life of pizza and soda indefinitely. Whereas the original meaning of the word simply applies to the stuff that you normally eat, and it seems obvious to me that a "diet" can only succeed if you approach it in that spirit - by committing to a permanent lifestyle change. If you're not ready for that then you've already failed and there's no reason to fool yourself further.
Yeah, I like the mid-Victorian diet: eat 6,000 Cal per day, and do sufficient work to maintain a waist-to-height ratio of 0.5 or less.
The 6,000 Cal, though, was mainly steamed and baked vegetables, molluscs and other sea food, and red and white offal, with beef dripping as fat. Waist-to-height ratio is a better BMI: easier to measure and calculate, and better predicts morbidity.
Fair point. I just had some the other day, and was thinking about how nice it was of y'all to invent what most people consider an 'Indian' dish. I had it with naan, though, so I suppose I was combining national dishes.
I think it's definitely possible to try and survive on only pizza and beer, and that'll clearly make you fat, but I don't think that's the reason most people gain weight. I think we've heard generations of 'advice' about food from what to eat, how much to eat, what balance of macromolecules is best, what size plate to use, when you can eat, what kinds of lipids are okay, how much salt to use, etc.
All the rules amount to engineering a diverse biological system based on the population mean from some underpowered study somewhere. Everyone is the average, including one breast and one testicle. This glut of 'rules' overrides perfectly good biological signals that come built in. They lead to unhealthy binging, panic eating, and other behaviors that lead to long-term weight gain (or loss for some pathologies), despite the body trying to tell you to knock it off by giving various signals of discomfort that the 'rules' once again redefine and reinterpret.
I disagree. I think that the rules are generally okay, there are no serious junk food-based diets as far as I'm aware. The problem is that following those rules is both onerous and unpleasant, and temptations to break them are ever-present. Our modern civilization is simply incompatible by default with being healthy according to evolution's designs, and it's increasingly more difficult to shape your environment such that it's possible to sustain healthy habits.
I think the problem isn't any one rule, but rather the aggregate that creates skewed behavior and distorts the individual's ability to listen to normal body cues. I know there's a common notion that modern lifestyle is incompatible with healthy living, but I'm not convinced that's true. Instead, it seems like more fodder for creating more rules to follow 'if you want to be healthy'. It becomes a moral/character issue and once again ramps up the tension, where people feel if they don't follow the rules it will reflect poorly on their character and they'll be judged. But prohibition rarely works well, and that's essentially what we're doing with various foods.
Oh, I definitely agree that social opprobrium can't solve these problems on its own. The rules are simple kludges, woefully inadequate for the task of fixing systemic issues.
About listening to your body, I agree in general, but in the case of modern diet evidence points to this feedback loop being broken. The lipostat theory seems solid, the only controversy is about which particular feature of the industrial civilization is at fault. See e.g. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/25/book-review-the-hungry-brain/
Yeah, I followed that theory a bit after Taubes was going on about carbs. I'm not as enamored of it as I used to be. It seems like an okay theory, but it doesn't feel like the kind of thing you can read and then turn around and recommend solutions that will work long-term.
I read the book Intuitive Eating and changed my lifestyle to fit that approach. Without really trying (and no stress about 'cheating'), I dropped 20 pounds that haven't come back. I no longer have 'food cravings' to the point that eating feels natural and easy, like it was when I was a kid and could eat whatever I felt like without gaining weight. I don't measure my food, cut out specific kinds of food, or worry that this cookie or soda will cause me to gain weight, because my body is fine at telling me when it doesn't want food anymore and I'm better at listening.
I don't agree with everything in the Inuitive Eating book, and some of the ideas feel a little hippy, but it worked like therapy for food-related everything in a way I didn't realize I needed until I read it.
100% the problem that creates obesity is people evolved to eat when food is available, and most people have it constantly available to them. Combine this with declining calorie burn through physical life declining, and you don't really need any more explanation.
It is not a hard problem, just a hard solution (fighting against millions of years of instinct to generally be lazy if possible and eat while the eating is good if possible).
The super hard part is that once you've gained the weight, it's super hard to convince your body that's not the new set point. That is, if you really want a healthier society, you've got to catch people before they gain the weight, rather than trying to fix after the fact. Nature is cruel.
I have long suspected that there is pretty significant variance from person in terms of how efficiently they turn “food into the mouth” into “available energy”. And maybe variation from person to person in terms of what kinds of foods are digested efficiently.
Has anybody looked into this? From the CICO crowd I’ve heard a lot of theories on individual variation on the “calories out” side of the equation (e.g. fidgeting being a way some people burn excess calories). But I’ve never really heard much serious questioning of the idea that “calories in” has individual variation - if you eat 4oz of lean beef, it has about this many calories, period.
When I was in grad school, the spouse of my thesis advisor was working on the calories out side of the equation. It seems many aspects of biology and environment are involved, to the point it becomes very complicated. I'm pretty sure body movement (including fidgeting) is a minor contributor, unless you're a big athlete. I think it's also tied into causal factors in determining whether you're more/less likely to be 'the kind of person who' engages in physical activity.
I’m particularly interested in the idea that individual microbiomes might play a role in how well you convert food into usable calories.
I think we all know somebody who can eat constantly and not gain weight, and another who seems to eat moderately but is always large, despite neither one being a gym rat. Either there is a big non-obvious source of calories out (like fidgeting) or one of them is much better at converting food into fat.
I think the best way to summarize how I see it is: feelings don't care about your facts. Decades of failure with dieting, programs, institutes, etc. have only led to blossoming obesity. You can lock someone in a room and force them to lose weight (cf. the people they hospitalize in the show "My 600 Pound Life"), and they will lose 100 pounds. Send them home again and they'll gain much of it back.
If, instead, you send them to a therapist to help them work through the childhood trauma that led to them comfort-eating you might see them naturally lose weight as they stop leaning on that crutch. Who cares how many calories you burn by chewing? It's the long-term behaviors that drive weight loss/gain.
Yeah I am kind of convinced that part of the reason I struggle so much with weight is that my gut is super "efficient". I just don't almost ever get sick from food, never get heartburn, like spicy food, don't have pooping issues, etc. I am like a garbage disposal.
Which is mostly great in a lot of ways, but doesn't do a lot to discourage overconsumption since there are almost no immediate downsides like their might be to someone who gets nauseous at a lot of smells or heartburn a lot.
And that isn't even getting into the how many calories exactly out of a 800 calorie meal does this person who has sudden runny stools an hour after every fifth meal get versus someone whose gut works. I kind of suspect it is less.
I was the same way, but I still found myself overeating during meals - especially at dinner. The two things that helped me the most were:
1.) Giving myself unlimited access to food. I felt less like I HAD to finish my meal when I knew that I could eat more later, and that I had no obligation to eat so much right then. When I realized I was 'working on' my plate, that it wasn't about satisfying hunger anymore, but about getting full and finishing the portion these ideas helped me to be okay with stopping there. If it's not enough, I have food and can eat more. Yet I rarely do.
2.) Really paying attention to how I felt both during and after the meal. I know when I eat more than I wanted to, because I feel vaguely less happy than I do when I eat only as much as I want. It's not indigestion or whatever, it's just not feeling as great about the mealtime experience. Then when I felt that way I'd remind myself that actually I didn't have to feel bad about the meal (because of 1 above - there's always more food, so why bias toward packing it in?). No single meal makes you fat, so I didn't worry about that so much, just how the mealtime experience made me feel before, during, and after the event. Slowly that conscientiousness changed my habits and made me happier about food in general.
Now, I eat what I want, when I want, and however much I want without gaining weight. I'm happy and not hungry, and I'm not beholden to 'cravings'. But it took some time to retrain my mind and my body to really understand what 'want' means to me.
A simple but effective technique is also to just buy smaller plates. The sight of a smaller but fuller plate will actually make you more satiated than the same amount of food on a larger plate.
I tried that and other hacks, and they didn't work for me. I just kept eating, getting seconds and thirds until I was overfed. It took actually feeling what it meant to be overfed, internalizing that feeling, and deciding I didn't like it to change my behavior. For me, 'tricking' my body never worked. Really listening to my internal signals was the only thing that created lasting change.
I think part of this is because the other side of the coin is that you'll always have unlimited access to food, whether you admit that or not. I was at a birthday party the other day for my kids and they had pizza. It was hot and looked good, but when I considered whether I was actually hungry, the answer was "no". I didn't want the food, and knowing that I was happy not to eat it. In the past I would have eaten anyway, because it was there and everyone was eating. I would have felt overfed afterward and regretted a decision that felt more like inevitability. That I didn't eat was driven by simple self-awareness, which looks from the outside like self-control, or like someone who can eat however much they want and whatever they want whenever they want and still be skinny. It helped me drop weight and keep it off. I don't think it's possible to replicate that as the sum of a multitude of 'hacks'.
This is true, and I've read several articles describing studies showing that different individuals respond differently to food (including fruit, not just burgers!). Finding them now, though, is harder, as is always the way. A quick search found me this one: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0934-0 - I don't currently have access to it, but the abstract sounds promising.
It is true. Every gut microbiome is different, and our microbes break down most of our foods, so it's true just on that point alone.
Nippard did a great video on whether obesity is a choice that goes over a bunch of the research on how people absorb the same amount of calories differently (study references in the description):
A friend did microbiome research in grad school. She was studying a specific type of gut bacteria that was in the mice she ordered from one source, but not another. She later found out that it was all in the food the mice ate. The vitamin mix was slightly different in one versus the other, and that led to differences in microbiome distributions across a host of species.
Sure, different people have different microbiomes, but to a large extent that's driven by diet. This makes sense, since what grows will be determined by what you feed it. (Try this at home with a bean and cabbage breakfast experiment!) I'm sure the causation you've outlined (microbiome -> diet) plays a role. But I think the magnitude of the reverse (microbiome <- diet) has a much greater effect size.
Yes, diet influences microbiome, but some people just have some microbes that are missing, so diet can't fix that. It's not clear that diet can fix them all. Fecal transplants FTW.
How about "parts of it are influenced by diet". That's certainly true, but I think there's evidence that other parts are influenced by something genetic. And, of course, whether you are exposed, possibly in some other way. Also by "in what order" you are exposed to the microbes.
And that's just what I've picked up from "popular science" articles.
A diet is supposed to be "the things that you eat". If you don't keep the diet permanently, you don't get the benefits permanently.
FWIW, I've switched to a diet of no sugar, no (almost none) starch. I expect to be on it permanently. (Well, diabetes 2 unmedicated requires something like that.)
Yes, fad diets are a bad idea. Lots of different reasons depending on the fad. But your diet is always a real thing, and if you stick to it, you get and keep the benefits it may offer. (And, of course, the detriments.)
30. I tend to think the media as cause narrative is a bit off. But most countries have become more polarized and are facing fairly severe crises over this and populists. The exact severity varies significantly. But this is a common international phenomenon among the democracies.
While I haven't actually ran the numbers eyeballing it the non-polarized democracies mostly seem to be those which are growing fairly rapidly economically (in real per capita terms) and have high trust in institutions. (And they still have polarized media.)
Specifically, this doesn't decrease feelings of difference. But it decreases the feeling that these differences can't be overcome or pessimism about the future of the country or the feeling compromise is bad. For example, a lot of Indians feel Indian society is very deeply divided but mostly believe these differences can be overcome. (There's also countries where the population feels polarized but politicians have managed to keep a lid on it. Often strong party systems where the ruling party defeated a populist revolt.)
As for how this happened the pattern in trust is easy. An institution does something and loses trust. It sometimes slowly grows (or can grow rapidly if something happens). But often it just stays low. For example, for the US government it was Vietnam. Trust in the US government at the start of American major troop presence (1961) was 77%. When the US pulled out (1975) it was 34%. And ever since then the average has been in the 30s-40s. For the banks/Wall Street it was the slowdown then crash of 2008 (from 53% in 2004 to 18% in 2010) and it now stays in the 20s. This has happened in succession such that the only trusted institutions left in the US are the military, first responders (police, firefighters, etc), and small business.
Reasons for economic growth are more complex. But the average real per capita growth since 2000 has been 1.2%. It was double that, 2.4%, from 1945 to 2000. The statistic has been consistently below the trailing century average since 2000.
Yeah, so anyway, grow the economy and get higher quality institutions. Easy to say, hard to do.
My long-held hypothesis was that media changed because the Internet demolished subscriptions as a viable revenue source, leaving advertising as the dominant factor. Since advertisers want eyeballs more than informed subscribers, the newspapers (and TV news) did the rational thing and optimized for eyeballs.
This hypothesis explains the timing (media mostly changed a few years after 1994, the year Netscape Navigator came out and the WWW became a public fascination), and the presence of clickbait. It does not appear to explain why non-US media sources haven't succumbed as much to polarization pressure... at least, not until I notice that the Internet has not pervaded the globe outside the US as much as it has inside.
That leaves weather, sports, and stocks as the only things that don't quite add up for me. They've long stood out as the only parts of news that do still have to cater to subscribers. What's keeping them fed? That information might be gathered more efficiently now than before (especially stocks), but I'm betting more money is spent on them than before anyway (even adjusting for inflation and PPP). Are grants stepping up? Is there a subscriber base I'm not noticing?
But radio, which was a much bigger thing in that era in part because it was most of what people listened to while driving, changed in this way starting before the WWW was created. It changed in this way during the mid/late 1980s regarding both news+current events (e.g. Rush Limbaugh) and sports (sports yell-radio shows).
Also, when Fox News launched in fall 1996 only 22 percent of U.S. adults yet had online access and only 12 percent were going online for political or current-events news:
The actual trend has been the opposite: less reliance on advertising revenues and more reliance on subscriptions. Here's a graph for the NYT (https://www.statista.com/graphic/1/192911/revenue-of-the-new-york-times-company-by-source.jpg) which admittedly doesn't go back very far. But shows how much advertising revenue has collapsed and, insofar as it's been replaced at all, it's been replaced by subscriptions.
The common theory is the opposite: advertisers acted as a moderating force. If you want to maximize subscribers you want to stick close enough to the center as to get maximum readership. Subscriptions, meanwhile, optimize for a smaller but more passionate fan base. Which leads to extremism and siloing.
That's for the NYT only, and while I'm not crazy about the way NYT slants its articles, they certainly don't strike me as clickbait. Do you have a similar graph for newspapers nationwide? The one I found on Statista is paywalled.
I'm admittedly not familiar with the theory you're calling "common". For me, the common theory was the opposite of yours; see Neil Postman's _How to Watch TV News_ for details.
In terms of incentives, news sources want audiences to keep coming back, while controlling their own costs. The straightforward method is to deliver news in the form of stories, to drip-feed and repeat those stories (less investigative work required), and embed advertising in the middle of them in a way that keeps people looking. "More after this."
I do agree there's an incentive to tell subscribers what they want to hear, but 40 passionate subscribers will still make only 57% as much as 70 slightly less passionate subscribers.
One alternative way out is to make the news more _entertaining_. There are people who hatewatch this or that news. (A running joke I used to make is that, based on how often I heard about him and from who, Rush Limbaugh was watched almost exclusively by the left.)
If you don't share its politics, NYT seems pretty obviously, carefully crafted click bait for partisan readers who want confirmation of their biases, with just enough opposing-view perspective buried deep in the piece for the NYT to claim not to be biased.
Weird how I haven't seen folk mention that we're back where media started in late 1800s/early 1900s: very, very partisan. The whole faux-objective media is an artifact of 50s-60s, and even then, wasn't really true (Cronkite wasn't apolitical, even if that was the image). Prior to that period, the media was insanely partisan, over the top, not professionalized, etc.
I've thought about that, actually, and they say in the UK it always was that way.
The thing that gets me is the total lack of interest in accuracy in conservative media. Fox News just settled a huge lawsuit over this, and Tucker Carlson had the same complaint 20 years ago and tried to make a right-wing paper with good fact-checking before giving up because it was a total financial loser.
Since the 90s my position on "when is the US actually going to see serious collapse?", has been "as soon as the economy stops rapidly growing. That promise is what holds it all together, when it stops happening it will be immediate dissolution.
> Why do East Asians have so many famous numbered lists (“Four Noble Truths”, “Thirteen Classics”, etc)?
As Gwern himself mentioned as well, monosyllabic digits play a role (I'm not familiar with India), but I think it's mostly a matter of style. Certain ways of writing can just feel more natural for no particular reason. Reminds me of how English speakers love creating acronyms that spell a word, even though English is not really a language well suited for pronounceable acronyms, with only 5 vowels.
Doesn't Celtic mythology have a lot of numbered lists? (Like, the pre-Anglo-Saxon invasion stuff, so not technically "English".) I'd always assumed that this was some sort of Indo-European thing that migrated to China with Buddhism, but probably that's wrong.
Judaism has numbered lists too. Thirteen attributes of mercy, twelve tribes, ten commandments (and Plagues on Egypt), six orders of Mishnah, five books of Torah, four matriarchs, three patriarchs, two tablets of the covenant, one is our God on heaven and on Earth.
I’d put my money on not having articles or caps (for at least Chinese); “The Points for Attention” could be a title “points for attention” is too vague to know you’re referring to a specific list.
I thought it was because Chinese doesn't have plurals. Providing a number makes it clear that it's a list. The Five Great Lakes of America, as opposed to the One Great Lake of Africa.
First we should ask if there's a phenomenon at all. Lots of cultures have numbered lists, probably a mnemonic for illiterates. In the 20th century, I think Chinese stands alone.
I am torn between "there are linguistic reasons in Chinese to name things this way" (such as the lack of a definite article), and "thousand-year-old religious traditions always make numbered lists" as the explanation. As "Four Noble Truths" originated in Sanskrit, I have to lean towards the second explanation.
I'd always assumed the short list thing was to emphasise the importance of the items being listed, due to there being so few of them and in many cases an unstated assumption that they cover all eventualities.
Isn't there a comical "three sorts of fools" list pattern in Mexico, for example, "There are three sorts of fools in the World, those who dance with their wives, those who drink with their boss, and ..", and I've forgotten the third. Maybe it was "those who can't even remember three simple items!" But it's like the "Knock, knock, Who's there?" rubric, in that there are many variations.
Edit: I tried a Google search, on the Mexico fools list, and not a squeak, with any phrase combo I could think of! I'm finding that more and more now, with things I know exist, and which in some cases had appeared on the Internet. So it appears even mighty Google has reached the limits of its ability to dig up references to anything!
Oh I for sure have found search engines declining in functionality the last few years. My phones ability to interpret my "keystrokes" as well. It is notably worse than it was 2-3 years ago, and I am sure it isn't me in this case.
It's amazing how bad my phone now is at recognizing what I'm trying to type, I assume changes in algorithms for patent litigation reasons, or for the kids. And google is no longer any good for anything other than offering up the product you don't want.
It could have something to do with the connection between numbers and magical powers. In the ancient world, a person who truly understood arithmetic (and geometry !) was in essence a wizard, or at least an oracle; e.g. he could tell you how many wooden planks you'd need to fence your sheep-pen, as though he could see the future ! A rich tradition of numerology developed in many cultures as the result, attributing *actual* magic (or divine, same thing) properties to numbers; this is especially fun to do if your language conflates numbers and letters/ideograms (e.g. Hebrew).
Thus, I suspect that titles of numbered lists such as "Four Noble Truths" and so on are a kind of numerological pun, that we modern Westerners may or may not have the capacity to understand in context.
My favorite Chinese numbered list is The Two Whatevers.
I picture Alicia Silverstone in "Clueless" dressed in a Mao Jacket.
Unfortunately, it's not as fun as it sounds: "We will resolutely uphold whatever policy decisions Chairman Mao made, and unswervingly follow whatever instructions Chairman Mao gave"
Ironically, you might find the Singaporean tendency to use acronyms particularly funny. It might be the most over-acronymised country in the world - allegedly an intentional strategy, early on, to facilitate easier communication with poor English speakers after independence.
35. Georgian was somewhere between heavily discouraged and banned so Stalin wasn't exactly facing a lot of competition. But no, it wasn't anything to do with his later dictatorship. He actually went out of his way to hide them. As a child Stalin was an excellent student and a gifted poet and singer. He was also fairly religious and had a strong interest in art and music. (The interest would stick with him for the rest of his life.) He got into a good school and had a bright future ahead of him.
Then he read Marx and Lenin and a bunch of socialist literature and became a socialist revolutionary. He walked away from his educational life to be a full time, professional revolutionary (and/or criminal). He claimed he was kicked out of school for revolutionary activities but in reality he started skipping class and eventually just didn't show up. Instead he spent his time being a bank robber, extortionist, and general criminal in an attempt to disrupt the Tsarist system and raise funds for the revolution.
Georgian was never banned. Georgia was one of the few Soviet Republics where education was even mostly conducted in the local language, not Russian. Hence the many Soviet jokes about Georgians speaking Russian badly.
I was talking about under the Tsarist regime. Stalin didn't grow up in the Soviet Union, he grew up in Tsarist Russia. I realize now that wasn't clear.
I‘m not sure but I would be surprised if Georgian was actively discouraged under the Tsars. The Tsarist regime tried to kill „dialects“ but mostly left the non-Slavic languages alone.
I would add to this that as a teenager, several of Stalin's poems were published in a premier Georgian literary journal (Source: Montefiore's "Young Stalin"). These were long poems too, they gave a nobody a lot of page space. Simon Sebag Montefiore writes that while the themes were rather generic the language was very good.
I seem to recall from Young Stalin that Iveria was Georgia's premier literary journal, not Russia's, and I find it hard to believe that Russia's premier literary journal would be named Georgia, run by a Georgian, and publish poems in Georgian. Regardless, the point is that as a teenager, he was publishing poetry in prestigious journals.
Final thought, next time some person yammers about how The Humanities will impart morality to cold STEM, you can remind that person that Hitler was an artist and Stalin a successful poet. Mao was a poet too for that matter.
I'm half trolling here but half not. There's obvious value in humanities, but there's nothing about them that makes one inherently moral, as shown by these three monsters.
They certainly each thought themselves to be moral, or even Super-Moral. I'd say that it makes sense, if you think about adjacent topics all your life you might come to consider yourself an expert scholar capable of advancing state of the art, whereas STEM-type people would be more inclined to stay in their lane.
Please add Pol Pot to this list, studied in Paris. Basically, poseur intellectuals turn into communist butchers with far greater frequency than chance, which isn't too surprising given the things I've heard poseur intellectual say about the rabble. (And I'm not kidding, I think there's an obvious, common thread here people will nonetheless deny.)
Humanism does not equal good; it simply means that the justification for all things is (somehow) rooted in humans.
Under (genuine) Christianity you justify things as being for the glory of God, not for the benefit of the state or the welfare of humanity. The suffering of infidels and pagans, and hell even of Christians, doesn't matter compared to doing the will of God. And the same is true of Judaism (eg story of Abraham, or Job) or Islam.
Whereas, Humanism justifies things in terms of benefits to humans in the here and now. This may be limited groups of humans (nationalism or fascism or communism) or claims as to all humans (liberal humanism) but all three of fascism, communism, and liberalism are commensurate and at least agree on what they are trying to achieve, as opposed to earlier religions, with which they are incommensurate.
I'm not sure you understand my comment. My point is that some people seem to believe that simply by studying the humanities (art, literature, poetry) you will become a better person. I argue that Hitler, Stalin and Mao are strong exceptions to this idea. I am not talking about humanism
In a world where Humanism is the dominant religion, The Humanities are equated to good because the Humanities are (or were until recently) the narcissism of Humanism.
Same way that in a world where Christianity is the dominant religion Theology is "The Queen of Sciences", the most prestigious study, and is assumed to automatically make people better.
You're attacking this claim ("The Humanities = good") from an empirical point of view. I'm attacking the same claim from a conceptual point of view, explaining why the claim is made even though it's incorrect.
Basically, like most other horrific communist butchers, Stalin was an intellectual. People like to pretend that smart people don't do the stupidest things, but really, it takes a smart person to convince themselves and others of things that obviously aren't so.
"If there is one class of men whom history has proved especially and supremely capable of going quite wrong in all directions, it is the class of highly intellectual men."
The physical geography is stretched, and the map has about twice as many American states and Canadian provinces as there really are. The "real" states have the same shape as they do in real life, and the fake states have plausible names.
To me, an American, it looks uncanny, as if I had been hit on the head and had forgotten half of the states.
To me, it looks like a variant of "The Nine Nations of North America" - except that instead of breaking up (and partially rejoining pieces of) nations, the map does it at the state level (but similarly winding up with more divisions than in the original).
The map is mostly false; it has over a hundred states whereas in reality there are only 50. It gives plausible-sounding names and borders for the extra states, and somehow manages to add them in while keeping the shape of the real states exactly the same, which I don't think is geometrically easy.
Only Colorado and Wyoming are actually “rectangular” (not really because it’s on a sphere, but on a flat map). Utah is “all straight lines” but has a corner cut out. North Dakota and Kansas have 3 straight sides.
Every other state has more complex geometries, usually because at least one border is defined by a shoreline or river.
With the deformation of the continent's shape (note Alaska and Florida being much smaller than in reality) and that many extra states, it's not actually that hard. With fewer extras there would be frustration issues, though.
Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't it really easy to just spread things out a little and then keep adding states until it looks legit? If there's a weird shape that doesn't quite look like it should be a single state, you have the freedom to just make it into two or three.
I mean, yes; I said that with the deformed continent and this many extra states it's "not actually that hard". I'm just saying that with e.g. one fake state you'd have problems, and you'd have some issues if the continent shape were fixed (because all the coastal states would be fixed at 1:1).
I think they just stretched the map out and drew in new states to fill the void. Since the new states don't have to match anything in real life, they can be whatever shape is needed to make the map work.
30. <i>My only concern about this story is that some other countries haven’t become any more extreme/partisan since the advent of the Internet - is this because their media didn’t undergo this process? </I>. I‘d argue it is because media in other countries was already very partisan before the internet. This was certainly the case in countries I know well - Italy and Austria. There were (and still are) newspapers across the political spectrum. In Italy if you wanted sports news you bought Corriere dello Sport. Sports coverage in the „quality“ newspapers was meager. Same was true of classifieds. There were specialized publications for that. Italy even has a specialized publication for crosswords - La Settimana Enigmistica. In Austria Socialist voters read Der Standard, centrist conservatives read Die Presse. If you cared about soccer you bought Kicker. What held everything together in these countries was linguistic/ethnic identity. Now that we are also losing that as social glue thanks to mass immigration it’s not clear how the center holds.
Also, lots of countries have fairly strict laws about how partisan television can be.
European newspapers don’t seem as bad as the American ones because they’re traditionally partisan; what’s grating about CNN and the New York Times is the presentation of the Democrats’ propaganda lines as objective fact.
That would depend on what your threshold for explicitly admitting. The general trend is that they'll freely admit an ideological bias (eg. socialist, conservative), but be less keen to admit a partisan one (eg. Labour Party, Conservative Party).
In the UK, they'll all explicitly endorse a political party when there's an election, and it'll consistent enough which party they support to be controversial if they ever deviate. They don't have an explicit partisan line when there's not an election, but there's much less attempt to hide whose side they're on than even Fox News does. They'd all be happy to be described as a right-wing, left-wing or centrist paper respectively, but would be slightly less keen on being described as organs of their respective political party.
The French papers are more ideological but generally slightly less partisan, largely because the French political landscape has been too fractured and chaotic (eg. La Monde is centrist but hasn't historically had much centrism to support; La Croix is borderline anti-republican) and this has meant that the papers are more coherent ideological blocs than the political parties. The exception is Le Figaro, which was at times been very, very close to the UMP government.
The German papers are similar, with the caveat that Bild is a right-wing tabloid read mostly by SPD voters, and the broadsheets are slightly more liberal and centrist than their main parties; probably Bild would describe itself as "common sense" and the Zeitungs would both describe themselves as liberal, but everyone knows what their political leanings are.
My guess would be places like Austria and the Netherlands which are completely pillarised have more explicitly partisan papers, but I don't know.
Well, it seems to me that both Fox and CNN describe themselves as common sense, which to some means progressive and to others conservative. Maybe because America quickly transitioned from unusually low polarization to unusually high one there's no deep appreciation that persistent legitimate disagreement can exist, and both sides view their opponents as crazy mutants.
Yes. I believe the (right wing most Thatcherite) Murdock press supported Tony Blair (not all of the titles but most). This was unheard of at the time and it presaged a huge Labour victory.
I know the answer to Gwern's "Whatever happened to short stories" question.
Short stories were basically found in magazines, which were hugely popular in the interwar period, into the early 1950s. All the famous writers of the period wrote for them - Hemmingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, even Dahl and Vonnegut got their start, at the very tail end of the period, writing in magazines. Gwern is focused on sci-fi, perhaps because that's his interest, but just about every genre was in just about every mainstream magazine, from Cosmopolitan to Colliers to the Woman's Home Companion. Importantly, because the magazines were big business, short stories were where the money was - you wrote short stories for money, and novels for literary kudos. And that money is why everyone was writing short stories.
Then the bottom dropped out of the magazine market due to television, subscriptions and advertisments both collapsing. Those magazines that survived had to pivot away from competing with television, and be complementary to it. One thing that TV can do very well is tell a short story - that's what an episode is, but TV can bring it to life much better than a magazine can, so magazines dropped short stories, and those few that still carried them were no longer paying much.
A lot of people still liked short stories as they were used to them, so for a while the genre limped on through anthologies and collections. But there was no longer an economic way to release a standalone short story, and TV wasn't just a competitor to the magazines, it was a competitor to short stories in total, so the short story died as a popular form, with only a few weird literary hold-outs remaining.
I had thought the Internet would see a revival of short stories, but it hasn't happened to any great extent.
What it has led to (because people buying online see the cover, not the thickness, so don't get put off by a thin book) is the revival of shorter novels and even novellas.
There are a lot more 40k-60k word novels being published; in the 2000s, 100k words was pretty much a minimum to get into print.
Short stories do get distributed online - the model of having a free site and getting some people to pay for it anyway seems to work quite well for short stories. Not well enough to pay better than novels, but well enough to pay enough to get novelists to write an occasional short story (many writers like writing short stories) and also it's very useful as a way for newer writers to develop their craft.
This is true. In many ways, what we mean by "a short story" is a story of the right length for publication in a single 20th century magazine issue. With the decline of the medium, you see the decline of that particular length, but we continue to see publication of stories of varying lengths. You could even say people are using (e.g.) Twitter to publish very short stories.
I have to admit I haven't noticed a decline in short stories, but maybe I'm just calibrated wrong to the level of short stories there used to be. I see authors releasing short story collections, or writing short stories for zines, or just putting them up on blogs, and they look like they're very alive to me. A community I'm a part of is having a "Faire of Short-Stories" in a few days, even, where we'll be trading short stories we wrote. And it's much easier to get someone to read a short story (independent of the actual narrative style "short story", but meaning an short story by length) than a novel.
This is one bubble I didn't realise I was probably in!
There are a lot of short / shortish stories being published on e-book platforms like Kindle and others. Then there's story podcasts that are also quite popular. There are still print magazines and anthologies, although I can certainly believe there used to be more.
It may be my personal taste, but I rarely find a short story worth reading anymore. I used to subscribe to several magazines, and I dropped all except the informative ones (e.g. New Scientist). And it's because a year went by without encountering even one story I wanted to finish. This has meant I don't follow any new authors on book length fiction. (The ones I liked have been dying over the years, and now there are only a couple left.)
OTOH, my tastes have always been a bit of an outlier. I think I only ever liked one that won a Hugo, and rarely like any other prize winners.
Yes and TV killed that too. Completely. Short stories never died completely, but their value collapsed by about ~95%. It was said that in the 30s and 40s (and probably earlier, but I'm basing this on accounts I've read about that time period), selling one short story to a magazine like The Saturday Evening Post or The New Yorker provided a writer with a solid income for a year. Perhaps it was economically equivalent to selling a well-liked screenplay today.
Radio and short stories coexisted peacefully. My guess is radio, though popular, still left people with a desire to look at something, and colorful magazines filled that niche.
Not sure if mentioning this is relevant, but commercial radio predated decent sound recording technology for at least a decade, meaning it was a lot more practical in the beginning to use radio for live storytelling than for broadcasting music. I'd wager that the ratio of broadcasting recorded music/episodic storytelling on the radio increased steadily between 1930 and 1950.
The internet has absolutely seen a very specific revival of short stories, although the readership (and writers) are predominantly female: it's fanfic. Granted some fanfics are novel-length, but most, especially in the earlier days, were short-story-ish in length, and/or are longer but released serially, in chapters that appear once a week or once a month.
Yes, it depends what you mean. There are more short stories being published now than ever before in human history. But there are also more novels than ever before.
In the early to mid-20th century, the short story was the commercially dominant form of written fiction, highly lucrative, and culturally influential. Then magazines went away, and there's a lot of fixed publication and distribution costs in a book (you can't sell a 1 chapter book for 1/10th of the price), so novels became the only way to make money.
I thought the internet would make short story writers rich and famous again, because you now can sell your 1 chapter book for 1/10th of the price, and short stories are the perfect length, viable to read in one sitting, unlike a novel which takes much longer. But, as is now obvious in retrospect, what the internet really did is give us a superabundance of stories with cheap distribution, making it really hard to be a professional fiction writer full stop.
So yes, people are writing lots of fanfics, but no-one is becoming a millionaire from writing them, unless you leverage your fanfic's success into writing a novel that gets turned into a movie, or leading an apocalyptic cult.
It's a strange market failure, because it's much easier to write a short story than a novel, so you would think folk would focus there (but novels have the bragging rights), and many folk have one great story in them (just like many have one great song).
"Much easier to write a short story than a novel": Writing is not like building a brick wall, where the difficulty is roughly proportional to the number of bricks/words in the finished product. Some writers are naturally attuned to writing in a short, one-idea format, and so find short stories easier to write than novels. Other writers are naturally attuned to writing long, wandering storylines that don't reach a climax for tens of thousands of words, and so find it easier to write novels than short stories. For the latter, switching from writing novels to writing short stories would be like switching from being a marathon runner to being a rock climber. Just because no mountain face is 26 miles tall doesn't mean that rock climbing is "much easier" than marathoning.
This is a really useful historical explanation, thank you.
One other part of the picture is that MFA creative writing programs focus on writing and workshopping short stories, and there is a flourishing ecosystem of small magazines that published the best stories that emerge from these programs, for a readership almost exclusively of fellow writers. Most successful literary authors' first books are story collections, for this reason. A handful of the most successful publish stories in the New Yorker or the Atlantic, and continue this as a prestige move alongside the novels that make them famous. And a very few, like George Saunders, become big names entirely through short stories published in famous legacy magazines, above all the New Yorker.
Extending to siblings, there have been a lot of musical families. The Jackson family, the Staple Sisters, the Pointer Sisters, the Isley Brothers, the Everly Brothers, Sly and the Family Stone, the Osmonds, the Jonas Brothers, Hanson. Those are just some where the group was named after the family. There are also other groups that included siblings like the Beach Boys, AC/DC, and Radiohead. Google turns up some identical twins who are musical duos, but not any that I've heard of.
I never realized that Sly and the Family Stone actually included siblings. But I'd put them more in the category of the Beach Boys, as many of their core members were not siblings.
A quick scan of studies told me that a difference exists, but disappears by adulthood. That suggests to me that it's plausible that twins are disadvantaged enough to not be on the right tail of the distribution. It's possible that the rarity explanation is better, though it appears that they are 3 percent of live births, which is not a number I would consider so small that over time you wouldn't see a few very accomplished pairs. It's also possible that the two explanations interact.
That’s the way it works in horses, but not in people. Horse breeders are often encouraged to abort one when a mare is carrying twin embryos — otherwise you expend a lot of resources and get two very undersized foals that are not sellable. But horses and people have different placenta designs.
In people what happens is the person pregnant with twins consumes more resources, grows bigger faster, and has a lot more of the unpleasant pregnancy symptoms like foot swelling and nausea, earlier. Twins are generally smaller coming out, but that’s because they come out earlier. The cervix can’t count, so it assumes the mass of two babies is one ginormous baby and it’s time to send it out. Hospital norm is induction at 36 weeks if they don’t come out by that point. But by two years, if not a year, most twins are on the normal growth curve for singletons.
Yes, I’ve gestated identical twins, now happy and healthy toddlers.
A very quick scan of the research suggests that twins seem to have small early cognitive deficits relative to singleton babies that go away by the time they reach adolescence. Premature babies (which you suggest twins are) also I believe have similar patterns. Highly speculative, but plausible that these kind of issues prevent extreme right tail performance of the kind that would be needed to distinguish them in history, while not affecting their ability to lead successful lives by the standards of 99% of people.
There’s two pairs of highly successful identical twins playing in the Australian Football League. Max and Ben King and Harry and Ben McKay.
(There is a running joke that the McKay brothers are actually one person because despite playing at the top level for eight years now they have never played in the same game - whenever their teams play each other one just happens to be injured or whatever.)
In gymnastics, there are identical twins Jessica and Jennifer Gadirova on the bronze-winning 2021 British Olympic team, and also Paul and Morgan Hamm who were on the US Olympic team, and in fraternal twins, Alice and Asia D’Amato on the Italian Olympic team and Sanne and Lieke Wevers on the Dutch Olympic team.
My theory is simply that getting a person to extreme success takes a lot of family resources, and unless music or sports is the entire family’s business (you would see that a lot of the sibling duos had a parent as coach or manager), at some point they look at the costs of summer intensives, international competitions, training with a world-famous coach, and decide they can only afford it for the sibling seen as slightly more talented, and the other one should pursue something else. Or one twin gets to a stage when they want to be as different from their sibling as possible, instead of competing on a field where only one can win, and switch career aspirations.
Successful people are rarer than average. If one twin is successful, does that improve the odds for the other twin to be successful?
Well, maybe. Likely they will communicate, and if success is behavioral, then they might influence one another. But a non-successful twin might influence a potentially successful twin into being non-successful, too.
If it's a question of success being in the genes, then you could consider the twins to be individuals, and so successful twins would be as common relative to non-successful twins as successful people relative to non-successful people regardless of birth.
The Winklevoss twins come to mind. I wonder if twins usually have such a strong connection to each other that they lack the ability to be as cold and calculating as you need to be to be extremely successful.
In Gwern's list of questions, he asks if there are any drugs that work as "anti-psychedelics": i.e. are there any drugs that strengthen your sense of identity, rather than dissolving it. Gwern asks "Why [isn't there a drug that makes me feel] with the same absolute certainty that I feel ‘all is one’, that I am a unique snowflake utterly unlike any other human being or organism?"
Gwern thinks that stimulants don't qualify on the grounds that they don't induce psychedelic effects. I disagree. During coke highs, people often report that they believe themselves to be possessed of superhuman qualities and their demeanor changes to become more arrogant and narcissistic.
This sure sounds like it's approaching "unique snowflake" territory to me. It's almost as though stimulants are turning up the amplifier knob on somebody's sense of identity, magnifying their sense of themselves to mythic proportions.
How reasonable does this sound to other people? I don't have much expertise on drugs, and I'd appreciate somebody who knows more about habitual stimulant use who could explain how frequent this egotistical high really is.
(Tantalizingly, this entry on "ego inflation" on the Psychonauts wiki mentions that habitual stimulant use can lead to increased narcissism and egocentricity, even when the addict is sober. Can anyone, maybe a clinician, shed some light on whether or not this is a real feature of stimulant addiction? https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Ego_inflation)
Maybe I just drink it rarely and am sensitive, but a significant part of my 'conscious' time is either an unusually good night of sleep or coffee. And on reflection I got as much self reflection out of my Adderall trip as my mushroom trip
Re approval voting in North Dakota: I'm confused, because this more recent article states that a more recent vote on Wednesday failed to override the governor's veto of the ban. Meaning the ban has not been put in place, and approval voting is still ok? Has my brain been overwhelmed by the double negatives? https://www.valleynewslive.com/2023/04/20/bill-eliminate-approval-voting-fails-override-veto/
I think yours is more up-to-date than mine, so good work, I'll mention it on an Open Thread. The one I linked said the banners had enough votes to override a veto, but I guess it was wrong!
No, I think you were right - the article I posted also mentioned the vote from March which overrode the veto. But then they voted again last week and didn't override it. Maybe the governor vetoed it twice? These news articles aren't making it very clear.
It looks like the 33-13 vote was passing the senate. Then after that it got vetoed by the governor, the house overrode the veto but the senate didn't. At least that's what it looks like.)
I think you're also mistaken to say that voting experts unanimously dislike first past the post. Your link shows that 5 of 21 like it. Also FPTP has significant advantages - sharper accountability and ability to act for instance, which countries that have proportional representation systems struggle with
> surely it would be even better if you spotted someone wearing the ring and then you could use your smartphone to call up their dating profile.
What? If you've already spotted them in-person, you can just go up and talk to them. Why would you want to dance around with dating profiles and instant messaging to set up a time and place to meet in person, when you can just walk up and say hi?
Something like checking for deal breakers and / or common interests before doing the hard social task of cold approaching someone. I was assuming the online profile check would be done in the moment and then, if it met your criteria, you would personally go up to the pear ring person, not approach through the dating app.
Isn't talking to them the best way to find out if you're compatible and have common interests? Yes, it's intimidating to go up to a girl and try to chat her up, but if you can't do it when she's literally wearing a "Please come chat me up" badge, then how is the profile going to help? You don't need the picture, because you've already seen them in person. It seems that reviewing the profile before going over is more about providing an excuse for inaction than anything else ("Well, they're not into D&D, so I won't bother...").
Yeah, valid. I dunno, most of what draws me to people is not their looks, so seeing them IRL without any context wouldn't really make me interested in approaching them. I don't really think the kind of info people put in dating profiles would be much extra help in my case though, so your point stands.
Seeing them in person goes much further than just whether you find them physically attractive. We do tons of signaling through how we dress, manners, presentation, and language. Imagine a man with a partially shaved head and partially six inch pink hair. Now imagine a man with a military-style crew cut. I just made up these people, so there's no way that either of us "know" them, but just based on one of potentially dozens of signals we can begin creating an impression of who they are, what their interests might be, and whether it may be a good idea to "chat them up."
Sure. I think the best case scenario for the pear rings is feeling some sense of connection (whether that's physical attraction, signaling that matches your preferred culture, something funny they said or did, etc) with someone who is wearing one and using that as reassurance that overt flirting would not go completely amiss. In fact, that is possibly what the lack of a wedding band signaled back in the days where people didn't spend much time in non-marriage relationships.
Strong agree. Unfortunately I doubt that's going to be the result, even if it did catch on. I think every moderately attractive or more female would be inundated by guys if they saw the ring, even if there were no signs that they were compatible. Guys wearing a ring might get some genuinely helpful responses - but men tend to pursue women and so the signals are backwards. Maybe it would help out gay guys? Lesbians?
There are class or culture social cues that are reliable indicators of who you'd enjoy hanging out with and can be gotten from a few sentences of interests or background info. It feels awkward to end a conversation because she brought up zodiac signs (everyone's example is different and personal to them) and I would prefer a world where I could avoid that conversation in the first place
I'm socially anxious too. But I think the truth is we are looking for a lot of extra excuses and information so we can tell ourselves why it was OK that we didn't go up and talk to the stranger. But at some point you have to (wo)man up and go for it.
Besides, why is the service trying to optimise its appeal to socially anxious men? A dating service is a two-sided market, and I would wager the key to success would be getting lots of women on board. If you do that, the men will follow. If you sign up loads of socially anxious men, I am not sure all the women will be desperate to follow.
Right? The one other time I had heard of the pear rings, it was explicitly framed as an alternative to dating apps that let you have real conversations with actual people.
25. My big question with the El Salvador crackdown is whether it's financially sustainable. That's 2% of the population, and a higher percentage of young men - can the government afford to keep them locked up for a long period of time?
27. The opposition from the North Dakota state government is bizarre. They're getting hung up on approval voting when there's a ton of different ways that local governments have experimented with government structure? It's a pity.
36. I was wondering why all the 5-over-1s all had the same block design (the three-story walkups seem to have more variety in design).
Regarding 25, the cost of locking them up only has to be less than the presumably net negative economic effect of having them free, right? (Not to mention all the other aspects that aren't economic.) From reading the articles, it sounded like one of the government's "negotiating strategies" involved putting members of rival gangs in the same cell and locking the door, leading to some or all of them dying, so I'd expect that the government is spending a lot less money on lockups than would be the case in the USA.
Since the government gets around one fifth of GDP in El Salvador, the economic benefit from locking them up would have to be five times the cost for it to be profitable/sustainable for the government.
That's just in the short term, though. And even putting aside the other benefits to society (which do have economic aspects, albeit ones that are harder to quantify), this could be seen as an investment. What's the return on sustained not-being-murdered? Will this increase the rate of economic growth enough to eventually recoup the cost? Do normal economic models have regions that contain the "before" and "after" points, or do they just sort of assume the latter?
No, I was thinking in the medium term. In the short term, governments can run a deficit.
But I think a 5x multiplier isn't too implausible in the short term either. I saw somewhere that they were spending $130M extra on this, which is like half a percent of GDP if that's yearly. With a 5x multiplier, we only need 2.5% extra GDP growth for the government to break even.
> Regarding 25, the cost of locking them up only has to be less than the presumably net negative economic effect of having them free, right?
That depends what fraction of them actually are criminals, and given that we're talking about mass imprisonment with no safeguards, I suspect the answer may be frighteningly low.
"Under Bukele’s rule, people might not have to worry that much about gang violence and extortion, but that doesn’t mean they live without fear. Bullock recounted a conversation with a Salvadoran friend, a taxi driver in the outskirts of the capital, about life under the state of exception.
“He said, ‘It’s great, I don’t have to pay extortion, I don’t worry about the gangs.’ I said to him, ‘Do you worry about getting detained?’ He said, ‘Every day.’”"
Identifying criminals is hard, even with tattoos. If you rapidly round up and imprison 2% of your population, without any kind of due process or safeguards, it's pretty much inevitable that a lot of economically productive innocent people (and economically productive criminals, and economically unproductive innocent people) are going to get caught in the net.
27: I suspect the state government has detected a possible threat to their power base (being the sorts of people who do poorly under approval voting) and seek to kill it before it can threaten them for real.
In my city, that's what they did. I'm not even sure whether it was anything about "approval voting", per se. I have a suspicion that it might simply be that they don't want grassroots groups to have success in dramatically reforming aspects of government.
21. I speculatively attribute this to the aggressive campaign of misinformation about the burden of student loan debt. In reality, for about 70% of four-year graduates, it's less than or equal to about one year of the college wage premium ($30,000).
Granted, there are taxes, and the median college graduate differs from the median high school graduate in terms of cognitive ability and/or conscientiousness, so college doesn't literally pay for itself in one year, but in a large majority of cases it pays for student loan payments.
Thanks, that's great (and surprising) information. I'm guessing this is the usual thing Freddie deBoer always complains about where people act as if the Ivy Leagues are the typical college experience.
I am pretty surprised that the average college loan supposedly takes 10-20 years to pay off if this is true, though I can't find a great source for this and maybe it's a fake statistic.
Nah, it makes sense: the smaller the cost of college, the smaller the wage premium for that college (there are exceptions, but the average wage premium is inflated by the Ivy League just as the average cost of college is).
I should probably mention my source for this claim, which is the College Board's report on college pricing and student aid. It's in the Cumulative Debt section.
I should clarify that this does not include the 7% of undergraduates who went to for-profit colleges. They tend to have more debt. Just don't do this.
About 46% graduate debt-free; the median for the other 56% is under $30k. Average debt loads have actually been outpaced by inflation for several years.
Ivy League students actually have less debt, because they all have need-based financial aid that allows everyone to graduate debt free. There may be some exceptions where parents refuse to pay the expected family contribution, but every student gets a financial aid package that should allow debt-free graduation.
Another initially surprising fact is that default rate is negatively correlated with initial loan balance. This makes more sense when you consider that people who couldn't even make it through the first year of college, and thus borrowed very little, are generally not headed towards high-paying jobs.
The median 4-year graduate earns $525 more per week than the median high school graduate, which is $27,300 per year. (Now largely hypothetical) payments on a $30k loan are going to be around $4,000 per year, maybe a bit higher with current interest rates.
Per the College Board report, total U.S. student borrowing in constant dollars has declined every year since 2011. And nearly all of the decline is in borrowing by undergraduates: total annual borrowing by college students is now only half what it was a decade ago while borrowing by grad students is down just slightly.
That seems like a broadly rational shift, since borrowing for a graduate degree in law/medicine/engineering/etc is far more likely to be an economically-rational choice. There are still, I know, plenty of contrary examples. But overall it looks like some sensible change underway in how students and families are thinking about borrowing for school.
I took over a decade to pay off my student loan debt even though I had the money to pay it off after two years. With interest rates being what they were, it just didn't make sense to pay it off any faster than I had to, so I just kept making payments on schedule.
My student debt is lower interest than my mortgage, so if I’m paying down a debt it is my mortgage, which I have played down quite a bit. I think I’m on track to pay my student loans off some time in the next couple years, but I graduated in 2012, so 10-20 years is right on track for me.
When I was in high school there was widespread disinformation about even being able to afford to attend college. We even had a college information night at my high school where a financial aid expert told us that financial aid was capped at something like $10,000 total and so we better get good at applying for scholarships.
Had I known how easily financial aid was obtained I would have been more ambitious in which colleges I applied to. As it was I nearly enlisted in the reserves to help with my in-state tuition, which as a poor kid was still a daunting sum.
I've seen several discussions recently pointing out that tuition has actually been falling the past few years, likely because people were getting so hard-hit by the story about rising tuition (and also because the demographic that goes to college has been shrinking):
1) 30% of students having more than $30k in debt is still a lot though
2) The “college wage premium” is not evenly distributed at all - there are definitely some careers for which $30k is a year or less of premium, but plenty others that aren’t. Colleges charge frustratingly similar fees for computer science and social work degrees.
The problem is that “college is always worth it for everyone no matter what your interests are” was the message, when the truth is more like “as long as you focus on a well-paying field, you graduate more or less on time, and you don’t literally max out your available loans, college is a good investment”.
Its also the fact that people are increasingly questioning what the college wage premium actually is coming from. Colleges (and high school admins) have, for years, tried to claim that there is a causal relationship between college education and the wage premium. As more people are exposed to what little is actually taught there, more people are coming to the Bryan Caplan side of the argument, even if they have no idea who Caplan or signaling is. They just have a general feeling of "this institution isn't really doing anything of value."
In Caplan's three-factor model (human capital, ability bias, and signaling), only ability bias is acausal. Signaling still has a causal effect on earnings.
Signalling is causal, but charging that much for it is basically blackmail and it's not surprising people would turn against it emotionally even if it looks individually rational to pay (c.f. all the studies about people being willing to pay money to punish defectors in micro-econ experiments)
I think most of the horror stories about crippling six-figure college debt come from people who borrowed money to pay for *grad school*. That can get expensive, because a lot of the traditional financial-aid sources go away after the BS/BA, and because by the time you are in grad school your lifestyle may no longer fit in a shared dorm room (if your university even has graduate dorms).
There are probably some fields where taking on a six-figure debt load to complete grad school makes sense because A: that's the standard for the field and B: as a doctor or a lawyer or whatever, you'll be making the six-figure salary to pay off that debt without too much trouble. But this requires budgetary skills and disciplines that many twenty-somethings lack; if your $100K starting salary goes to support a $120K lifestyle like all your friends seem to have, then the $100K debt can become a problem.
In most of the STEM fields, borrowing money for grad school is a sucker bet because *paying* money for grad school is a sucker bet - if you're good enough to go to grad school, they'll pay *you* for your research and/or teaching assistance, where you are creating real value.
And then there are the fields like History or English Lit, where you're paying six figures for a lottery ticket that gives you a 10% chance of wining a tenure-track professorship, otherwise you're going to be stuck as an adjunct or a barista forever.
Counting only the literal debt misses out on any money put in up front by parents, and the 4 years of lost income.
eg. PhDs are generally a bad decision economically, despite having no tuition costs and receiving a small stipend, simply because they take many years and the opportunity cost is thus very high (including in the sense that getting work experience boosts future income by more than having a PhD, in almost all fields)
34. I can't figure out what Loeb is doing here. He's a serious scientist who has made good discoveries. But the whole thing with Oumuamua being an alien light sail, despite little evidence of that, and this new thing with the "interstellar" alien technology at the bottom of the ocean is weird. Is he using it for publicity to attract funding for research? Astronomy could certainly use more money, but I'm not sure "aliens!" is the way to go. I mean there's a small possibility he's right, but for Oumuamua we really have no way of telling and the chances of finding a small rock that might have come from interstellar space at the bottom of the ocean are basically zero...
Isn’t the point (from a sensationalist perspective at least), that if the other object is aliens it’ll be much easier to spot the wreckage of their dilithium tesla hyperdrive than if it’s just a boring ol’ space rock?
It doesn't sound like he anticipates finding interstallar alien technology around New Zealand, just hoping to collect rock fragments from rock originating outside the solar system. I think his graduate student got private funding. I have no idea how they'd determine if a rock is from the solar system or not. It actually surprises me that anything but powder might survive an impact at that speed, but maybe that's all they'd need if it can be sifted in some way.
ahh. I hadn't seen that quote about him saying possibly a button or some component surviving. He's gotta be pulling legs with the speed/energy of the impact. Based on podcast conversations It sounds like he thinks there may be swarms or arrays of information gathering devices scattered throughout the galaxy and passing through star systems - so I guess maybe everything has a small chance to be that.
7. I'm having trouble understanding the 15 minute city idea. The PDF someone linked to said there was a priority on protecting local centres, which... I guess means strangling out their competition? I don't know how else you're protecting them.
The first link makes it sound like they're trying to turn Oxford into Midgar. That's a good way to get yourself stabbed in the back, and also blown up by Godzilla and smushed by rocks.
Just noticed the wonderfully idiotic phrase from the guy's third news link:
"There is an element of government control here. It is a reasonable, limited control of the same kind that tells us we can’t drive into lakes or other people’s living rooms."
That's right, just like driving through a lake or a living room, if you try to drive across districts the government is going to total your car and kill its occupants.
They explain it in this press release - the 15 minute city is a positive aspiration not directly related to congestion style charging to reduce through traffic in a medieval city.
"The misinformation online has linked the traffic filters to the 15-minute neighbourhoods proposal in the city council’s Local Plan 2040, suggesting that the traffic filters will be used to confine people to their local area. This is not true.
The 15-minute neighbourhoods proposal aims to ensure that every resident has all the essentials (shops, healthcare, parks) within a 15-minute walk of their home. They aim to support and add services, not restrict them. "
7. It seems worth clarifying that this was an Oxfordshire County Council plan. While Oxfordshire County Council is a government entity within the UK, it's not "the British government"!
Neat, I'd be curious to see comparisons to other rich countries (something in Europe and South Korea come to mind so you get a mix of West and East). The USA seems at the puritanical end of the spectrum, not just with gambling as you say.
The three-step gambling system for pachinko parlors is hilarious. You wonder if there's some Japanese law banning a two-step system, it seems one more step than I would have thought of, but then I'm not Japanese.
It seems almost unbelievable that women would wear such a ring - these signals have existed for ever in terms of shoe choice/low cut top/short skirt etc. Most women I know complain of too much attention despite not putting out clear signifiers.
The existing signals aren't very good. Plenty of women wear low cut tops for reasons other than signaling availability. Everyone involved gets frustrated.
There's a significant signaling problem in dating. Women actively want to attract a potential mate, but end up attracting a significantly larger number of unappealing candidates. A pear ring would seem to make the second situation far more likely, and may not actually increase the main goal.
Good prank if the pear ring thing becomes slightly successful but not to the point where most people know about it: give someone else such a ring, and see hijinks ensue.
If it gets me a romantic vacation interlude with twenty-something Jennifer Hetrick, go ahead, prank away. Bonus points if there's also a low-impact Indiana Jones adventure to go with it.
But I think the average outcome would fall into the "Mostly Harmless" category.
28. "Trevor’s understandably morally anxious about benefiting from his Jewish ethnicity. Should he be? Is this any worse than benefiting from white privilege or male privilege or whatever other forms of privilege they’ve invented since I last checked?"
I imagine Scott is just trying to provoke us into saying the following (but I think the following is correct):
This is a false analogy. To the extent "white privilege" and "male privilege" are still a thing, they are *statistical* realities, or even just decoys for the real thing (whiteness correlates with class, which in turn determines much of what gets called "white privilege"). The right analogues here would be "in the US, "Jewishness" [defined as straight maternal descend from Orthodox Jews living in 1800, say, or whatever else you want] correlates with class" (very likely true) or "being brought up in Judaism makes you less likely to be molested by a priest" (also true).
The right analogy would be with Old-Style white privilege - being entitled to certain things if and only if you were white (or white enough for whoever is testing). A thing in Apartheid South Africa, certainly. The G.I. Bill also worked out this way in the U.S. South, though perhaps in a slightly less openly declared way (though my understanding was that it was completely deliberate, and other people saw through it). Would you sign up for a generously funded benefit program open to whites and only to whites? Or Asians, people of Latin American descent, etc.?
"Is it any worse than benefiting from being an American, and so having access to social support and benefit programs that Sudanese and Bangladeshis can only dream of?"
That's a thornier issue. Your average citizen of a rich country probably does not think very often of what an enormous privilege it is to be born with that status - and they would be baffled to hear that that privilege is questionable. (Of course, that doesn't make it *not* questionable.) I've even heard it said that, if it weren't for those privileges, citizenship would be meaningless - that is saddening and unintentionally funny, as that is exactly what you would associate with Roman decadence, say: citizens thinking of citizenship _merely_ as a set of privileges (which are great, because they have them).
Of course that may also why most Israelis wouldn't wink twice at the proposition: unlike most American Jews, they are brought up to think that "Jewishness" is a nationality - and most Israelis are completely comfortable with having preferences for the dominant nationality in their country (and in fact, according to a recent poll, most of them openly believe citizens of that nationality should get preferences over fellow citizens not of that nationality).
(Or again, of course, being perceived as "white" can of course cause you to be perceived differently by many individuals (better for the most part, worse in some (expanding?) set of circumstances). ("White-skin privilege" is probably a much better name for this, since it doesn't depend on whether your background of family origins are in the main "white" demographic, however defined, or whether you pass any sort of one-drop rule.) But, again, having a Jewish last name can cause you to be perceived a little differently by some individuals (better in some cases, worse in others, though fortunately nowadays it's largely a non-issue for the most part), so *the analogue is already there*, sans Tulsa, and is different from what's going on in Tulsa.)
The problem becomes more apparent when you flip the inclusion/exclusion paradigm. It's not only inclusive or Jewish people, it's exclusive of everyone else. It's pretty obvious to most Americans why joining a group that implicitly says "no blacks allowed" is suspect. We've long heard of the injustice of white country clubs and old boys clubs excluding vast swathes of the population, and it's pretty difficult to oppose something like a whites only country club as you form a Jews only country club that is at least comparable in influence to the white only clubs of yester year. Is it or is it not a legitimate move to hoard resources and opportunities within your ethnic group?
Yglesias' point about crackdowns - that the first requirement was an honest and effective force capable of doing the cracking down, and that once you have such a thing, the exact method by which you use it to deal with the gangs is really irrelevant - seemed to me the really useful insight.
If your police (or military or paramilitary) force is capable of being bribed by the gangs, then it doesn't matter what orders you give it, it's not going to crack down in an way that is effective.
30. 15-20 years ago, I remember seeing someone point out the contrast between the WSJ, which at the time had made its editorial page free and kept its news behind a paywall, with the NYT, which at the time had done the opposite. It might have been Tyler Cowen, but I can't find the post now.
What was the contrast at that point? Right now the NYT paywalls everything but it's easy to defeat, whereas the WSJ paywalls everything and I can't figure out how to get past it. The NYT seems much more partisan to me, but then I'm to their right. ;)
It was what I said: NYT paywalled their opinion page and gave the news away for free, while the WSJ did the opposite, the implication being that subscribers read WSJ for their reporting and the NYT for the opinion pieces.
Oh, I don't know what the effect was. I just thought it was relevant that, at the time, the NYT thought that the opinion page was what people were willing to pay for.
23: My hunch is that people partially support those policies because they support / like Trump (i.e. reverse causality). So once he is elected his supporters no longer really care cause goal accomplished.
Or that people who previously supported those policies on some level just detest Trump so much that they don’t want to be associated with him so their support for the policy drops. A case of the all powerful “Social Desirability Bias”.
I know I'm late here, but this is exactly what I was thinking. When Trump is elected moderates and liberals who might once have supported populist policies are no longer willing to, because those are Trump policies and you wouldn't want to be mistaken for one of THOSE people, would you?
Hell, protective tariffs and immigration restrictions were coded left-populist until extremely recently. As recently as 2015 Bernie Sanders was giving interviews about how open borders are a Koch brothers-backed policy designed to disenfranchise the American working class [1], which minus the Koch brothers bit could come right out of a Trump speech. You'd better be damn careful expressing that sentiment in liberal circles today.
>My only concern about this story is that some other countries haven’t become any more extreme/partisan since the advent of the Internet - is this because their media didn’t undergo this process? Why not?
The American "city newspaper" is not a typical model for most countries. I live in Britain; we have city newspapers, but they are the second-tier publications, like the Manchester Evening News (my city paper). The first-tier newspapers are national newspapers. All of them are based in London, though one (the Guardian) used to be based in Manchester until the 1960s. Because there have usually been around ten national newspapers (there are seven that have been continuously in print from before WWII; there are currently three others in print), they have had to compete with each other, and have often done so on the basis of their political positioning.
The city newspapers were usually exactly the sort of inoffensive entities stuffed full of ads that was described, but the national newspapers have always been viciously partisan. A famous 1992 headline, on election day, ran "If Kinnock wins today, will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights" https://pressgazette.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2016/04/The-Sun-If-Kinnock-Wins-Today-600x755.png This was in the then highest-circulation newspaper in the country.
The reasons for this are pretty simple: you can get an overnight train from London to just about anywhere in the country, so the first copies of the paper off the presses at about 10pm were loaded onto trains for the most distant parts of the country, with later printings progressively headed for closer regions. The upshot is that the entirety of Great Britain could, by the 1860s, read the national press. Americans, accustomed to newspapers being associated with a city, tend to refer to The Times as "The Times of London", to distinguish from the New York Times; this isn't incorrect (its editorial offices are, indeed, in London), but The Times of England or of Britain would be more informative.
It wasn't possible until the arrival of air freight to physically distribute a newspaper around the entire United States overnight, so a late-evening printing of the New York Times could be delivered in San Francisco the next morning, and air freight would make newspapers very expensive. The only national American newspaper is USA Today, which operates by having 37 printing presses spread around the country and electronically transmitting page layouts to each, so identical papers are printed in a variety of places. The technology to do this didn't exist until the late 1970s, and USA Today was founded in 1982, by which time the American "city newspaper" model was established.
The other upshot is that the UK distribution model (until it broke down recently with the internet) was that there were large numbers of independent newsagents who hired deliverers who would deliver the paper of choice to each household, so the newsagent would have a few hundred houses on their books, and each would order the paper they chose, and then the deliverer would deliver that paper to that house, then a different paper to the next house, and so on. The US distribution model was for the newspaper itself to organise delivery; this made it much harder for new newspapers to break into the market in a city. USA Today was usually only available at newsstands.
Just as an example of how different it was; in the 1990s and 2000s, if you stayed in a hotel in the UK, they would ask you which newspaper you wanted in the morning and would then deliver the requested paper to each room. In the US, you generally just got USA Today, or the local city newspaper, and they didn't ask.
During the time period in which USA Today has existed (1982-present), the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post have doubled as national papers as well despite their histories as local/regional papers. Newsstands and public libraries throughout the country typically carried all three, home delivery subscriptions (both full daily delivery and weekly delivery of the Sunday edition) were available and advertised through the country, and I seem to recall that WSJ at least was commonly available at hotels frequented by business travellers. There are also a bunch of national weekly news magazines: US News, Newsweek, Time, etc.
In addition, there's a long history of newspapers local to different parts of the country printing the same content outside their "local" or "metro" sections, through various combinations of syndication, partnership, shared ownership, and wire service articles.
That said, I believe you that the UK's geographical compactness has traditionally given their broadly-circulated papers a more national character than US papers, as the reach needed to be a regional papers in the US would make for a national papers in the UK. In addition, London dominates the UK far more than any American city does to the US, being by far the largest city as well as the capital, the central hub of the transportation network, and the main financial and cultural center; which combined with geographic factors really blurs the lines between "London newspaper" and "national newspaper".
I never get the impression that the NYT and WaPo see each other as competitors in the way that, say, the Times and the Telegraph do. I chose those British papers because they have similar ideologies to each other, and have similar class/status positions (ie, they are both "broadsheets", both have a serious image, and both aim at middle class and upper middle class customers), which I'd say is largely also true of the NYT and WaPo. Both compete for journalists, but I think of the British pair as much more competing for readers, where the US pair would expect non-locals to read and subscribe to both.
Most European national presses are exactly that: national, as opposed to regional papers that are available nationwide.
The German press is mostly regional: Süddeutsche Zeitung (Munich), Frankfurter Allgemeine (Frankfurt), Handelsblatt (Dusseldorf), Die Welt (Hamburg), Der Tagesspiegel (Berlin). Bild and Taz are both national (and both are now based in Berlin), and all of those "regional" papers are available nationwide.
Even though the papers are regional they tend to be divided by political allegiance: SZ is the left-liberals, FAZ, the right-liberals, Die Welt is the right, die taz is the New Left (one of the groups that formed the Greens). There isn't really a social democrat (SPD) paper, though SZ is probably the closest since 1982 (when the liberal party joined a right-wing coalition and most left-liberals split with it). Handelsblatt is the main business paper - the equivalent to the British Financial Times or the American Wall Street Journal, ie in a different market.
The French press is dominated by Paris (Le Monde, Libération, Le Figaro). There isn't a French tradition of a popular tabloid press the way there is in Britain (Sun, Mirror, Star, Mail) or Germany (Bild), so circulation was always much lower than in the UK or Germany, and the French regionals (Ouest-France, Dépêche du Midi, Midi Libre, Sud Ouest, etc) used to be a much bigger deal than the British equivalents (Yorkshire Post, Manchester Evening News, Liverpool Echo, Evening Standard, etc).
With the exception of the ideologically regional press (e.g. the Basque and Catalan papers in Spain or the Scottish papers in Britain) I can't think of any European country other than Germany and Switzerland where there are major newspapers that aren't national and the vast majority are based in the capital city (about half of the Italian press is based in Milan, other countries are solidly capital-centred).
Just to clarify: I think if you asked an NYT marketer "why should I read the NYT instead of the WaPo?" or vice versa, they'd probably say "you should read both" or "because you live in New York / Washington and we have local coverage as well as national".
Whereas if you asked someone in Britain, you'd hear "the Telegraph is overly committed to the Tories and the Times is more of a critical friend", or "you can't trust the Times not to support the Lib Dems", or "the Guardian is too left-wing" or whatever.
I seem to recall the NYT being marketed widely in the pre-Internet days (e.g. TV and radio spots hawking NYT subscriptions (sometimes Sunday only) to people living in Michigan).
I don’t know that they ever said “read us, not USA Today” but they definitely were positioning themselves as a national source of news for anyone who wanted to consider themselves well read.
My impression is that NYT and WaPo have had a long-standing rivalry with each trying to position itself as being the best American newspaper for serious, respectable journalism. They compete mainly in terms of quality of access to well-placed sources and the ensuing ability to break big stories first while still being responsible about verifying accuracy, aiming for the same market niche and taking very similar technocratic center-left editorial stances. The Wall Street Journal also aims at high levels of respectability, but emphasizes financial and business news over politics and takes a center-right editorial stances when it does get political.
There's also a secondary differentiation that WaPo has a really good comics section (or at least they did in the 90s and early 2000s when I was reading them somewhat regularly), while NYT takes the stance (dating back to their 19th century rivalry with Pulitzer's New York World and Hearst's New York Journal) that comics are a gimmick for gossip rags.
Within their respective home markets, NYT's and WaPo 's main local rivals (the New York Post and the Washington Times) compete by emphasizing local news and sports reporting (especially the NY Post, which has a reputation for excellent in-depth coverage of NYC sports teams), taking populist-conservative editorial stances, and inclining towards being sensationalist gossip rags in their national news reporting. Both have some national presence now, but I get the impression that that's mainly a function of the blogging era when sensationalist partisan news is a good way to get links shared for your articles and there's a particular market for conservative populism.
Disagree: even in 90s, if you wanted sunday times in DC, you had to go to some bookstore that carried it, and get there early enough to get a copy. Times and Post really didn't become national in any sense until 90s, after USA Today paved the way. WSJ was (and remains) a different case, because business has to read it (somewhat like the economist).
> They also hoped that sometime in the future there would be a “fire alarm” - something would happen to get people and policy-makers’ attention - and then the political route would open up. [...] I personally am pretty surprised it was just “GPT-4 got released and was very good”. [...] I’m starting to worry that the problem won’t be building a political coalition against unsafe AI, the problem will be not overshooting and banning all AI forever.
It's a bit early to worry about *that*.
AFAIK there no mainstream politician has publicly come out in support of slowing down AI research. The idea of AGI risk is seen with contempt and derision by your average tech-savvy internet nerd, let alone your average 40-something blue-collar worker.
Sure, big names are coming around, but as far as the public goes? There's about as much support for AGI safety as there would be for a carbon tax in the 1980s.
I don't think there's a massive public upswell of support for regulating prediction markets, crypto, or basically safe medical studies that have slightly-too-short-consent-forms, but all those things happened.
I'm not imagining this as "Congress passes a law saying no AI ever", I'm imagining it as regulators, in the normal course of their regulating, comparable to the way they regulate social media, putting so many restrictions on AI that it becomes prohibitively expensive to do it and nobody does.
Well, in the absence of a massive public upswell of support you need some powerful vested interests, which explains all your other examples. Laws don't pass randomly, or by a handful of lawmakers' whimsy because nobody else was paying attention that day in Congress.
In the case of prediction markets, you have a long-standing broadly popular opposition to (and laws heavily regulating) gambling, plus companies that do legalized gambling that might cast a jaundiced eye on upstarts. In the case of crypto you have long-standing broadly popular financial regulation that tries to avoid anything that seems scammy, and trading an asset that has zero intrinsic value seems mighty close to that, on first inspection. And in the case of medical studies you have the most powerful interest group of all, which is lawyers.
If the latter ever happens, I think you are entirely correct, and moreover that swell would be sufficient to cut off any further use of AIs. So either way I think it's never going to happen -- either because it can't happen at all, or because people won't let it happen any further once they see it get started.
What may very well happen, on the other hand, is that use of AI technology disrupts some minor sector or other of employment, and some people do indeed lose their jobs and have to refocus. It will be permitted because the benefits to most people outweight the losses to some. It happened to typists, travel agents, and grooms, I see no reason it can't happen to code monkeys, English teachers, and journalists.
Not sure how you define AI in ways that you can't avoid by calling what you're doing software of some other type, and regulators never, ever act on a 6-month time frame, let alone impose immediate pauses, basically can't do so given requirements before they act. So if there's urgency here, don't look to the regulators, even if all you care about is U.S.
I really love everything about HustleGPT, especially because it turned out to be absolutely useless and the guy is desperately trying to convert his 15 minutes into money, but it looks like that's not going to well either.
2. "Why are furries so artistically and economically influential compared to other fetishes?"
I don't know, 50 Shades of Grey sold a lot of copies, people are using ideas of consent drawn from kink in vanilla sex (sometimes to unreasonable lengths in my view), role-playing games are using the stoplight system...
5. Extremely un-PC hypothesis: a lot of the academic rules on dating are invented by lesbians trying to compete for bisexual women by driving out straight (or bi) men. I don't know where else to put this that will actually get reasonably smart people to come up with critiques but won't dismiss it out of hand or simply believe it as part of the 'gay agenda'.
6. So more money won't make chronically unhappy people happy, but will make everyone else happier? Yeah, I'd believe that. Didn't someone show here it was actually logarithmic, such that going from about $100K to $200K is like going from $50K to $100K, but it was hard to recruit enough rich people to prove it? Tracks my personal experience but that proves nothing.
15. I suspect the cat's out of the bag on that one, but worth trying.
21. With the college thing I think the debt problem has grown to the point it's reaching parity--i.e., jumping ahead in the job queue with a college degree no longer justifies the now-huge debt you acquire. That's assuming you don't get into Harvard, of course, and what point in the prestige hierarchy breakeven is reached is probably questionable and depends on a bunch of other things.
22. Seems like a nice idea, silly though it is. A lot of people don't want to be flirted with, so they made it socially dangerous to do so (at least in liberal areas)...so this solves that problem. I kind of doubt it'll catch on. If there's one thing we know we nerds suck at it's romance.
23. The obvious answer is their policies don't work. ;) You could say the same about communists, and I wonder if there's a certain symmetry there. My guess is right-wing populists drive off the professional class necessary to implement policy successfully, which was certainly a problem with Trump--he had to rely on people more interested in tax cuts to staff his administration. Honestly he wasn't doing so bad in some ways until COVID hit--the economy was growing without inflation and he didn't start any wars. A less narcissistic person (which is to say, anybody) might have pulled out a close reelection.
28. Go for it, dude. The thing I've realized after reaching middle age is, everyone takes advantage of their privileges, and then lies about it to make well-meaning, honest people feel guilty so they don't take advantage of theirs. This one seems pretty good for everyone--Middle America seems underinvested right now. I don't know about the culture clash between the 'blue' Jewish arrivals and the 'red' locals, but as David Brooks has pointed out, blue cities in red states are doing pretty well. Maybe the challenge is to keep either side from getting all the power.
35. Well, that other genocidal dictator was a painter.
5. I feel like there’s not enough lesbians or bi women for them to wield this kind of influence. A more likely and equally un PC explanation is that it’s ugly women who are jealous of the attention certain women get from men so they problematize it by demonizing the men and making the women victims as a cope.
There’s some truth to that. I think the ideas “trickle up” in the sense that even attractive women benefit from using them to 1.) control men and 2.) protect their self esteem when they get hurt.
But wait, it’s definitely a common name but if you’re the comedian I just wanna say I’m a huge fan. If not, well you share the name with a pretty famous comic/podcaster.
Sailer had something like that theory for why media would have stories about how horrible it is that young co-eds are being asked out on dates by MBAs.
You wouldn't think there is enough, but the movement against it is really driven out of feminists/women studies departments and the HR world, and those are all areas where lesbians are vastly overrepresented.
I doubt that is the main driver, but I bet it is some part of the story. When I was dating a woman in a masters of women's studies program (briefly...it wasn't a good idea), I was really struck by how the department seemed to be half (or more) lesbians, and that their main focus was on getting women to hate men and problematize women's relationships with men.
Not that a lot of their criticisms weren't correct, but they tended to be unnecessarily hostile and myopic as regards benefits of heterosexuality, which um clearly has some direct benefits to them.
5. Eh, it's a semi-plausible just-so story, those are a dime a dozen. I wouldn't use it except as a cheap shot against an outgroup. Are bi women that much of a percentage out of Lesbian's dating pools ? Don't Lesbians already have several significant advantages when it comes to competing with men over bi women, chief among which are (1) The exotic factor (not many of them) (2) Being the same gender they are chasing (3) Being a minority and the automatic cookies that come with that.
If you replace "Lesbians" by "Feminists", you might be onto something. Feminists in general, Lesbians or not, are into demonizing men. Even the saner subsets believe - at some level or the other, explicitly or otherwise - that men are inherently a threat to women in the gender competitions. The name itself invites looking at gender relations as a classical ingroup-outgroup dynamics, with *all* what that entails.
So yeah, "A group that is suspicious of men is trying to make their life harder", not that surprising, however offensive it is. The only thing you need to prove now is that Feminists wield significant authority at the right administrative levels, which is also not that hard.
Don't Lesbians already have several significant advantages when it comes to competing with men over bi women, chief among which are (1) The exotic factor (not many of them) (2) Being the same gender they are chasing (3) Being a minority and the automatic cookies that come with that.
"
Well, against that is the fact that they are a PITA to have relationships with...
"Are bi women that much of a percentage out of lesbians' dating pools?"
Yes. The two major groups within LGB orientations are gay men and bi women, this is well established. If you're an exclusive lesbian you're almost certain to have either a bi girlfriend or no girlfriend. (Conversely this is also the source of some lesbians being comically rigorous about never having been with a man in any capacity, while gay men do no such thing.)
Regarding research about the Catholic Church from Martin-Luther-University: I'm working there (science department) and can assure everyone that we're pretty much the most secular institution in the least religious part of the world (former East Germany). ;-)
By the way, regarding nuclear power, it's worth noting how utterly different the attitudes to nuclear power are in comparable countries. At the same time as Germany has proudly switched off its last power plants, Finland - smaller, but similar to Germany in many ways, though also different in many ways - has basically all parties in the new parliament supporting more nuclear power, and in a recent poll 68% of people see nuclear as "positive" or "very positive" and only 6% as "negative" or "very negative". https://twitter.com/Kaikenhuippu/status/1649011146362433539
For the same reason, many twins from earlier cohorts lived as singletons when the other twin died. Ronald Fisher, for example, had a twin brother who died in infancy. Accordingly, you would expect the number of highly successful twin pairs to be increasing over time, especially very recently.
I never knew this about twin iqs, but my explanation is that tiny differences that exist between people make the difference between “great” and “extremely great”. So even if two twins are 99.9% identical, thar 0.1% is enough of a difference to make one a household name compared to the other. If Ronald Fishers twin brother would have lived, he’s likely to have been brilliant and successful, but perhaps not quite to the same degree. He probably would have been a doctor, or something, and may have been in the top 100 scientists of his day rather than top 10 like his brother. What’s really the difference between, say, the 92nd and 6th best scientists of the early 20th century? Not much. On a grand scale they’re basically equal in intelligence. Yet from a legacy perspective one is far more “successful” than the other. It’s just that being “extremely successful” brings together a whole bunch of low probabilities that are unlikely to happen twice, let alone once.
But it's not just that it's rare to have pairs of famous identical twins, but it seems to be rare to have _one_ famous identical twin.
Roughly one out of every 125 people is an identical twin. Among the thousand most famous people in the world there should be about eight people who have an identical twin, but it's hard to think of any. From a bit of googling I find the following famous twins:
1. The Winklevoss twins (both twins are famous)
2. The Olsen twins (but they only became famous because their twin-ness allowed them to be cast as a single person in Full House)
3. Rami Malek, the somewhat famous actor, has an identical twin
4. Uh, two of the guys from Good Charlotte?
Other lists of famous twins seem to very quickly get down into people I've never heard of.
I don't think any of the people I've mentioned count within the thousand most famous people in the world, and certainly not the thousand most famous people in history.
2. The twins thing has an intuitive explanation for me:
There’s probably so few “extremely successful” identical twins because the marginal difference between “highly successful” and “extremely successful” is often razor thin. I’m going to use sports as an example because it’s very easy to evaluate objectively, but I believe the talent distribution we see so clearly in sports exists in other domains as well.
The difference between a guy who, for example, ends up playing 12 seasons in the NBA and a guy who never makes a roster and plays overseas is extremely tiny, especially from an outside perspective. If you have 2 twins, one is 6’8” with a 7’ wingspan, and one is 6’6.5” with a 6’9.5” wingspan, that alone is enough to make one person an NBA prospect and the other just a great D1 basketball player. Even though both guys are functionally the same, in todays world of max efficiency those small differences determine whether someone is “extremely successful” or just regular old successful.
I assume the same principle applies to the difference between, say, a world renowned physicist at MIT vs his twin brother in the physics department at Ohio State, or whatever (example is purely hypothetical). Both brilliant and successful, and on a scale of all humanity pretty much equally smart.
I think this, combined with just how rare identical twins are pretty much explains it fully.
I'd even go as far as saying that two 1000% identical twins by any reasonable measure, of which one became extremely sucessful, the other twin still only has a moderately increased chance of becoming extremely sucessful. Which still rounds to almost zero since the baseline is so low. Just from my own field, the difference between an experimental result that "goes viral" and another equally well-done experiment that becomes just a run-of-the-mill lowly cited paper is almost 100% unpredictable before you've done it. Or the difference between an arcane detail of a contentious theory being solved, and that arcane detail turning out to be a major breakthrough that makes the theory dominant. And so on.
Exactly. There’s not much randomness involved in being “successful” but the jump from there to being “extremely successful” has a massive amount of randomness and chance involved.
I forgot about them lol. I was thinking of identical twins Keegan and Kris Murray, the former was drafted 4th overall last year while the latter is still at Iowa and likely to be a much later pick this coming draft.
Pear ring seems like a great idea, but I wish that someone would invent and publicize a gay version so I can advertise my singleness to the correct gender. Rainbow? Purple? I pass as straight, and I definitely don't want a piece of jewelry to cause me to be constantly approached by men.
I'm...guessing you're a lesbian? You could get a little rainbow ring thing. Men might think you were bi though. I don't know, go to lots of feminist stuff. Unless you're a right-leaning lesbian (unlikely but hey, this is SSC), in which case I know OkCupid had a 'hide me from straight people' option fairly recently.
The other possibility is you're gay, in which case you could continue passing as straight and have a small rainbow wristband or pin or something for when you want to go out and meet someone.
Re #28, why would these billionaires think this is a good idea? They do realize this exactly plays into (and in this case confirms) the anti-Jewish trope of Jews being more successful because of nepotism, where other Jews in high places preferentially grant jobs and benefits to their "tribesmen" over the "goyim," right? I fail to see how they think creating the exact classic conditions for resentment against a local Jewish community would be a good idea for their local Jewish community. Maybe a few more talented Jewish people move in because of this program, at the cost of all the locals who find out about this program viewing them (and by extension the Jews already there) as privileged interlopers and not wanting anything to do with them. Seems like a pretty obvious net loss to me.
(Edit because I realized I confused the words "interloper" and "interlocutor")
If the locals also get benefits from the billionaires' projects I don't see why they would be so upset
Also, it's silly to care more about playing into stereotype than achieving your goals. It's also a stereotype that jews are rich. Should jews eschew good paying jobs? Obviously not.
Exactly. And to Drethelin: the point is not just that these are stereotypes, but that these are stereotypical *vices*, which will also reflect poorly on people who do not engage in them.
With regards to Gwern's question on writing vs. coding in the morning. My best coding time is usually around 9-11am. 8-9am I'm still waking up, 11am I'm starting to get hungry for lunch. I usually eat at noon, then I'm tired from eating lunch from roughly 1-2:00. 2:00-3:30 can sometimes be ok if I'm well rested enough and I'm usually getting tired again as the afternoon wears on. The later I code, the more easy mistakes I make, which I usually catch the next morning while wondering what on earth I was thinking.
I've also noticed that most of my best ideas come in the morning, oftentimes I'll wake up with them. To me, there is very clearly some mental background process that continues to work on whatever problem I'm dealing with at the time, and whose results generally filter into my consciousness in the morning after waking. If we assume this process is similar, this would explain why writers feel more effective in the morning: they are getting the creative output of their sleep processes when they wake up.
As to why coders stereo-typically like to stay up late, while I might be biased, I think coding is probably more rewarding that writing is and this leads people to get wrapped up in it in a way writers typically don't. You can write a bit of code that adds a bit of functionality, then you can test it and figure out all the little bugs that inevitably creep in, fixing each one is a little reward like solving a puzzle. And when you fix all of them and the code works and you can see the new feature, that's a bigger reward and so, so satisfying. Fixing the bugs can also task you, because you are so close to having it working and you just need to iron out those kinks so 5 more minutes to try 1 more thing.... can become 1 hour, then 2 (it's pretty easy to get into a flow state when coding). That said, as I mentioned before, my ability to code degrades the more tired I am, especially as the evening wears on and irrespective of how focused I am on the task, so I place being well rested at a premium to maintain optimum coding ability. Everyone else seems to just rely on caffeine (I don't use it so I'm pretty sure I'm an outlier, for whatever that's worth).
> To me, there is very clearly some mental background process that continues to work on whatever problem I'm dealing with at the time, and whose results generally filter into my consciousness in the morning after waking.
Definitely. Background processing is going on while awake too. I’ve seen programmers in the middle of an unrelated conversation raise an index finger say “Oh yeah, gotta go” and go back to their desk with a solution to a knotty problem. Weird, but it does happen.
Then there’s the whole sitting up in bed in the middle of the night thing too. “So that’s it”
> My only concern about this story is that some other countries haven’t become any more extreme/partisan since the advent of the Internet - is this because their media didn’t undergo this process?
UK newspapers were always partisan. UK broadcast media aren't allowed to be. If you want to understand US polarisation, the repeal of the fairness doctrine should be your first port of call.
I mean I'm sure there's far left-wingers who think that the BBC isn't far enough left, but you gotta be pretty far left to think that.
Maybe the rightmost 50% of the population think the BBC is too far left, the next 30% think it's pretty fine and the leftmost 20% think it's too far right.
A big reason behind #21, the drop in people saying college is worth the cost, is that the opportunity costs went way up: youth unemployment went from 16.3% in 2013 to 7.5% now.
"The alignment community always figured their concerns sounded too weird for normal people to care about, that politics was a lost cause, and that our best hope lay in technical research. They also hoped that sometime in the future there would be a “fire alarm” - something would happen to get people and policy-makers’ attention - and then the political route would open up. I personally am pretty surprised it was just “GPT-4 got released and was very good”."
And this was always a bizarre belief. Rationalists did not invent AI fear, or even AI doomerism. How much of science fiction is about a mad scientist creating a being that turns on him? That's what Frankenstein is about, and that was written in 1818! Isaac Asimov's "I, Robot" series, written in the 1940s and 1950s, is about the problems of AI alignment. One of the most iconic evil AIs, HAL 9000, is from the 1960s. So are Daleks, who want to exterminate the whole universe. More recently, we have movies like Matrix or Terminator, TV series like Battlestar Galactica, and video games like Horizon Zero Dawn.
Storytellers have been taping into the public's fear of AI since before AI existed. Whether they like to admit it or not, rationalists are embedded in this culture and take their inspiration from it. It's no surprise whatsoever that improved AI capabilities would heighten AI fears and potentially lead to the government snuffing out the most revolutionary technology since electricity.
I've been saying for several years that remote work is not sustainable for businesses, maybe any large business. That we're seeing significant drops makes perfect sense to me, and I don't think we'll ever get to the point where a majority of jobs are even partially remote. Honestly, it seems that any discussion of significant remote work is a symptom of the types of people who have the freedom to write about such things being one of the few professions where it might work (journalism).
The core problem is that most employees do not have the knowledge and drive to start a career remotely. Even if experienced employees can complete their tasks from home, new employees need direction and training (this includes experienced employees starting at a new business in most cases).
If you allow your long term employees to work remotely, there's no one around to enculturate and train the new employees. You've also got potentially significant problems making sure that work is being completed and that employees are using their time effectively. Many information jobs that could work remotely involve long term projects from multiple people, which permits some people to ride on the accomplishments of others or pretend to get their work done before some deadline looms and stuff crashes. This exists in person, but proximity allows managers to have more opportunities to review and notice problems.
Compounding this is the fact that the vast majority of jobs require a physical output at a particular location. You can't be a remote nurse, mechanic, farmer, dock worker, etc. That he thinks only 40% of workers will be fully in person is pretty much insane, if you understand the types of work that exist. We're not going to have WFH for the service industry, manufacturing, construction, retail sales (distribution network), let alone the more obvious like mining and agriculture. These fields make up about 80% of the private sector workforce. That a few people could work remotely for companies in these fields is probably true, but we're talking well under 1%, probably far less.
Even speaking theoretically, it's probably the case that fewer than 10% of jobs can even be done partially from home. The chart pictured above is probably only a subsection of jobs - likely not polling too many restaurants or nursing homes to determine the percent of people working from home.
These are great points. It’s a bit annoying how entrenched the “bosses only want us in the office to feel important / because they don’t actually do anything valuable” position has become.
There is a grain of truth there - I think bosses were genuinely way too paranoid about WFH being an excuse to slack prior to COVID forcing the issue. And the idea that the workplace is a magical place of essential collaboration that is absolutely worth the added cost of maintaining a building and commuting in all circumstances is dumb.
But the idea that WFH is cost-free for all or most office workers is equally dumb.
Well, it is essentially magical as far as our understanding of collaboration and skill transfer is concerned. Whether it's worth the cost is another question.
IT might be different but my first job was in one of the FAANGs and the mentorship I received, or expected, was exactly none after the first day on boarding. Of course 18 years of education was behind all that. I was expected to work it out
I also got no formal mentorship, but I absolutely spent a lot of over-the-shoulder time with more experienced engineers and my technical lead. In some sense I think this is MORE critical if you don’t have a great, formalized onboarding and mentorship program. Informal training and mentorship is easier in person.
+1 on all of this. If you are a veteran knowledge worker who doesn't mind finishing out your career as a siloed content creator, full remote is great. It doesn't work nearly as well for newbies, or collaborative teams, or anyone who wants to advance beyond solitary content creation. And as noted, it doesn't work at all for the vast majority of jobs. And for the jobs it *does* work for, hybrid is usually better than remote.
I'm also with Gbdub on how annoying it is to be told that it's only the evil bosses trying to preserve on-site work because they get their jollies watching their minions slave away. As a lazy manager, I've always found that the best course is to hire the sort of minions who almost don't need managing. But that works best when they can most easily reach out to one another for assistance. And during COVID, it was my staff who took it on themselves to organize all the off-site get-togethers and invite me, not the other way around.
Full remote is for people who have a very strong reason to live 100+ miles from their workplace, and are willing to accept the resulting limitations, and almost never for new hires who want to succeed.
I don't know about businesses, but it's my feeling that it's not sustainable for the employees. If you are out of touch with the company, you will be among those surprised by being let go.
"A few years ago a weird object called Oumuamua entered the solar system and a few astronomers speculated in might have been an alien spacecraft (it’s since left). "
I was taught that the Catholic Church becoming anti-science for the Counter-Reformation is what allowed Protestantism to seize the pro-science position.
Copernicus, after all, did his fateful research in the employ of the Church trying to develop a better calendar that correctly dated holidays with respect to the life of Jesus. His book didn't really get much traction even in the scientific community until it got an endorsement from Tycho Brahe, on account of some testably wrong predictions Copernicus made based on a much too small solar system. (The endorsement being posthumous and probably actually attributable to Brahe's student Kepler is another story.)
Initially, the Protestants opposed heliocentrism as an "innovation". They complained of a pattern of behavior by the Church of interpreting the Bible to the point of, in the Protestants' eyes, changing the meaning. Heliocentrism is one of the flimsier ones. First, the orthodoxy here was more Aristotelean than Biblical. But even the Biblical textual argument is weak; as I understand it, the argument comes down to two passages: Bereshit 1:1-3 (God split Heaven and Earth before creating light), and a single line from Joshua (*something* happened to the sun by Joshua's command; the Protestants translated it as "stopped", modern Jewish scholarship has it as "disappeared", perhaps like an eclipse). Both were sort of flimsy arguments! But in the Protestants' eyes they fit into a larger pattern, and taking cheap shots at an opponent's controversial theory is a common way people score points.
But as part of the Counter-Reformation, the Church chose to go fully hard-ass on heliocentrism. Possibly *because* the Protestants were so ineffective at stamping science out, the Church might have felt they could make the case that they were holier and more originalist than the Protestants. They had the institutional advantage to run those inquisitions, after all. But by this point the Scientific Revolution was clearly in full swing, and while Galileo was a jerk his trial was clearly a bit funky, and so the Protestants had the opportunity to pivot to the pro-science position.
That equilibrium lasted a few hundred years. For my money, it seems less true now; these days Evangelical Protestants seem at least as skeptical of science as the Church.
It’s more than this - the Protestants were generally less keen on science than the Catholics, but they were also much weaker in their own countries as they were completely dependant on the local monarch/nobility (who liked guns, clocks and fireworks, and went to the same parties as the scientists).
Interestingly, the central difference between Catholicism and Protestantism can usefully be summarized as the debate between "trust the experts" (i.e., the Pope) and "do your own research" (i.e., read the Bible in your own language). I think this debate has complicated interactions on many levels with the development of science.
Except that, in Protestantism, you had to absolutely (and fundamentally) accept the bible. Hence fundamentalism. That’s also an appeal to authority, even if multiple sects understood the authority differently.
The main reason science and Protestantism seem to accelerate at the same time is the printing press is necessary for both.
A big reason for Luther's Reformation was that during the Renaissance, Italian cardinals had gotten highly worldly and elitist -- which included art and science. About a half century into the Reformation, the Catholic Church decided to fight back by adopting a lot of anti-elite Protestant tendencies during its new Counter-Reformation. Eventually this led to the Galileo controversy, which dragged on for about 20 years at the highest levels of Italian Church, before finally coming down against Galileo about a century after Luther started the Reformation.
Before anyone comes up with a rationale for the result of this study, I'd like to point out that its methodology is laughably bad - all the author did was count the English-language Wikipedia's entries for people he thinks should qualify as scientists, with very dubious criteria: "Additionally, either for robustness purposes or in order to augment the number of observations, we will sometimes use the more-broadly-defined metric ‘intellectuals’".
6. From your summary, if they were both right, then neither was right. My understanding is that they concluded "some people get happier with more money, whereas some people don't."
31. I never agreed with Guzey's conclusion from that first debunking article (the only one of his that I read) -- IMO plenty of sleep is obviously important. But his meta-point seemed more important: that most evidence is pretty muddled and popularizers disingenuously present it to the public. But reading this link, maybe I was just projecting this meta-point onto him if he actually tried to sleep 4 hours a day.
I took it to mean that unhappy/depressed people won't be made much happier even with a lot more money, while generally happy people will go "another $10,000? now I can afford to do that thing I wanted to do!" and they express that happiness/satisfaction.
I agree with you about Guzey--his article struck me as bizarre, because he spent most of it explaining how all our scientific evidence about sleep is very low quality and doesn't replicate, and then concluded "sleeping a lot is almost definitely bad for you and most people should sleep less".
The answer to why Brazilian jiu-jitsu took so long to invent is simple: for all it likes to pretend, MMA is not like actual combat. If you really want to win a fight, you bring a friend or use a weapon. Both of those give you huge advantages, and it's what everyone did: norms of "help your friend in any fight and ask questions later" and "always carry at least a knife" are extremely widespread across cultures. Extended, one-on-one, completely unarmed combat just didn't happen often at all. No one got good at MMA until people started playing by MMA rules.
"Also that AI wiping out humanity is “not inconceivable . . . that’s all I’ll say”
Completely unsurprising. We have two centuries of literature conceiving of AI being bad in one way or another (I count Frankenstein's Monster as AI), and as soon as "wiping out humanity" became a thing, AI was fingered as a possible villain the next day.
I think Curtis Yarvin was right when he recognized AI alarmism as a modern manifestation of the golem myth (man creates thing to do his bidding, it gets out of control and goes on a rampage).
You can do as much psychoanalysis as you want (and maybe even be correct about the sources of people's feelings), but it has no bearing on whether there's an actual risk. Yarvin's arguments for why people shouldn't worry about AI destroying humanity are 90% bloviating and literary references, and 10% "but how will it build robots good enough to keep the data centers running".
I think he was still spot-on in his argument to the effect of "AI would still need to build massive testing facilities in meatspace to develop a superweapon, and people would be able to easily notice that and shut it down." This being a result of the fact that physical systems are chaotic, and you can't simulate them well enough to engineer any device of any significant complexity without real-world testing, no matter how much computing power you have. This might not address all the potential doomsday scenarios in the AI risk gish gallop, but it at least covers the ones of the "AI does some sort of nanomachine magic and everyone dies" type that Yudkowsky likes to go on about.
I don't think that the stealth nanobots are impossible, but they aren't the load-bearing part of AI risk, and Yudkowsky's emphasis on them is but one of his many PR blunders. But even a flawless PR campaign probably wouldn't help if alignment is anywhere near as hard as he thinks it is, and would still be irrelevant if it's easy.
I don't think it's just a PR blunder, it's an intellectual blunder.
I think that stealth nanobots are the load-bearing part of AI risk... and if not stealth nanobots then some equivalent technology. If I were convinced such a thing was likely to be possible then I'd personally be a lot more concerned about AI risk.
I agree with this. The "sudden AI death" scenario depends on the AI somehow being able to kill us all basically (or literally) overnight so there's no time to respond. Which has never made any sense to me, personally.
I mean, if stealth nanobots existed, wouldn't this be a big concern all by itself, even in the *absence* of any hint of AIs? It's not like only AIs would think of using them.
I'm curious what you do think is the load-bearing part of AI risk, then. This relates to why I described AI risk discourse as a gish gallop, because it seems like as soon as you explain why one proposed vector of AI doomsday is impossible and ridiculous based on how the physical and computational systems involved actually work, the AI risk theorist has come up with another crazy scenario, and once you defuse that possibility, they now have three more. The whole thing seems almost to be based on a pre-established assumption that AI represents an x-risk, justifying any scenario that leads to that conclusion, no matter how contrived (just like how the creationist gish galloper takes creationism as an axiom, and then comes up with endless supposed evidence to justify the conclusion he's already settled on).
To me, the load-bearing part is admitting that sufficiently smarter than you entities are possible. The default expectation, given that, is that you can't control them and eventually they will amass more resources than you collectively have, at which point you're at their mercy. I think that Karnofsky's overview is pretty good: https://www.cold-takes.com/ai-could-defeat-all-of-us-combined/
The thing about the golem myth is that it’s a myth because it was impossible to *make golems*, not because it’s obvious that golems would be rampage-proof.
Or that twins, especially identical ones, try very hard to be distinguishable personalities, because everyone tends to treat them as a unit. So perhaps if Bill works on becoming the world's leading expert on reed buntings, Ben will decide to become a musician.
Furthermore, at very high levels of achievement, one of them will almost certainly be obviously better if they pursue the same field. So one probably abandons the effort and finds their own path lest they always be the “less successful twin”.
Not my experience with identical twins. If only a particular set of twins I worked with a few years ago had even changed one thing - hairstyle, clothing, voice, demeanour I wouldn’t have annoyed them more than once by getting their name(s) wrong.
(Which genuinely annoyed them.)
Of course the other thing they could have done to avoid this problem was not work in the same place.
Does anyone know whether the Minnesota twins studies (specifically MISTRA) analyzed mean differences in personality traits between twins raised together versus apart? I'm aware MISTRA primarily focused on heritability, so maybe not; curious about the influence of the unique twin bond on traits, and if it's evident when comparing average levels between groups.
And has anyone checked up on the babies he used as living experiments? Are they okay? Did it all work out? If we're going to decide that cut-n-paste humans are the way forward, at least let us find out if it worked okay or not the first time.
"The twins spent their first weeks in a hospital neonatal intensive care unit. Lulu and Nana were born prematurely, by emergency cesarean section at 31 weeks, and initially had difficulty breathing. The health problems that Lulu and Nana experienced at birth could be a result of known risks of twin pregnancies and conventional in vitro fertilization treatments. Or they could be the result of unknown risks associated with CRISPR gene editing. Today the children are reportedly healthy, but their future is unknown."
“I can’t tell whether they’re claiming Stalin was actually very good - or that he pretended his poems were anonymous, and everyone else praised them lavishly while pretending not to know Stalin wrote them.”
Stephen Kotkin’s biography suggests his talents were recognized even when he was an unknown revolutionary under the Tsar:
“As a teenager, he had abandoned a successful trajectory, with high marks in school, to fight tsarist oppression, and published first-rate poems in a Georgian newspaper, which he recited in front of others. (‘To this day his beautiful, sonorous lyrics echo in my ears,’ one person would recall.)”
Could this be a piece of evidence in favor of a "g-factor" that makes certain individuals simply much more likely to have extreme success at whatever they put their efforts towards? The skills necessary to write a nationally-prominent poem and to scheme your way to controlling one of the world's superpowers seem quite distinct, and yet Stalin apparently had a several sigma above average level of ability in both, which seems unlikely to be a coincidence.
I could see that argument holding if the man in question was Lenin, but Stalin wasn't really a proselytizer of the revolution - he was the guy who got his hands dirty, from robbing banks for the proletariat, to brutally undermining and backstabbing anyone within the party who got between him and power. So I'd say it was less a way with words and more a Machiavellian ability at power games and scheming, which seems less immediately connected to the cognitive processes behind poetry. Hence the theory that there's some sort of generalist factor at play.
It can't be too generalist, or he'd have been better at more stuff.
It seems more likely to me that Stalin simply had a strong ability "for something", and found a way to leverage it both to write poems, and also to seize control of the largest country in the world.
>It can't be too generalist, or he'd have been better at more stuff.
Are we sure he wouldn't have been, and poetry and dictatorship just happened to be the areas he decided to turn his passions towards? Are there any areas where he was known to have been passionate or made an attempt to master, but failed? Such a case would be what would differentiate between the two hypotheses.
That's a good point. Seizing control of the largest country in the world probably doesn't leave a lot of spare time for anything else. And it's not like stepping down would be a possibility, if he wanted to live. So once he set down that road, he could never leave.
I do think it says something that he seems to have been better at getting and keeping power, than he was at actually running the state. The Lysenko saga seems like a good case there.
He oversaw the transition of a lethargic agrarian backwater into a nuclear-wielding superpower, with a victory in the largest ever war in between. There's a common refrain in certain quarters how all of that was "in spite of him", but it doesn't look like countries saddled with incompetent dictators usually manage to achieve much in spite of them.
Stalin really had three talents, two of which were relevant to a dictatorship. The first was his skill at art (and the least relevant). The second was his extremely good organizational and management skills. The third was his masterful ability to be a political knife fighter. Stalin was also always a workaholic.
However, Stalin he was actually a notably weak Marxist theoretician. Something he was embarrassed about and tried, with limited success, to rectify throughout his life. He was also not very good at geopolitics or diplomacy and also not very good at military affairs. His knowledge of technology wasn't amazing either (he famously held up the development of computers). He wasn't a master criminal either. So he was a man with strengths and weaknesses rather than some all consuming ability to be successful at anything.
> 27. [...] One of the few rare victories for these voting systems was Fargo, North Dakota...
Approval voting has struggled to gain momentum. But ranked-choice voting has actually been having a run of successes in the past few years: the mayoral primaries in NYC, the mayoral election in Burlington, VT, statewide elections in Alaska and Maine...
The voting nerds have good theoretical reasons to like approval voting, but I've tended to think ranked choice/instant runoff is a lot easier to understand and makes more sense to voters. The problem with approval voting is how much it requires strategizing. You're supposed to vote for whichever candidates you "approve" of. But if you really like candidate 1, you think candidate 2 is not great, and you absolutely hate candidate 3, should you "approve" of candidate 2? To answer this you have to be following the polls closely and figuring out what other voters are likely to do.
Instant Runoff isn't a big threat to the two big political parties, whereas approval voting is.
IRV, at least in the US context, can be expected to result in continued dominance of the big two parties. Some people will vote for a minor candidate as their first preference, but inevitably all votes wind up getting directed either towards the Republican or the Democrat.
Approval voting is more dangerous because the natural winner is some kind of likeable centrist. I would actually worry that in approval voting nobody can ever win except for a likeable centrist. Pretty soon all candidates are competing to be the most centrist of all, and the two political parties are left right out.
Some of us might consider that a good thing. :) Which is why it'll never happen, because the two parties have all the power.
I do feel like there's some game-theoretic explanation for a lot of our polarization problems in terms of the duopoly which the MSM is burying because it might hurt the Democrats.
Australia has IRV (or ranked choice, not sure what the difference is) and mandatory voting, and the observable result has been both major parties competing to occupy the centre - which is way better for the country than the mess the USA has.
I will note that while IRV does still lead to 2 dominant major parties, it also has allowed a number of minor parties to get a bunch of seats, with the Greens having a bunch and a variety of other parties managing one or two seats each. Not enough to ever form government, and usually not enough to cause minority governments, but it still allows for a lot more ideological viewpoints to be aired in Parliament.
One of my hobby horses is to point out that, while the most common implementation thereof, IRV is merely a subset of RCV methods and Condorcet methods have significant advantages.
Do you have a link that explains why Condorcet methods would be better? Condorcet seems like quite a bit more effort for voters to understand, which means likely reduced participation. And a quick google search suggests the Condorcet winner can be problematic. For example, from an essay about the 2022 Alaska race (https://democracysos.substack.com/p/alaska-election-results-show-why):
"With RCV, winning candidates in a single-winner contest (like a governor, mayor or a representative of a legislative district) must have BOTH a broad base of support AND a strong core of support. RCV rewards both deep support as evidenced by a high number of first rankings, and broad support, as evidenced by many backup rankings. But with Condorcet and these other methods, winners only need to have a broad base of support, and do not need much core support."
Again, Condorcet is a form of ranked choice voting (RCV); if you mean IRV, please say that.
Voters do not need to understand how to *implement* the algorithm as long as they understand the purpose: Condorcet methods select the candidate who would beat every other in a two-way race.
There used to be a nice table on Wikipedia showing which methods met which criteria (obviously none meet all per Arrow), but it seems to have been edited away. IRV satisfies fewer. The core v. breadth of support argument is just FUD.
Yeah, in that quote it says RCV, but from the rest of the article it's clear they're comparing Condorcet with instant runoff.
I think it's important for voters to understand how the outcome is reached in order to have a reasonable level of trust in the voting system. Yes, the idea behind Condorcet is pretty simple--but if you're adding it on (presumably with instant-runoff as the backstop if there's no Condorcet winner?) then you're increasing the complexity, and frankly most voters are not going to bother learning how the new system works, they'll just understand that it's a complicated system and they don't know how the conclusion is reached. And if their candidate loses, they'll be angry.
Number of criteria satisfied is not actually very relevant, since they don't all have equal importance. And some factors are harder to formalize, like the idea that someone who is almost nobody's first choice would lack a governing mandate and the emotional support of the electorate. You can certainly make an argument that compromise candidates are an improvement over see-sawing between opposed viewpoints, but I don't think it's obvious at all.
I wish that table were still available so I could check my memory, but I think that it showed Condorcet meeting every criterion IRV did and then some, and one of the extras was from Arrow's main set (clone independence, perhaps?).
There are Condorcet methods that have built in breakers if there isn't a single winner; best I've been able to tell they are functionally equivalent (reverse the closest pairwise result) even if the implementation details differ. I like to use a rock-paper-scissors analogy as an example of this sort of problem (you'd only ever get two remaining candidates if they exactly tied): the paper is in shreds after cut by the scissors, the scissors are bent uselessly out shape when smashed by the rock, but the rock is unaffected by being covered by the paper -> rock wins.
Personally I would rather elected officials be boringly competent and *not* have an emotional connection with the populace. Calvin Coolidge FTW. The alternative is just demagoguery with extra steps.
Every complex system is equivalent to FPTP when there are only two candidates, and I can't see why any system would be preferable if it picks a winner who would lose (by definition) in such a race to the Condorcet winner.
To be clear, I'm not opposed to IRV; it would be worlds better than FPTP, and once the electorate is comfortable with ranked ballots Condorcet *might* become politically feasible (I'm under no illusions that it currently is). Mostly I'm just salty about IRV proponents coopting the term RCV, making that future conversation unnecessarily harder.
It’s a bit odd you giving out to him about getting voting systems wrong. Your original post was full of acronyms and could convince nobody of anything, except people who agreed with you to begin with.
It was primarily nitpicking about terminology (the abbreviations were of terms in the comment I replied to, so I took it as given that their meanings were inferrable), with a side of merely stating a thesis that was developed over the rest of the conversation. An infodump about the latter would've obscured the former & was beside the point until there was a request for additional information.
I absolutely agree that I'm doing a "special crackpot that works mostly for me" diet but hoping to find what the magic button is ;) It would be great if we could interpolate from all those one-off crackpot diets that work and find one common ingredient. Maybe not, but maybe.
The magic button is probably the hypothesized 'fat-thermostat' (sometimes called the lipostat), which is a sort of thermostat that determines how much fat your body 'wants' to carry. Losing fat is relatively easy an can apparently be done in a variety of ways. In fact, it almost seems as if general-purpose fat loss formula is: do something markedly different what whatever you've been doing in the past and your body will respond by becoming (temporarily) leaner. But if you don't change the fat-thermostat's set-point, your body will eventually fight back and add fat until you get back to your old shape.
A problem with the fat-thermostat thing is that nobody seems to know if it exists or what it is. But I have a theory. This theory is based on the observation that we can tell who will become fat in the future, even if they are not fat in the present. This on its own would make a neat experiment: take a bunch of photos of attractive young adults and ask the experiment's participants to predict the subject-of-the-photo's BMI ten years in the future. I'll wager that people's predictions of future-BMI will be highly accurate - even if you eliminate or control for indications of socioeconomic class in the test photos. I'd love to see this experiment done, but my fat-thermostat hunch requires us to take the future-BMI-is-predictable hypothesis at face value for now, because my proposal for the identity of the fat-thermostat is that the fat-thermostat is just those traits we observe that allows us to predict future BMI - small localized fat pockets.
When we see an attractive young adult but bet that they will be fat in the future, we're responding to the presence (or absence) of small patches of fat - the cheeks and jowls, maybe under the arms, the love handles, certain places on the abdomen etc. - all of the so-called 'baby fat' spots. Even a lean person can have these little slight deposits that act as a good predictor of future corpulence. And the reverse is true too - when a heavy person loses enough fat to become lean, they retain pockets of fat in these 'hard to lose' places. Which in turn betokens that they will become fat again in the future if they abandon their diet and exercise regimen. Or, probably even if they don't! My fat-thermostat idea is that it's these pockets of fat the are the source of the signals that produce the metabolic and behavioral changes that drive up BMI.
How might we test this idea? Liposuction. It's well known that liposuction is generally ineffective. BUT! there are two broad types of liposuction procedures. One is so-called 'sculpting', which removes precisely the fat deposits I'm talking about - jowls and cheeks, under arms, love handles etc. The other is of course bulk, general purpose fat removal from the abdomen, legs, thighs etc. My hypothesis is this: if we had access to data about past liposuction procedures, that we'd see two clusters: people who became fat again and a small set people who stayed lean, and that the cluster of people who stayed lean are correlated with having had 'sculpting' procedures done in addition to bulk fat removal. I'm imagining that people who are obese enough to resort to liposuction usually don't get any of the 'sculpting' work done. Who needs to sharpen their jawline when they've got an enormous abdomen? But I'm proposing that those few who also get fat taken from their jowls, and under their arms etc - that these few stay lean(ish) compared to those who don't. Secondly, I hypothesize that if you look at people who have only had 'sculpting' liposuction on hard to lose fat deposits, that their BMIs decrease afterwards.
I definitely think there is a "lipostat," at least functionally. I doubt that it's an exact number of body fat % or whatever saved off in the brain somewhere, like one might imagine, but it might just be a local equilibrium between competing hormones or other signals.
But that's not the "button," that's the thermostat. What's the button we can press on the thermostat to lose fat?
I disagree that we can easily lose weight. There are plenty of "eat something different" experiments without any significant weight loss. In fact, I'd say we don't know of ANY reliable way to sustainably lose fat. We can starve people for a while and they'll lose a bit of fat, but it also drives their metabolism into the ground and almost all of them gain all the weight back quickly.
In fact, I don't think I know anyone who's lost over 25lbs and kept it off except by doing a version of low-carb, and then only those people who were drinking excess soda and fruit juices.
So the lipostat is not "the button," but the "button" only works if there is a lipostat.
'relatively easy' to lose fat - relative to how difficult it is to keep it off, which is nearly impossible. The lipostat isn't a button - it's a dial, but turning it down will cause fat loss. Once the lipostat has been turned down, then a bunch of metabolic and behavioral changes kick in. Suddenly joining a beach volleyball team seems like a good idea. Suddenly veggies taste great. Suddenly you're too busy to eat full meals and so you grab a sandwich on the go. etc. The lipostat /might/ be competing hormones, but I'm saying that I think it's pockets of baby fat. Those are the signaling nodes.
I think the lipostat isn't a button/dial, it's a feedback loop. But it HAS a button or dial (hopefully). "There exists a lipostat" is not actionable. A button you can push, a dial you can turn.
E.g. maybe the button is insulin. So to turn down the lipostat, eat less insulinogenic foods, or eat them apart from energy-dense foods (1 carb/protein meal, 1 fat meal?), or concentrate them only in 1 period of time. This would explain a whole bunch of marginally successful diets (low-carb, time-restricted eating/OMAD, even low-fat).
Of course just speculation that it's insulin, but it's one of the better hypotheses I know of.
I'm not sure if the baby fat pockets are causal or simply symptoms.
On 5, British Universities are different to American ones. In particular, 18-year-olds are viewed entirely as adults, and the university is a business they pay to provide them instruction in a specific subject. There’s no expectation that they’ll provide any pastoral care, and you only rent a room from them in your first year (where they’re basically just your landlord). They’re not in any sense responsible for you; if any of them tried to impose an honour code, that would be as weird as McDonald’s imposing one on its customers.
Dating your lecturer (who may or may not be a professor) doesn’t seem any stranger to me than dating your dentist, with the caveat that they shouldn’t mark your exams to stop them being biased in your favour.
(Exceptions to this are that there’s been a slow pressure towards Americanising for the last few years driven by the general infantilisation of society, and Oxbridge works completely differently from everywhere else).
Dating YOUR professor seems potentially problematic from a power dynamics standpoint. Dating “some other professor” really doesn’t.
That said I think if you mean actual “professors” there is likely a pretty wide age gap, which feels at least a little distasteful when one of the parties is barely legal.
You say Americanizing, but I think the degree to which e.g. workplace romance or dating your doctor is actually avoided in practice is fairly limited. At my big faceless corporation for example, intra office romance is fine as long as you aren’t in the same reporting chain (and this has as much to do with nepotism as it does with concerns about consent).
I didn't mean Americanising in dating, so much as in the relationship between students and their universities; in the US, it always seems much more paternalistic/pastoral than in the UK, where the relationship isn't really different to what you'd expect if you enrolled in a car repair course aged 40.
That makes more sense. I don’t have experience with UK universities to compare, but US ones do have some paternalistic instincts. Although it would be nice if they’d focus a little more of that paternalism on “make sure students they matriculate are actually academically and financially prepared to make college worth their time and money”.
I have the impression that doctors are not supposed to have sexual relationships with current patients according to professional ethics guidelines. Maybe dentists are different, I don’t know.
Also apparently at least some British universities apparently ban relationships between staff and students eg UCL.
The Gathering Place in Tulsa (funded by oil millionaire turned banking billionaire, but who's counting) is really quite amazing. Both Tulsa and Oklahoma City are doing impressive things in terms of family-oriented public infrastructure, even if they are still essentially giant sprawl exurb metropolitan areas. Purple cities in red states can be pretty nice places to live.
>New weird either-genius-or-crackpot anthropology blog (origin of pronouns, snake cult theory of everything). My heuristic is that as soon as someone uses the phrase “Basque-[Anything]” they’re beyond salvation, but this person is trying very hard!
Would point out it's only the second most radical take about snake mythology. The anthropologist Jeremy Narby was studying a tribe in the amazon, and he participated in their Ayahuasca ceremonies. Like them, snakes appeared to him. Then he notices that creation myths link snakes to knowledge across the world. Egypt, Jewish, Australian, Amazonian, Indian...why are there always snakes? He suggestion is that western science is wrong, and that there are mystical ways of knowing, somehow connected to snakes.
My take is that snake venom is itself a hallucinogen, maybe it was used as part of a self-domestication package when recursion / self-awareness was first emerging.
They were probably a major threat back in the day, like big carnivores.
I recall reading (in the Atlantic, before the paywall) apparently most animals are afraid of the human voice. To steal from TV Tropes, in most of the natural world, humans are Cthulhu.
There really was a bear in Georgia that OD'd on cocaine, but the bear corpse in KY is not that bear, and their story of what happened to the real bear is a complete fabrication. The outfit displaying the supposed cocaine bear finally admitted as much.
I'm the anon commenter quoted in that article,, and I'd looked into the corpse-journey story a couple of years ago and found it was clearly BS (some parts didn't make sense, and I tracked down multiple people who could have verified parts of the story, and got "definitely didn't happen", "definitely not the bear", etc.)
Re the Tulsa thing, I am not sure how much he's correct in crediting Tulsa's transformation to Kaiser et al. Obvious disclaimer, I live in the other city in Oklahoma and am not super-familiar with Tulsa. But a lot of what he talks about (at least the non-Jewish parts) I'm seeing here in OKC, too, despite a lack of billionaires funding it (at least as far as I know). Which makes me suspect that structural factors (land is cheap, the government is pretty hands-off) and general demographic shifts are driving a lot of it. If you have people who want Culture, Culture will appear, and both OKC and Tulsa are big enough to have demand.
I'll definitely second the message that Oklahoma is a pretty nice place to be. My mortgage is about the same as my rent was in deep suburban LA for a place a third the size (and I had a really good deal there) and the government mostly leaves you alone. Gas is cheap, and it's safe. The only downside is the lack of battleships and that the local ACX community isn't that strong, but if you move, we can change that.
> Why are furries so artistically and economically influential compared to other fetishes?
I have a few theories:
First, unlike many other fetishes, the furry fetish can ONLY be satisfied by art. Into bondage? There's plenty of videos on PornHub. Into feet? The industrious editors of wikiFeet have you covered. But for furries, there is no photography, only art that has to be drawn, painted, or created digitally. Naturally, this results in the creation of a lot of art. A minority of furries are interested in photographs and videos of actual people having actual sex in fursuits, but they're definitely a small percentage (and even then, someone has to buy a fursuit from an artist who created it).
Second, the furry fandom is identity based. It's commonplace to have a "fursona" to represent yourself online (which is where furries spend all their time anyway). This creates a lot of demand for art, since people will want a visual for their furry avatar. In terms of porn, this makes it rather unique in that you can pay to have a representation of yourself in the pornography. I think it's pretty easy to see why that would appeal to people and lead to increased investment in furry fetish artwork relative to other fetishes.
Third, it's an internet-based culture. This leads to certain demographics associated with economic success. There's an overrepresentation of people in tech/IT. It's mostly male. When folks from other countries participate in English-speaking furry communities, you'll only be interacting with the people in those other countries who speak perfect English (a correlate of intelligence and economic success). And for what it's worth, the community is extremely autistic, something like 4x as likely to be autistic as the rest of the population (though I'm not sure what impact this has on their income).
Although...
I'm not actually sure if furries are that economically influential. It certainly seems that way based on the quantity of furry art, but is there actually data to support that idea? Sure, they appear to have a lot of money to burn on art, but furry art isn't always expensive. A lot of furry artists live in third world countries and make a living off doing commissions for people in first-world countries. Even if those commissions are only $10 USD, that can go a long way in a developing economy.
Plus, appearances could lead to a biased sample. I think a good analogy would be related to somebody hating gay people because they think they're all flamboyant and annoying. The issue here is that they don't notice the normal behavior of non-flamboyant gays because they don't realize non-flamboyant gays are gay at all. For furry art, we only see commissions from the wealthiest and most successful furries who can afford it. For every one of them, there might be 10 furries living in poverty.
Seems like a good question for someone like aella to answer via survey data.
Chapman has this peculiar duality when he allows himself wild flights of fancy is his philosophical theories, but when it comes to science and intelligence he suddenly starts asking for perfect rigor or it doesn't count. He admits that we don't know exactly how science works and how AI works, which apparently means that we should dismiss certain intuitions about these topics (except for his).
I could buy that the state of academe is the main bottleneck on science but that won't limit an AGI (it might stop it getting published, but it wouldn't stop it *doing science* for its own purposes, and (if aligned) putting it all on arXiv)
> The Roman Emperors thought Christians not performing the relevant sacrifices to the Gods were an externality, too.
Yeah, that's some real high-level discussion there. They've definitely got a grip on what externalities are and have good ideas on how to handle them. This definitely isn't just throwing out the laziest possible argument to avoid having to consider the possibility that you're having a negative effect on other people. I wonder if the response is the same to the externalities imposed by homeless people on the sidewalk or drug markets in public places.
I'm pretty sure the notion of an externality is nowhere near that old, so I doubt that Roman emperors had any such opinion. Even if they had some notion that was vaguely related, "this idea has been misused in the past" is not just a fully general counterargument against all externalities, it's a fully general argument against literally any idea!
Edit--also, it's not even clear to me that social cohesion is the relevant effect. It sounds to me like the reason this example was used because the emperors thought that gods actually existed and cared about sacrifices, to try to associate the concept of an externality with something that doesn't exist at all. Of course, this is complete nonsense--the externalities of cars clearly exist.
No, you can do that. You just have to put some actual effort in to making the argument rather than throwing out 1 example (a debatable one at that). No one seriously believes that it's impossible for one person to do something which inadvertently has negative effects on someone else. They may not call it "externality" but that's exactly what is being suggested when someone says they don't want an apartment building near them because of shade or congestion, or they don't want to take the train because there's a homeless person shouting obscenities on the platform, or they don't want to live in the same neighborhood as poor people.
Yes, I can. I am perfectly allowed to point out one glaring flaw in your argument. You are not owed my time and effort to debunk your entire worldview. You do not get to set the terms of the debate and demand everyone else adhere to them and dismiss them if they don't.
"Someone else once used a similar idea and it was bad" is not a "glaring flaw", it's about .01% of the way to an argument. You don't have to spend time and effort on anything if you don't want to, but a weak argument is still a weak argument. Making some irrelevant claim about "the terms of debate" won't change that fact.
Re 5 on professors dating students - I expect that most people are actually much more fine with that than most people affiliated with universities would be. I suspect the American poll results would be pretty much in line with the British ones. You can find plenty of examples of it happening in TV shows (here's a list that includes a lot of *high school* students dating teachers, as well as college students, not too many of which are portrayed very negatively: https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2017/08/168506/teacher-student-sexual-affairs-on-tv-shows - and it doesn't include cases like Jeff Winger dating his math professor in the first season of Community).
Meanwhile, within universities you have a lot of sentiment that is too far in the opposite direction. The Texas A&M University System (i.e., the thing controlled by the legislature that has authority over the College Station campus, as well as the others, so not the "woke" part, more the Republican part) a few years ago dropped a rule banning *all employees* from having "romantic, sexual, or amatory relationships" with undergraduate students, with only 24 hours notice to the campuses before the rule went into effect. Whoever wrote the rule realized they needed an exception for undergraduate student employees, but didn't understand that basically all graduate students count as "employees", and that the university is large enough that incoming grad students who are single are going to accidentally hook up with people from other parts of the university if they try to meet anyone in a forum other than carefully controlled online dating.
If you don't want to have sex with your professors, don't! It is that simple. I had a couple of close friendships with gay professors who desperately wanted to fuck me (I am straight as an arrow). One turned into a 25 year long friendship and we had/have hundreds of lunches/poker games etc. The only cost to me in that whole time was just shooting down a couple awkward passes every couple of years. Wow what a huge struggle, impossible to overcome. How will my psyche survive?
If you are worried about faculty manipulating or punishing students over romantic entanglements, make that the thing that is actually forbidden/tortable.
I do think it's a good thing, both for an individual and for their classmates, if it's clear that this sort of extracurricular activity between a current professor and a current student is off-limits - both so a student doesn't feel there *could* be some quid pro quo if they went along with something they weren't that into, and so that the classmates are clear that there isn't any quid pro quo that they are being shut out of. But I wouldn't endorse anything like the blanket policies that some institutions impose.
Re: the African birth rate decline: Scott’s gloss of it makes it sound like it’s consensus that Africa was terrifying everyone and pushing us towards overpop catastrophe.
This is the OPPOSITE narrative from what I’ve been hearing for the past several years in my circles: that overpopulation is mostly a eugenicist myth, that huge numbers of countries of developing countries are headed for UNDERpopulation crises, etc. So what gives?
Lots of other countries (especially East Asia, but also Europe) are on track for underpopulation crises, Africa was on track for an overpopulation crisis. You could theoretically solve both crises by redistributing Africans to Asia and Europe, but the Asians, Europeans, and Africans might have objections to that plan.
Regarding #37, article is paywalled but here is the nut of it:
"....few have noticed a wealth of new data that suggest that Africa’s birth rate is falling far more quickly than expected. Though plenty of growth is still baked in, this could have a huge impact on Africa’s total population by 2100. It could also provide a big boost to the continent’s economic development. “We have been underestimating what is happening in terms of fertility change in Africa,” says Jose Rimon II of Johns Hopkins University. “Africa will probably undergo the same kind of rapid changes as east Asia did.”
The UN’s population projections are widely seen as the most authoritative. Its latest report, published last year, contained considerably lower estimates for sub-Saharan Africa than those of a decade ago....
Yet even the UN’s latest projections may not be keeping pace with the rapid decline in fertility rates (the average number of children that women are expected to have) that some striking recent studies show. Most remarkable is Nigeria, where a UN-backed survey in 2021 found the fertility rate had fallen to 4.6 from 5.8 just five years earlier. This figure seems to be broadly confirmed by another survey, this time backed by USAID, America’s aid agency, which found a fertility rate of 4.8 in 2021, down from 6.1 in 2010. “Something is happening,” muses Argentina Matavel of the UN Population Fund.
If these findings are correct they would suggest that birth rates are falling at a similar pace to those in some parts of Asia, when that region saw its own population growth rates slow sharply in a process often known as a demographic transition.
A similar trend seems to be emerging in parts of the Sahel, which still has some of Africa’s highest fertility rates, and coastal west Africa. In Mali, for instance, the fertility rate fell from 6.3 to a still high 5.7 in six years. Senegal’s, at 3.9 in 2021, equates to one fewer baby per woman than little over a decade ago. So too in the Gambia, where the rate plunged from 5.6 in 2013 to 4.4 in 2020, and Ghana, where it fell from 4.2 to 3.8 in just three years....
Demographers are divided over how much to read into these recent surveys, particularly since the data they produce can be noisy. “When you see a precipitous decline in fertility, your starting-point is that something is wrong with the data,” says Tom Moultrie of the University of Cape Town....Yet even comparing only within iterations of the same survey (as The Economist has done with the figures above), the trend is evident. Comparing across them in the case of Niger, which has the world’s highest fertility rate but few surveys, shows a decline from 7.6 in 2012 to 6.2 in 2021.
Others are also reducing their projections. In 1972 the Club of Rome, a think-tank, published an influential book, “The Limits to Growth”, warning that consumption and population growth would lead to economic collapse. Now it says the population bomb may never go off: it reckons sub-Saharan Africa’s population may peak as soon as 2060, which is 40 years earlier than the UN’s projections.
Even so, fertility rates are not dipping uniformly. Some countries, including Angola, Cameroon and Congo, are seemingly stuck at relatively high rates. And there are often big regional differences within countries such as Kenya. Almost everywhere in Africa, fertility rates are much lower for urban women, who typically have 30-40% fewer children than those in the countryside....
Family planning, especially when promoted by outsiders, has often caught the ire of religious leaders. Yet in some places that may be changing. Clerics talk more often about family planning these days, notes Amina Mohammed, a devout mother on the outskirts of Kano. “There is no verse in the Holy Koran where Muslims are forbidden from controlling, planning or restricting the number of children they have,” says Shuaib Mukhtar Shuaib, one such cleric. The Prophet Muhammad tacitly approved of the withdrawal method, he continues. These days Idris Sulaiman Abubakar, a gynaecologist in Kano’s biggest public hospital, is more worried about the impact of Nigeria’s film industry on contraception than that of religion. “They’ll bring a story-line that the woman’s reproductive system was damaged because she uses pills,” he explains.
Girls’ education also makes a big difference to fertility rates. In Angola, for instance, women without any schooling have 7.8 children, whereas those with tertiary education have 2.3. Educated women have a better chance of a job, so the opportunity cost of staying at home to look after children is higher and they are more likely to win arguments with their husbands over how many kids to have.
Research by Endale Kebede, Anne Goujon and Wolfgang Lutz of the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital suggests that a stall in Africa’s demographic transition in the 2000s may have stemmed from the delayed effect of cuts in spending on education in the 1980s, when many African economies were in crisis. The rapid falls in fertility rates that now seem to be taking place could be because of the huge push to improve girls’ schooling in the past few decades....
"....the implications of continued or accelerated declines in fertility rates are enormous. For a start, Africa’s population—and therefore the world’s—would be considerably lower than most current projections. Take Nigeria. If the latest surveys are correct in finding that its fertility rate was 4.6 in 2021, this would suggest that it was already at a lower bound of the UN’s estimates and on a much lower fertility trajectory than the UN’s main forecast. Assuming Nigeria stays on the lower trajectory, then its population would get to about 342m people in 2060. That is some 90m people fewer than the UN’s current base estimate and some 200m fewer than it forecast ten years ago.
This is good news, though not, as some would have it, because Africa is overcrowded. In fact sub-Saharan Africa has an average of 48 people per square kilometre, which is far lower than Britain (277), Japan (346) or South Korea (531). Of sub-Saharan Africa’s five most populous countries, all are below Britain’s density. There is little evidence of whole African countries being stuck in a Malthusian trap, named after Thomas Malthus, who claimed population growth would outstrip food supply, leading to catastrophe. Trade and global food production, which is rising while the amount of land used for it is falling, means that neither sub-regions nor even countries need be self-sufficient provided their economies produce the wealth to buy it.
Nor is it because high population growth necessarily means economic growth per head is low. “It’s not very clear that we have the data to be able to say for sure that the population growth rate itself is bad or good,” says Anne Bakilana of the World Bank. Richer places have fewer children and higher savings rates. But teasing out the causality is tricky.
What is clearer is that the transition from high population growth to a lower one can bring a bevy of benefits. Women and children are both more likely to prosper as fertility rates fall. Fertility drops usually mean wider gaps between births and fewer teenage pregnancies: both help reduce risks to a mother’s health. And falling fertility rates mean there are more working-age adults relative to the number of children. With fewer mouths to feed at home, each child is more likely to get enough food, as well as books and uniforms for school. At the national level smaller cohorts could allow governments to spend more per child.
Falling fertility rates also excite economists because they boost both the working-age share of the population and the number of women in the workforce. More people working should boost prosperity. The faster fertility rates fall, the bigger the impact. A study in 2017 by Mahesh Karra and David Canning of Harvard University and Joshua Wilde of the University of South Florida estimates that lowering the fertility rate by one child per woman in Nigeria could almost double income per person by 2060. Yet for countries to reap a big dividend, those entering the job market need to be able to find productive jobs—a monumental challenge in a continent that must invest trillions of dollars in the infrastructure (such as roads, power lines and ports) needed to generate them."
The part I didn't get was why Scott said there were *2* obvious problems with the plan. De facto territorial borders are rather a major glaring flaw, yes, but what's the second one?
Man that North Dakota one is frustrating. It's just maddening to have local political change rugpulled on you. Like when the Supreme Court ruled states weren't allowed to put term limits on their federal representatives.
Tulsa has a long* history of oil billionaires using their wealth to indulge their particular whims and create cool stuff (see: anything beginning with "Phil," The History of Science collection (now in Norman), etc.)
I saw that, I know it technically doesn't impact the intellectual content of his opinions per se, but it really wasn't a good look. Something something Bayesian updating on his reliability.
I fail to see the connection. Highlighting the fact that DC police do not enforce the law regarding license plates doesn't seem to have much to do with saying that cracking down on violent gangs doesn't work. It is not hypocritical to want laws to be enforced and to be skeptical of the efficacy of crackdowns.
When someone selectively and performatively uses the law to punish People He Does Not Like, it is a sign that they regard the law as something which should be used to hurt Bad People (and therefore his definition of what working looks like). It also explains why the Stasi was so successful.
Who are the People He Does Not Like? Lawbreakers? I don't like criminals much either. Does wanting the laws to be enforced mean you want to hurt people? Laws, particularly regulations around motor vehicles, are meant to keep people from being hurt. You might as well say that someone who wants current gun control regulations to be enforced does so out of a desire to hurt people.
Go back to that selectively and performatively part. Because he sure isn't snitching on "lawbreakers" like prostitutes and drug users. And no, license plates have nothing to do with safety and everything to do with revenue.
License plates allow speeders, hit and runners, drive by shooters, etc, to be identified. We didn't mandate that every vehicle needs to be registered and display a license plate because the government needs more money, we did it because cars crash into things and run over people and there needs to be a way to identify whose responsible when that happens.
What evidence do you have that his highlighting of people who break the law regarding car licenses is "performative"? Typically that implies that he's doing it not for the reasons stated but for some other reason. What is that other reason? You previously mentioned it was punish People He Does Not Like, and I asked you who those people are. Why do you think he *really* tweets about people driving cars without a license plate, if its not merely that he believes that law should be enforced for the reasons he puts forward for why they should be enforced?
> Why do you think he *really* tweets about people driving cars without a license plate, if its not merely that he believes that law should be enforced for the reasons he puts forward for why they should be enforced?
At a guess, he wants to pick on people whose cars are nicer than his. Does he tweet about every shitty old Toyota he sees without a front plate, or just nice new BMWs?
"We didn't mandate that every vehicle needs to be registered and display a license plate because the government needs more money, we did it because cars crash into things and run over people and there needs to be a way to identify whose responsible when that happens."
We? Really?
And I can only assume you must be very young or never have moved from one state to another with a car if you believe it's not about money. Heck, NY will charge you the sales tax you "should" have paid if you bought your car in your previous state of residence prior to your move. If I get a speeding ticket in Montreal, it goes on my NY driving record because there is this little thing called "computer networks" that make it easy to identify my car regardless of where or if it was registered.
If you don't understand how tweeting out an action for your followers to see is performative then we will be unable to communicate on any kind of useful level.
"In the 80s and 90s, Tulsa experienced a decline. It got gross and dangerous. "
As someone who lived there (and was a stage electrician), this is completely wrong. You could run around downtown after midnight. It had a symphony orchestra, an amazingly good youth orchestra, a ballet company, and at least three theater companies.
Decline is relative, but gross isn't and to somehow consider Regan/Bush/Clinton era Tulsa as being "dangerous" when compared to Boston... RYFKM?
I particularly thought "Lizzo is coming to town!" as a selling point giggle-worthy, since every major pop/rock/country/Broadway touring company act had a show in Tulsa, I set some of them up.
No data, but my intuition is that the 70s was when things got fucked up. The 90s were the era of Giuliani turning Times Square from hooker central into a tourist hotspot using sweet, sweet brutality.
If you want to know what percent of Americans think college is worth the cost, you should just look at what percent of Americans go to college. Any delta between this and your poll results is cheap talk.
Also there is a confounder for polling purposes: many Americans have an exaggerated impression of how much college actually costs. The published sticker prices and average retail (actual) prices paid are a good bit lower than what people being polled will have read in media accounts about "the cost of college", because the media invariably banners the sticker prices not the actual prices paid.
For the 2020-21 school year the U.S. national averages (per the College Board) for one full school year were as follows. PSP is the sticker price, ARP is the average price actually paid. These average totals include room and board and fees in addition to tuition.
Public 2-year colleges: PSP $18,550, AVP $14,560
Public 4-year colleges, in-state students: PSP $26,820, ARP $19,490
Not true. Plenty of people feel they have to go to college merely because that’s what gets them an entry level job, a job that needed a high school diploma a few decades ago. They can resent going to college and still go to college.
This is just the "Revealed Preferences" bullshit again, built on the 2 fallacies of assuming that actions are always reliable indicators of desire, and that an individual's desire is the only desire that matters when deciding their actions. Both are wrong.
There are cases in which actions are arguably not reliable indicators of desire (eg addiction), but I’m hardly convinced “doing a four year degree” is an example of this. If someone bothers to to go to university, presumably they think it is “worth the cost” in some meaningful sense. Maybe it’s worthwhile in instrumental rather than intrinsic terms, and maybe this is only due to mafiaesque capture of the hiring pipeline. But if that’s what you’re interested in, ask questions about that. By contrast, if you want to know what people think the value of X is, sale prices are better data points than survey questions.
What most interested me about #6 was actually the magnitude of income's effect on happiness, rather than the non-linearities in the most + least happy groups:
> KD reported that the effect of an approximately fourfold difference in income is about equal to the effect of being a caregiver, twice as large as the effect of being married, about equal to the effect of a weekend, and less than a third as large as the effect of a headache.
Interesting to put this into perspective - I wish this had been emphasized! It was buried in a single paragraph in the middle of the paper.
That is fascinating! thanks for sharing! Surprised being married is half being a parent (which I assume is most of the "caregiver" category?), but I guess the not-married category includes plenty of people in relationships that haven't married yet, not only single people.
#20: "In fact, I’ve updated so far that I’m starting to worry that the problem won’t be building a political coalition against unsafe AI, the problem will be not overshooting and banning all AI forever. " Wow, that seems really implausible to me. Here's why: (1) Government has done very little so far to regulate the big tech companies, even when they are doing things that are harmful in a ways that are much more immediate and easy to understand than Foom -- for example, providing powerful vehicles for spreading misinformation. Why would AI change that? (2) There are enormous amounts of money to be made from AI. That will motivate the makers, and also the many many industries that can benefit from it, to support its continued development. (3) The main danger is hard to understand. I am smart, well-educated and have spent a lot of time reading about and discussing AI risks, and I still feel unable to judge how great a risk it poses to humanity. (4) My impression is that most of the public's not a bit concerned. Even most of my professional friends sort of chuckle when the subject comes up, as though it's an urban myth like that killer bees are about to invade.
I can think of 2 things that might nudge the US in the directing of reining in AI development: One would be some well-publicized bad events resulting from widespread use of GPT4: Cybercrime greatly increases; or a bunch of business go under because they give AI too much responsibility and it makes a big mistake; or some AI use in the financial industry causes alarming events in the stock market. The other is the reaction of groups of professionals whose jobs are shinking because AI can do so much of them. Recently saw a study of accuracy of AI and radiologists at making a yes/no judgment from a medical imaging result relating to a certain pulmonary problem. It was a problem where after a few days you knew for sure whether correct answer was yes or no. Radiologists alone were about 80% accurate, AI alone was about 84%. If the images AI was unsure of were passed to the radiologist, combined accuracy of AI plus radiologist was about 86%. Seems likely to me that training AI a bit more on the difficult-to-judge cases will result in AI alone being the most accurate way to handle ALL the images. Of course there will still be things for the radiologist to do -- but a LOT fewer of them. Seems like GPT4 & similar, unlike other advances, is going to be taking away the jobs of some upper middle class professionals.
But still I doubt that even the 2 things above that might make the public more afraid of AI and more resentful of it are enough to overcome the very powerful forces that nudge events in the direction of continued AI development.
(8) has been a fun story to watch unfold from the inside - for a lot of physicists in condensed matter room temperature superconductivity is the ultimate holy grail and absolutely nothing gets them wound up more than a good old fashioned USO (Unidentified Superconducting Object). These happen occasionally but the fact that this one actually got published in Nature makes it totally unique - they are going to get a huge black eye at the end of this debacle.
This has basically devolved into the physics version of a slapfight between Dias and Hirsch, conducted in the traditional way via weekly combative back-and-forth rants very thinly disguised as arxiv papers (see: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.00190).
Referencing an earlier comment from the hidden thread but I knew someone had to be doing this! Don’t understand how this doesn’t solve almost the whole thing.
#6 matches something that I've been thinking for a while. Money doesn't buy happiness if you're a baseline miserable person, but it does if you're a baseline-happy person.
As a baseline-happy person, I tend to be content unless I've got some particular reason to be miserable. As I've increased my wealth, I've managed to use money to remove many of those reasons to be miserable. I used to be too hot in the summer, now I have air conditioning. I used to sleep less comfortably on a cheap mattress, now I sleep very comfortably on a fancy mattress. I used to be miserable doing housework (or miserable living in a filthy house), now I pay someone to do it for me. There are still some other miseries that I'm not rich enough to solve, like flying economy class or needing to go to work, but with more money I could solve those too and be even happier.
Regarding right wing populists: It's because they usually advocate some degree of "law and order." Everyone wants to have law and order, no one wants to do it. High effort, high resistance.
It's like people voting to clean their room, and then support dropping when it's time to actually clean their room.
>keep it a good place to live while the rest of the Midwest hollows out
I beg your pardon? First of all, Oklahoma isn't centrally Midwestern. Neither is rust-belt Ohio or barren Wyoming. The states in between have plenty of nice healthy towns and cities (sure the rural population is declining, but that happens everywhere) that are great places to live if you can handle a little snow. We like our rich farmlands and tight-knit communities; California can't have them.
(Yes, I'm still salty about the Wall Drug bit in Unsong literalizing "flyover states"; why do you ask?)
But in fairness it is true that our (I'm a lifelong Midwesterner) small/medium cities are a special kind of dismal these days. Decatur Illinois and Battle Creek Michigan, those sorts of cities, probably a couple dozen of them across the Midwest. I'm old enough to remember when those were much livelier/healthier places than they are now.
#2 : I have a hypothesis that numbered lists is just a good propaganda/educational tool from a purely memetic point of view. I don't have evidence, it's just a plausible just-so story that came to me when I thought about the question deeply.
As a starting point, I note that modern clickbait journalism and buzzfeed-style content mills have always loved the numbered list, "7 REASONS TO <insert random thing>, NUMBER <insert number between 1 and 7> WILL SHOCK YOU". Communism was also famous for its 5 year plans and 4 things that need to abolished and things like that. Judaism has the Ten Commandments, Islam has (off the top of my head, and translated non-professionally from Arabic) the Five Pillars of Islam, the Ten Companions of The Prophet Foretold To Enter Heaven, the Seven People Who Will Enjoy Allah's Shade On Judgment Day, etc.... Martin Luther upended Europe and Christianity with a 95-point list.
What are the common factors of clickbait journalism, Judaism, Islam, Communism, and East Asian philosophy ? I can find nothing except that they were all ideologies or families of ideologies that needed to indoctrinate, to preach, to capture attention and hold it. Indoctrination and propaganda are not necessarily bad things, some forms of education are and should be indoctrination, and lots of good Art is propaganda. Indoctrination and propaganda are just general purpose tools to capture attention and convince people, they are understandably favorite tools for ideologies like Islam, but they are neutral tools nonetheless.
Anyway, can we find reasons why numbered lists are a good indoctrination and propaganda tool ? Here are the 7 reasons why numbered lists are a good linguistic tool :
(1) The number serves as a simple checksum against data corruption or forgetfulness. You might forget how many The Pillars of Islam were or mis-remember the number to be 3 or 4 or 7, but you can never (or very rarely) make that mistake with The Five Pillars of Islam.
(2) The number serves as an attention grabber that builds tension and invites a listener or a reader to continue paying attention to get to the final thing. A classic template for a joke is "3 Xs are Y", where X is any general category and Y is any activity or action. Stories has evolved numbered chapters, television shows has numbered episodes nested inside numbered seasons, and movie series has numbers on every movie. Media players has a timer countdown to tell you how many hours and minutes and seconds remain. Etc..., Numbers are a "Progress Bar" service that tells you how much of the thing remains, and this is valuable from an attention regulation point of view. It's a simpe musical rhythm that starts at 1 and gradually builds up to climax.
(3) Lists are a good info organization structure in general, striking a sweet spot between free-form text on the one hand and elaborate diagrams or other overly-structured complex data structures on the other. Lists are how lots of writers outline essays, speeches, stories, screenplays, etc...[1]. When Dan Bricklin, the inventor of spreadsheet software, was thinking about a way to reference variables, he striked upon the grid system (i.e. a numbered, lettered, 2D list) as a way of organizing and storing the values in a spreadsheet[2]. Arguments in Logic and Analytical philosophy are written as numbered lists of premises and conclusions. High-level overviews of algorithms and code in Computer Science and Software Engineering are often written as ordered lists of steps. Laws and Constitutions are written as lists. The oldest surviving writings are lists of financial transactions. TODO lists.
(4) Numbered lists invite sorting along some natural or important axis. For example, the Pillars of Islam is sorted according to difficulty. First you simply have to profess that there is no God but Allah, just say a single phrase with your mouth. Then you have to pray 5 times a day, slightly harder but still within the realm of easy. Next you have to donate 2.5% of your money yearly, now we're talking money, but still a relatively small amount. Next you have to fast in Ramadan, spending anywhere betwen 12 and 16 hours without food or water or sex, for 30 days. It's hard, especially in the summer, especially in the near-equator regions that Islam is the main religion in. Finally, you have to go to mecca to perform the Haij, an ancient Arabic religious practice that Islam kept. The Haij is so difficult that it's optional, you can be a Muslim whose health or finances don't allow you to perform the Haij.
Other lists may sort according to importance or historical recency or any other topic-specific notion, numbered lists allow and suggest that to you by their very nature.
(5) The number can invite comparisons, metaphors, imagery and analogies, whether justified or not. Humans have built a lot of culture and mythology around numbers, and plenty of important things in our biology and in nature in general has distinct numbers. Two eyes, Two hands, Five fingers per Hand, Ten fingers in total per pair of limbs. 7 as a holy number, 13 as a lucky (or unlucky) number. Addition to mean conjunction or unity (e.g. "A man and a woman, 2 people unite in love to be 1"). Etc... If your numbered list can invoke a number with already a rich cultural imagery or history, it can be more effective and memorable. One such cultural imagery is the concept of the numbered list itself : you can piggyback off a more popular and established numbered list to get your numbered list to the audience quicker and more effectively. For example, if I name my list The Three Laws of X, Newton's and Asimov's (both Issacs, coincidence ?) immediately come to mind, boosting the attention my audience give me, even if its mocking or hostile (e.g. "Who this guy thinks himself to be ?").
(6) The list serves as a FAQ that followers of the ideology can always refer new comers or hostile opponents to in order to know the ideology better or to correct misconceptions or reiterate the ideology's core values.
(7) Lists are flexible, each point has a variable scope so you can always shorten or lengthen the list as you please by selectively splitting or fine-graining points and conslidating them. This point itself is such an example, I thought of it purely to get the list's length to 7.
tldr; numbered lists are a natural tool for storytelling and oration, they have plenty of educational and memetic advantages and disparate ideologies and propagandists have gravitated to them independently.
"I was listening to Stalin on, uh, Spotify, on the way over here...
And I'm talking about I listen to early Stalin. Not the later shit when he sold out. Early Stalin, when he was paranoid and he had the military behind him. Not when he started talking about wheat!"
29. The paper starts the clock on counting scientists in 1450. But what about before then? Before Francis Bacon was Roger Bacon. During the Renaissance there were lots of scientists in Italy, and then they went away. But were there many before the Renaissance? I don't know. Maybe it was just a return to normal.
Re: 5 I think what's going on is that the people most likely to talk about professor student dating are likely doing so either because:
1) They are in academia themselves in which case they have an incentive to signal that they totally aren't creepily into dating their students (and a lesser but still powerful signally concern for female academics).
2) Because it's an issue of concern for them. Few people who are just 'shrug it's not a big deal' are going to be very animated about it.
Overall this seems like an issue which suffers from a strong bias to overreport only one direction of concern. And that's bad because I think we are making things worse by imposing such strict rules for professor-student and, especially, TA-student dating.
Let's be honest, there is a great deal of temptation for this to happen. There are women who find that relationship sexy and men who are tempted to date younger women. So let's play out how this happens under a regime that says we fire professors who date their students and one that just requires reporting or class switches or mild punishment.
The student who dates under rule that says it's fine just give notice won't feel pressure not to ask to be transferred to a different class, advisor or even just to seek advice from someone else. OTOH, a relationship under the firing rule will necessarily start with the professor explaining that it's critical it be kept secret, that they'll lose their job if anyone ever finds out. That's going to make the student feel very reluctant to reach out (especially because they probably still have some feelings for the prof and just want get out of the situation not get them fired) for any help and absent that will have no way to extract themselves from the situation. And abusive relationships tend to make the victim doubt themselves. They, no matter how wrongly, may feel guilty for inducing the professor to put their career on the line.
Yes, you'll deter some professor student relationships from happening at all. However, that deterrence will be concentrated primarily among those who are best adjusted/most rule following and thus least likely to use psychological pressure, threats etc.. to manipulate a student. So the end result is you've probably denied some people a fun time and created a really awful trap for the most vulnerable students for the worst abusers of power to use against them.
The AI Risk phenomenon is a great example of why humanity will probably never implement most of the transformative technologies people have been theorizing about for centuries, if not millennia (i.e., nuclear energy - both fission and fusion, genetic engineering, gene therapy for common diseases, stem-cell therapy, space travel, etc.). Instead of working finding ways to properly integrate a new, transformative technology in ways that benefits our society, we consistently choose to regulate it either to death or near-death. Think about the number of problems that exist today because we have such low risk-tolerance and fail to organize enough cognitive capital to create ways to integrate these technologies in a sustainable way and make sure errors do not lead to a public outcry and subsequent bans.
As our world develops its communication technologies, any negative effect of a potential new technology will immediately be known to most of the world and will most likely be regulated to death, near-death, complete-uselessness, or near-uselessness.
Part of the problem is new tech is always on some pathway to worldwide use with time. Almost everyone will be using it given a reasonable amount of time. This propagates problems that otherwise would have been contained and effects which would be minimal. Part of the way to mitigate risk is to make sure the tech is only used in a constrained space where leakage is very low.
On BJJ and the related question of traditional martial arts vs. MMA, the explanation is simply that traditional martial arts have become stylized to fuck as it's become less acceptable *and* less needful to straight up murder a guy without using firearms. You can find video clips of traditional martial artists smashing someone's face in; they'll just look remarkably like e.g. a boxer or MMA fighter doing it. A fifty-year-old guy doing some feckless wavy-hands Tai Chi has just been wasting his time on ineffective martial arts because there was no pressure to be effective and he was probably too genteel to want to pay the cost of being effective in the first place.
23. Didn't Trumpism prevail on the anti-international trade issue? Biden signed that huge bipartisan bill with a lot of "America First" items on it. I doubt we would be here on this issue were it not for Trump making it hugely popular.
You could say that world events, not Trump, helped prod this attitude along. But I think it's hard to make the case that the USA is penalizing trade with England, Germany and France because of Russia, Covid or China.
In regards to El Salvador and "tough on crime policies" in general, I think a point that gets overlooked is that a lot of "tough on crime" rhetoric combines two policies that are often treated as a package deal, but in principle can be separated. These are:
1. Increasing the likelihood that a criminal will actually be arrested and punished.
2. Increasing the severity of their punishment.
"Tough on crime" policies like the one in El Salvador often do both at once. However, a lot of psychological research indicates that 1 is the policy that does most of the work. 2 isn't actually that effective. Criminals care much more about the odds of getting caught than what exactly happens if they are.
It seems to me that this might allow some kind of effective compromise between tough on crime activists and human rights activists. Give the human rights activists lighter sentences, nicer prisons, and more serious efforts at rehabilitation. Give tough on crime activists can get more cops on the street and more arrests.
“However, a lot of psychological research indicates that 1 is the policy that does most of the work. 2 isn't actually that effective.”
That's entirely accurate if you change the statement "2 isn't that effective" by adding "it isn't that effective at deterring people from committing crimes who are not in prison." I agree that increasing sentence length and such doesn't have a significant impact in that regard.
However, what you seem to overlook is that increasing sentence length and other similar measures can be extremely effective at preventing individuals who have already committed crimes and are currently in prison from committing further crimes. For example, on average, a murderer has 21 (!!!) prior convictions.
Swedish registry studies indicate that approximately 70-80% of violent crimes are committed by just 1% of individuals. This is supported by a recent New York Times article discussing shoplifting, which found that 350 individuals were responsible for the majority of incidents in a city of 10 million. By keeping these few individuals behind bars for longer or implementing stricter policies, such as three-strike rules, crime rates can be significantly reduced. This is not achieved through deterrence, as you correctly pointed out, but rather by the impossibility of incarcerated individuals committing further crimes.
I also wholeheartedly support the concept of comfortable prisons with amenities like libraries, TVs, and pleasant living spaces, as long as are to escape from.
The thesis-antithesis-synthesis process really does work a fair amount of the time.
I do it on Twitter a lot: I say X, somebody responds with "What about Y?", I'm stumped for awhile because Y is true, and then figure out Z would account for both X and Y being true some of the time.
I think the "do less AI" movement is pretty doomed. To me, it feels analogous to degrowth arguments related to climate change. The incentives are just overwhelming in the other direction, and trying to regulate against those incentives is just going to cause unintended consequences. You'll just end up with shadier AI researchers making more progress relative to those that care about safety, at the margin.
Again analogizing to climate change and how solar, batteries, nuclear and so on are apparently the best solutions to the problem, I think more positive technological progress in both AI alignment, in tracking safety risks like bioweapons, and in progress on rapidly rolling out vaccines and whatnot should be what we emphasize. I'm glad that more of these concrete proposals are coming out along with the ultimately not very useful ones like the 6 month pause and the EY Time article.
I also think we need a ground-up rework of the concept of AI alignment. I'm not even necessarily aligned with myself from 8 hours ago, so how are we going to align a nebulous concept of AGI with a nebulous concept of humanity? In my opinion, a 21st century version of Asimov's laws seems more promising: for instance, do no more than acceptable harm X (e.g., hurting someone's feelings by disagreeing with them) as a fundamental AI rule.
On "21 - College no longer worth the cost" - it's just... If you keep rising the cost and the real margin of benefit against something that you can learn yourself lessen in all possible metrics - what exactly were the expectations here? Real "surprised Pikachu face" moment.
Pretty sure if the question was about "is going to college beneficial" - the results would've been different. But is it beneficial ENOUGH to also go into the personal bankruptcy for years? No, it isn't.
(And actually it is a lynx, because bobcats are one of the four species within the wild cat genus Lynx. The critter for which our common name is "bobcat" is the species Lynx rufus i.e. "red lynx".)
Regarding the linguistics article and the mysterious prevalence of 1s pronouns based on the phoneme /n/, I don't have time or energy to properly read the full article or to give a very carefully thought-out response. But throughout a couple of decades of being an amateur comparitive linguistics enthusiast I've always been extremely skeptical of hypotheses proposing language proto-families, and, while I appreciate how well the article thinks through multiple sides of each question it treats, quite a few things in it subtly triggered my crackpottery radar even apart from its speculations about the dawn of self-awareness and snake mythology and so on.
For one thing, while I don't have time to actually check through the hypothetical roots for 1s pronouns among the ancestors dozens of language families, from the few I do know about I'm immediately suspicious that the author (and linguists he cites) might be cherry-picking certain roots and certain debated forms of roots. For instance, Austronesian (okay, mainly the Malayo-Polynesian branch) is one of the few language families where I am familiar with a few roots and knew that the 1s pronouns come from a pretty clear *aku root, no nasal consonants involved. I just checked this on Wiktionary, and not only does it back me up on this, I don't think it lists any 1s pronouns in the living daughter languages with /n/ in them. So why does this article list *’a(ŋ)kƏn as the root and count it among the evident roots based on /n/? It looks like this alternate proposed root has only possibly a nasal before the /k/ and that it ends in /n/, but (and this may be just an amateur assumption) the fact that a two-syllable root ends nasally seems like very weak evidence of it being related to another proto-language's root which begins with or is based mainly on /n/. It also goes to illustrate one of the main reasons (I'm sure) why linguists typically don't like to give much credence to proto-family hypotheses: the exact roots of the proto-language are already very hypothetical and up to much debate (in this case, apparently someone thinks that the 1s pronoun root in proto-Austronesian may have been *’a(ŋ)kƏn rather than *aku; that seems to reflect at best some disagreement among similarly qualified experts!).
Relatedly, a language family may have more than one root for a pronoun for a particular person/number combination. Indo-European is a good example of this: one of the roots is *me, and this is the one that the author lists under the proto-pronouns that don't involve /n/ (but then uses this list to point out that a bunch involve /m/ and that /m/ is not far from /n/). But the other root, from which Latin and Greek ego, Germanic ich/ik/ek/jeg/etc. and English I are derived, is something like *éǵh; this is highly contested, and in fact some common form (like *éǵhóm) evolving into both *éǵh and *me seems to also have been proposed, but I think we can agree that at first blush, *éǵh appears to have no similarity to *me. (And the author even points out how our pronoun I doesn't reflect a root involving /n/, now choosing to ignore our object form me which does have a nasal that he's pointed out is not so far from /n/!) So, how many of the 1s pronoun roots listed may have existed alongside other unrelated-looking 1s pronoun roots? Once you acknowledge that a proto-language may have distinct, unrelated-looking roots for a particular person/number pronoun (and why shouldn't they? many modern languages do!), the waters have already been muddied quite a lot.
I also don't know what to make of all the discussion in the article about time scales and how slowly over centuries and millennia pronoun roots may have evolved compared to other types of roots, and what this might mean in terms of evidence of anything. Are the reconstructed roots listed even proposed to have been in use during the same millennia? This may be a case of my not having read the article carefully enough.
I notice that the author mentioned in one place the near-universality of certain consonants in roots for some kinship terms most likely arising from the sounds babies make first and mentioned in another place how pronouns may arise from kinship terms. (In fact, this is a huge phenomenon visible in the present: in many East Asian languages there is a blurring between pronouns and kinship terms.) So why not propose as a possible explanation for the prevalence of /n/ (and other nasals) in 1s pronoun roots that in prehistoric times they may have often arisen from parental kinship terms which in turn almost certainly were influenced by consonants prevalent in baby sounds? Think of the obvious origins of "mama" and then think of mothers talking to their babies who refer to themselves as "Mama" in place of using a 1s pronoun. It doesn't seem like an unreasonable hypothesis to me.
I hope this parent comment might inspire some people who are more knowledgeable and have more time for research (or more research behind them) to chime in and do a little picking apart of the article.
Yeah, that's absolutely true. Although the examples you gave included borrowing from closely related languages (I think the Old English 3p pronoun was hi, not also he, but still it was probably disfavored because of being easy to confuse with the 3s masculine pronoun he), but amazingly this can happen between completely unrelated languages in the same region. I think this is conjectured to have been the origin of Piraha's very few personal pronouns to suggest that at one time Piraha had no personal pronouns at all, although as with every conjecture relating to Piraha you have to take this with a grain of salt.
Existing pronouns in a single language can also switch from occupying one position on the standard arrays of pronouns to another. The 1p object pronoun in Italian is ci, but this is a relatively recent replacement of the expected pronoun based on n- (Latin/Spanish/Portuguese nos); while the etymology of ci is not entirely clear, it seems to have been a locative pronoun ("there") before spreading out to occupy the 1p obj. personal pronoun role while continuing to mean "there" in certain contexts. Also, I've seen it hypothesized that the Indo-European root *wey* from which our 1p pronoun we is descended originally had a 1p inclusive meaning ("you and I") and evolved into the 2p pronoun in some branches like Italic (Latin vos), although Wiktionary seems to disagree. The point is, all of these are things that can occur and have been proved to occur in certain cases.
Yikes, I mean I knew there was an insane number of variants for the 3p singular feminine pronoun "she" at some point in the Middle English period, but it looks like *all* (at least animate) 3p pronouns were a mess.
re Newspapers. US has just two parties, and is huge. so you can earn easily from polarised columns. any country with a multi party system will have more camps, so harder to capitalize.
the UK has badly two parties. papers are partly having a political identity. I think lots of entertainment is involved. do has durability maybe with the internet. in the UK the political commentary is part comedy IMHO
I've meditated off and on for a bunch of years. I do think it makes you more calm, makes attention more controllable, etc, etc-that's all fine. My problem with meditation is something in my head I call the doormat problem: the more I meditated, the calmer I became, and there were a bunch of things I didn't solve which I would have otherwise solved if I had the adequate emotional impetus pushing me along. For instance, for anger/sadness, I'd just sort of meditate it away, which is not great.
In general, it felt like I was turning down the volume control knob on my emotions as a whole, which is not very pleasing to me, even if it gives me reduced despair/sadness/anxiety. YYMV, etc.
Yeah, when I was meditating regularly, I found that it altered some kludgy internal dynamics. I had been using intense emotion to motivate myself to do certain things, and I found it harder to do those things when I lowered the intensity of the emotions.
It's like someone who arrives places on time because they have an intense fear of being late. If the fear goes away (a change for the good), they may start being late to things more often (a change for the bad), because they never built up more healthy ways of being punctual. But then, sometimes it's more important to be somewhere on time, than it is to be calm and collected about it.
> 24: 200 Concrete Problems In AI Interpretability. “You can note which you're working on, and reach out to other people doing the same.”
Thanks for signal boosting my sequence! This is a link to the spreadsheet to track which problems you're working on, you can also see the actual sequence (with the problems, resources + tips, and a bunch more context) here https://www.alignmentforum.org/s/yivyHaCAmMJ3CqSyj/p/LbrPTJ4fmABEdEnLf
In answer to the question of whether it should feel okay for some position of privilege to be offered to "Jews only", I think the question you need to ask yourself is whether you'd be okay with someone else offering a similar set of benefits but advertising it as "No Jews".
If you're okay with this then I admire your consistency. If you're not then you should reconsider being okay with the first one.
But if you are okay with people spending money on themselves, leaving it to their families or descendants, or donating it to their alma mater -- it seems clearly inconsistent to forbid spending on members of their religious group.
The point is merely that a line must be drawn somewhere. Complete consistency is not sensible. It's inconsistent to allow Jews Only but not No Jews, and it's similarly inconsistent to allow For My Alma Mater but not For My Religion. Given that, your argument falls flat, because there's nothing particularly wrong with drawing the line between Jews Only and Non Jews Only...merely the inevitable inconsistentcy that comes with drawing a line at all.
29. Anything regarding Christian history is massively impacted by the belief status of the writer, particularly if they are Protestant, Catholic, or lately, secular. The writer’s institution is very relevant. The reason why you’ve heard so much from pro-Catholic side lately is because the internet has made it a lot easier to publicize and/or come across those opinions. English language liberal arts academia was an exclusively Protestant affair for a very long time.
That's quite the powerful graph! Could you link the article it comes from?
Looks like google has the link below the image: https://www.economist.com/europe/2021/12/18/why-have-danes-turned-against-immigration
This doesn't really make sense, because Trump didn't actually do almost anything he promised. No one was reacting to the consequences of his pre-election stuff becoming real, because basically nothing changed.
This theory would also predict a large backlash against left-wing policies in Venezuela, correct?
It’s a whole lot easier to be in favor of “restorative justice” when you’re not getting robbed at a convenience store by someone with a mile long rapsheet
>especially if you take it in the amounts required for the main effect which AFAICT is the only reason anyone drinks the stuff. If you're drunk, you're not drinking in moderation.
In my social circles, drinking to get drunk tends to be a very occasional indulgence if it's engaged in at all. My own use of alcohol, and that of most of my friends who drink, is what would be considered "microdosing" for other substances: enough to subtly feel the effects, but a small fraction of what it would take to get drunk.
It's one thing to say "I can't do this because reasons", and quite another to say that nobody else really does this. Lots of people, myself included, enjoy drinking in actual moderation without ever getting drunk by any reasonable definition. And surely you've noticed many, many people having a drink with dinner at a restaurant while not being conspicuously drunk.
Same here. Especially true once you pass your mid-twenties. At that point “drinking to get drunk” often makes you utterly miserable for a full day or more. But “drinking to get a mild buzz”, which may be just a couple strong beers, can still be quite pleasant, as can “a couple fingers of whiskey as a nightcap after a tiring day”.
Plenty of people treat beer and wine as simply an enjoyable beverage, with the intoxicating effects only a secondary consideration and often observed as much in placebo effect as anything else.
I mean literally 2 and it’s not something I do every day or even most days. Although a glass or two of wine a day is de riguer in lots of places, many of which we consider quite healthy generally. Treating it as a beverage, not an intoxicant.
5-6 beers in one day, if it’s spread across the entire day, is of course not enough to make you really intoxicated. Nor is it healthy as an everyday thing but I don’t think anyone is saying it is. If nothing else the caloric load is gonna be bad for you at that point.
Didn’t claim whisky before bed was healthy either, but it’s also not “drinking to get drunk” which you seemed to be saying was the only reason anyone consumed alcohol.
My understanding of the difference between modafinil and armodafinil is that modafinil is 50% armodafinil and 50% another variety with a shorter half-life. So in theory it should be easier to sleep after a morning dose of modafinil. But in practice, when I tried both I couldn't detect any difference.
Some people actually like the taste of wine, for example, and don't drink it for the purpose of getting drunk. Of course, having that kind of norm around is still risky, and supposed health benefits are dubious at best, but it's not outright hypocrisy/ridiculous per se.
"horses can hybridize with mules and zebras"
Mules are very rarely fertile. I think you mean donkeys.
This is obviously false, both GMO foods and nuclear power have ongoing research, capital investment, and even products.
The GMO corn market is valued at 260 billion dollars, 92 percent of corn grown in America is genetically modified (https://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/issues/311/ge-foods/about-ge-foods), among many other plants.
60 nuclear reactors are under construction across the world (https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/plans-for-new-reactors-worldwide.aspx).
If you want another example, gene therapy is currently being utilized more and more after undergoing a dramatic but not eternal slumber (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gene_therapies)
You may be correct that these things can't be calibrated but is blatantly untrue to say the only options are "whatever speed of research comes out of scientists freely moving forward, or nothing."
If you want to be taken seriously maybe don't exaggerate for comic effect when making a key point of your argument.
"Handing it to china" is also kind of an absurd thing to say. They have a tiny fraction of AI researchers and processing power compared to America, and have not shown any particularly world-changing examples of scientific innovation or engineering achievements despite strong cultural efforts promoting engineering and research.
I immediately clocked you as making a forceful, mediocre argument to cover for a less forceful, still mediocre argument and wrote off the whole exchange. I'd say that does count as interpreting you correctly, but I don't think the rhetorical style accomplished what you wanted.
Ooooof. Stay down, trebuchet, stay down
His argument didn't seem either mediocre or overly forceful to me. It *is* weird for Rationalists to be anti-regulation and pro-development for every other technology, yet take the complete opposite stance on AI. It *is* unrealistic to think that scientific progress is a dial that can be turned and fine-tuned to precisely the speed you want. It *is* naïve to think that Rationalist arguments for AI safety will stay within the Rationalist community, and won't be taken out of context by people opposed to AI in general for any number of political, social, or economic reasons, or just out of simple closed-mindedness. And it *is* perfectly reasonable to think that China will gladly step in to fill the vacuum left by Westerners abandoning an entire field of research, especially since that's exactly what's happened with genetic engineering.
They did nuclear weapons decades ago, a space station is a worthless showpiece, and the gain of function research relies on western biotech, reagents, machinery, and training.
If all it took was "running some computer code" OpenAI wouldn't be spending literally billions of dollars on development and hardware.
Conversely if *you* want to be taken seriously, consider the implications of what you're writing before starting a comment with "This is obviously false."
So far no. But it's a lot easier to catch up to, then pass, the West if the West has chosen to stand still.
Especially if the best researchers from the West all move to China to keep going.
Hardware is more of an issue, but again China won't stand still in this respect.
The only secret of either the Atom Bomb or LLMs is that they can be constructed; once that is known anyone who wants to pay the price can get there eventually.
I think the nuclear power situation is not as bad a sign as all that. In the last few years, political opinion and policy have both shifted in the right direction. A big part of the problem is that nuclear power plants are lumbering elephants, and doing anything significant with them takes years if not decades.
Looking at Germany, the majority of Germans now support nuclear power. But shutting down a reactor is planned years in advance (even delaying that by a few months was difficult). Starting them up again is a possibility, but will likewise take years of preparation.
In the US, policy has been moving pretty fast in the right direction. The inflation reduction act included billions in support for existing reactors, plus DOE research money for advanced reactors. There has been effort on regulation, too: Congress passed the Nuclear Energy Innovationd and Modernization Act (almost unanimously) in 2019, to smooth the way for advanced reactors. Now they're working on another piece of legislation (the ADVANCE Act) to fix up some of the details that weren't working out the way they planned. And the NRC commissioners have responded to changing political winds by pressing for faster approvals.
The statistic you're looking for, by the way, is "until this year, no new reactor that started its licensing process after 1975 got approved, constructed, and went into operation". There were lots of designs and some construction permits approved in that time, but they mostly got cancelled for economic reasons. There were also a number of reactors that got finished during that time, but had started the licensing process before 1975.
On AI, we have the CHIPS act's major embargoes on semiconductor technology going to China, which is a brilliant move that I would not have expected to be so effective. And the administration's rhetoric on AI risk has shifted to hedging (e.g. "we live in a world that already has other existential risks") rather than outright dismissal. The people in power are showing themselves to not always be morons.
I think the cultural treatment of nuclear power has already improved a lot. But yeah, physical reactors take a long time and a lot of money, and there are many things that could go wrong before we reach that point.
This is a silly standard. Congress spending other people's money is not news. It barely counts as PR. Is the NRC going to adopt sane regulations around tritium release? Are they going to scrap LNT? Are they going to allow physical testing (with reasonable and not the currently obscene requirements for permitting)?
No. They aren't. Nothing even approaching this is coming. Instead, congress will throw a little more money at the problem. All of this money will be eaten up by the DOE/NRC bureaucracy. Projects will be announced on paper which will then go nowhere. I'll happily bet that the NRC won't allow a molten salt reactor to begin contributing to the grid within the next thirty years (even though piles of companies have been working on this for ~two decades already and we had working reactors back in the 60s).
"Is the NRC going to adopt sane regulations around tritium release?"
Yeah, they voted to regulate fusion facilities under byproduct material rules, so they won't have to go through most of the licensing that fission plants require.
"Are they going to scrap LNT?"
Not any time soon, but honestly it shouldn't make that much difference. Even under the LNT assumption plants can be very safe.
"Are they going to allow physical testing (with reasonable and not the currently obscene requirements for permitting)?"
This one I don't know a lot about, but I wouldn't bet on it. Better get real good at simulations.
"All of this money will be eaten up by the DOE/NRC bureaucracy."
Some of the money they're trying to do with the ADVANCE act is to reimburse advanced reactor applicants for all the NRC fees, so that would be good.
"I'll happily bet that the NRC won't allow a molten salt reactor to begin contributing to the grid within the next thirty years"
Terrapower's Natrium is liquid metal, not molten salt, but I think it's likely to get on the grid next decade. The licensing process for molten salt reactors may be slower, but it won't be *that* slow unless the money dries up.
Fusion byproduct rules: again, I'll believe it when I see it.
LNT: depends on the plant. And the problem isn't that plants can't be built to LNT standards, it's that they cost an order of magnitude more when they are.
Simulations: don't work very well. Devanney has a lot of good information on this topic.
The government paying NRC fees: this has been the racket for most of this time. The DOE/Congress ponies up more funding for nuclear development. The nuclear companies take these funds and use them to pay NRC fees. The NRC eats these fees. The NRC stops getting these fees once the plant is approved so their incentive is to keep projects at the edge of approval... forever.
Terrapower: they actually have two proposed reactors. One is the liquid metal reactor you refer to. The other is the MCFR: https://www.terrapower.com/our-work/molten-chloride-fast-reactor-technology/. Note that this one too got government funding (in 2020, long before the Ukraine war and the ensuing energy crisis). And so the racket continues.
To be fair though (and to steelman @Drethelin 's point), the GMO/nuclear power/gene therapy markets are heavily regulated. You can't just engineer some random fruit in your backyard and start selling it; you have to get it approved by the FDA to make sure it's not toxic. Similarly, you can't build a nuclear reactor on your ranch, although that probably has more to do with the difficulty of procuring fissile material. And of course you cannot experiment with medical treatments with zero oversight; we've been there, it doesn't look pretty.
So, I don't think it'd be unreasonable to expect some regulation of AI deployment. For example, even though it is relatively easy to engineer AI to track every person everywhere in nearly real time, we probably shouldn't allow anyone to apply this functionality to Americans, regardless of what China is thinking.
That "shouldn't allow" is doing a lot of work where it's unclear if "allow" is up to any gov't, group, etc. If you're successful in forcing people (e.g.) to use worse tech for AI research, they will. AI finds a way!
Um. Have you actually looked at that list of reactors under construction? The only ones I see in The West is Vogtle in the US, Hinkley Point in the UK, and Flamanville in France. Vogtle and Hinkley Point are widely recognized as total boondoggles that will never give positive returns. France has EDF which at least has a history of building reactors (and pointedly ignoring US regs) and it hasn't been doing that well lately (see French nuclear capacity factor for the last year). The vast majority of the reactors under construction are: China and Russia (through Rosatom). China might just be a majority by itself (though I haven't bothered to count). Given that the parent comment joked about the overlords in Beijing... It seems like they're just right and Nuclear has indeed been utterly strangled in US aligned countries.
Really, you can't call yourself informed on this subject unless you've gone through the stuff Devanney has written. Start here: https://jackdevanney.substack.com/.
Devanney is knowledgeable, but take him with a grain of salt. He has very strong opinions that color his analysis. He tends to really lean on particular aspects of regulation (LNT and ALARA) that are not nearly as important as he'd like to think, while de-emphasizing major economic factors related to construction management, loss of the nuclear-skilled workforces in western countries, and ever-cheaper alternatives.
I don't buy that. You may be able to argue about the relative importance of regulation but the overall cost comparisons between the US and say China are too large to wave away. And really, the whole rationale for all the regulation is radiation risk so what would possibly compete in importance with (1) the way we determine harm from radiation exposure and (2) how much regulation requires utilities spend to avoid said harm.
Re. cheaper alternatives: I think he's too optimistic there. Intermittent sources are not in any reasonable sense an alternative to base-load power (as Germany is finding out the hard way) and grid-scale power storage is a pipe-dream. And that's even if we pretend we only need a week of storage (in reality, output is highly seasonal so we really need three months of storage at least).
About reactors under construction in the west: Few days ago, the finnish Olkiluoto EPR started to commercially produces electricity, 14 years later than according to the original schedule. It is the 1st european EPR to be commercially operational (2nd worldwide after the chinese one), and will produce about 20% of Finnish electricity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant
This gives hope for Flamanville and Hinkley Point which as you noted are quite below on schedule as well, as the contractor is the same (Framatome).
About 2 years ago Macron announced the construction of 6 EPR2, to be operational in 2050, plus possibly 8 additional ones. We will see how this go.
2050? It'll take _thirty years_ to build six nukes? China will probably build an order of magnitude or more in the same time period.
The need of electricity production of China is probably also an order of magnitude or more higher than the one of France.
Do you think the West as a whole will be able to build sixty reactors in the next thirty years?
Yeah J. Devanney is great, the whole LNT thing is costing us plenty, and making most people scared for what is really no reason. It's hard to know how to change all this. How do you help the public become less scared of nuclear fission?
Man, the question of whether schools should have a prohibition on professors and grad students dating was the topic of probably the single nastiest extended argument on the internet I've ever seen...
Really? Wow. I don't remember seeing this issue particularly explode anywhere on the internet. Was this one particular fight happening in one particular place, and if so, could you provide a link?
Yeah unfortunately it was on Facebook, which admittedly only sort of counts as the internet. As such it would be very difficult to dig it up and link it, and likely it wouldn't display even with a link. :-/
I take that back, I found it and it turns out it was posted publicly! Kind of wary of linking to Facebook even if it was, strictly speaking, posted publicly; it's not really the sort of thing I want to bring more attention to -- especially as Facebook doesn't seem to have any sort of "this is sufficiently old that you can no longer comment or vote" window like Reddit has? That seems weird, it has to, right? But this post is from 2015 and it still seems to allow commenting... (well, OK, maybe it wouldn't if I actually hit enter, but I'm not going to try that; I should try that out on something else, I guess).
It's not as long as I remembered. Only 66 comments. Obviously seen way longer arguments on e.g. Shtetl-Optimized. But, a lot of those comments are directly responding to previous ones, so that's kind of notable.
I guess it's not really the nastiest, when you consider the other arguments I've seen on related topics, especially on, again, Shtetl-Optimized. I guess it really stood out to me as being *surprisingly* nasty, i.e., I wouldn't have expected this particular narrow matter to be such a flashpoint.
Anyway on rechecking it, guess I was exaggerating. It was still memorable to me, anyway!
No, Facebook has no time limit on commenting. Nor do I want it to.
Yeah, I was thinking of Shtetl-Optimized and was trying to implicitly ask, "Really, more nasty and extended than the Comment 151 Debacle of early 2015?" (Although arguably that thread itself was somewhat productive and wasn't even especially nasty by internet standards.)
I'm familiar with the concept of anti-fraternization in the military: if a commanding officer dates a subordinate, that can lead to bad outcomes such as preferential treatment, worse treatment if the relationship goes sour, jealousy/lower morale from other subordinates, and the potential for unwanted, coercive power dynamics in the relationship.
That's why the military bans such relationships.
I don't see why similar bans in civilian settings are controversial.
I can see why plenty of onerous rules that are necessary in the military should be controversial in civilian settings. Military discipline is strict because the stakes are high, and you need to know that your CO has your back when you're in a foxhole and he's not thinking about how he can sacrifice your life to save his boyfriend.
The stakes in academic life are lower. Some student gets an undeserved A on one out of the thirty-six courses they'll need to take to graduate? Eh, big deal, it's the US university system and everybody gets an A anyway.
I would agree that I've seen many cases of professors-dating-students that I consider icky. But the fact that I personally consider a relationship icky doesn't mean it should be banned. Homosexuality is icky too, we don't ban that.
My theory is such bans are symptomatic of a society that no longer believes much in romance, in true love, in soul mates, etc.
If one did believe in true love and that dating perhaps means much more than just "these two people are shagging", then not being able to date one's boss, professor, colleague, what have you, might seem dystopian.
It's not EXACTLY that. It's more that ideologies (well, successful ideologies) start off with some flexibility as to human weakness and foibles, but then under appropriate conditions, develop a hardline that insists on the dogma of the ideology with no tolerance for exceptions.
Catholicism went through this with Calvinism.
Sunni went through it with Wahhabism.
Shia went through it with Khomeinism.
Similarly Humanism (ie the dominant ideology since the French Revolution) is going through such a hardline phase with Woke. The dominant theme of these hardline phases is that it's no longer important what most people want or think; what's important is the maximalist line that can be deduced from the founding axioms.
I *suspect* that what drives this hardline response is the rise of an alternative worldview that, even as it claims to be a perfection of the original worldview, is actually aimed somewhat differently, and is limited (for technical reasons) to a small group of elites. No matter what the elites say, it's easy for a different, larger group to hate on them and to channel that hate.
So with Calvinism it was Humanism as the bugbear that drove that version of the Reformation (as opposed to earlier Wycliffe and Huss mutterings) into overdrive. No matter how much Erasmus might claim that his goal was to perfect Christianity, the masses saw the project as "changing the world we know" and reacted with the usual "we need to go back to the ways of our fathers, only more so".
Likewise with Humanism, the bugbear is "technology" in some sort of generic sense. A feeling that science, data, algorithms, are creating a world where humans (and specifically the things that The Humanities consider important) will be sidelined by something else. No matter how much tech might claim that their goal is to perfect Humanism, the masses see the project as "changing the world we know" and react with the usual "we need to go back to the ways of our <non biologically but connected as family in some per-user-defined way humans who preceded us in time>, only more so".
Of course the science/tech project has been going on for many years, but it has became more obviously threatening in the past decade or so; just like Humanism had a reasonably long run before the zeitgeist picked up that it was in fact a threat.
This is a very interesting narrative. Thanks for posting.
That was good except for the Calvinism bit. I presume you mean Calvinism was an extreme form of Christianity.
Wouldn’t true love survive something like this? It feels like the kind of thing that would happen as part of a romance story, which for the sake of the story would lead to complications, but which true love would overcome. It would be sad, but it wouldn’t outrage anyone.
If I’m being charitable, it might be because we no longer trust our professors and our students to be good, so both people work to ensure the student learns more about the teacher’s subject than they otherwise would have. It’s now plausible that the teacher would teach the student less, because of the relationship (possibly in turn because university is less of a vocation these days). If I’m being less charitable to previous attitudes, we might be more upset these days if a teacher abuses their power over a student after a failed relationship.
I don't think it's all that controversial for a civilian organization to bar romantic relationships with actual subordinates. There's ,maybe a little controversy about banning professors dating their own graduate assistants, for various reasons, but a professor dating a coed taking one of his undergraduate classes has always been considered a bit unseemly I think.
But barring a relationship between e.g. a professor and *any* student goes beyond that, and some universities have moved in that direction. The military allows a captain to date or even marry a lieutenant who is not a direct subordinate. There is a rule against officer/enlisted fraternization, which makes some sense so long as those are meant to be distinct classes, but within the officer/enlisted ranks and outside the direct chain of command, all is fair in love and war.
"a professor dating a coed taking one of his undergraduate classes has always been considered a bit unseemly I think."
No it hasn't. This was considered *absolutely normal* less than a hundred years ago, and not too many years before that it was considered an abomination since women weren't allowed to attend college at all and the professor would necessarily have been dating a man. (Well, thus technically not a coed, I guess.)
What changed is that the original morals were essentially male: that it's fine for a guy to take whatever shots he can. The new morals are based on the anxieties of middle-aged women, whereby every configuration of older man/younger woman is *innately* suspect and the task is just to come up with a reason for why it should be forbidden. (Also why it's "more okay" for older women to date younger men: this obviously doesn't trouble the self-image of middle-aged women, and men just think it's fine for them to take whatever shots they can.)
Because restrictions on liberty should always be questioned and meet a high burden of necessity. Especially on sex/romance, which people care about A LOT
Also from ah object level, romance typically blossoms between people who encounter each other organically and does not respect arbitrary bearacratic regulations. Like e.g. from people I know in the military have told me everyone is fucking anyways, antifraternization rules are necessary to protect the vulnerable but are not(or should not be ) stringently enforced
On the pear ring, what an utterly unappealing name.
Pears are some of the worst fruit, it's basically saying you're personified by a shitty fruit.
But this raises the question, if you had to describe yourself as a fruit, which would you be?
It's a pun: Pear Ring = pairing
HA! Here I was thinking it was because pears look like a butt. https://giphy.com/clips/studiosoriginals-wink-5IaDo6XbO0CIt6wwlB
If a butt was the goal, they would have used a peach ring.
No, pears look like Louis Philippe, king of France 1830-48:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Caricature_(1830%E2%80%931843)#/media/File:Les_Poires_cropped.jpg
This drawing feels like a premonition of internet humor. I guess we're still the same species after all.
That beats what I was thinking: "pear rings because all the people wearing them will be pear-shaped."
Hmm... From the point of view of a potential investor in the company making them, another association is:
https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/why-do-we-say-its-all-gone-pear-shaped/
"When a plan goes horribly wrong, it said to have gone ‘pear-shaped’."
And a butt looks like cleavage.
Thanks for the explanation! I had missed that pun.
Even given the pun, I'm not sure that "pear" is an entirely wise choice for part of a product name. One of the associations is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pear_of_anguish .
On the other hand, there is a footwear company that decided to use https://www.kurufootwear.com/ . I asked them why they decided to name their brand after a fatal neurological disease spread by funereal cannibalism.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease) . They said that they intended the name to reflect a Finnish city https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru,_Finland
<mild snark>
kurufootwear: "Plimsolls, now with prions!"
</mild snark>
Isn't this just a claddagh ring?
I was going to say, we already have claddagh rings and should maybe just popularize that.
Yes, but I heard about the Pear ring about 6 minutes before I ever heard about the claddagh ring, so it clearly has better marketing.
What's a claddagh ring?
"Traditional" Irish custom; a ring with a heart on it - by choosing the hand you wear it on and the orientation of the heart, you can discreetly convey your relationship status. At least in theory. The issue of course is the same one Pear will face, ie ~no one actually uses the them like that.
That would be a pretty effective use of half a nybble of data.
2 bits conveys 4 possibilities
00 go ahead and take a shot
01 I could be convinced because my lunkhead hasn’t committed
10 We have plans, but the deal hasn’t been inked
11 You do know what you are getting into here, don’t you?
What are you talking about? Pears are awesome! They are the better apples.
And pear pie is spectacular.
Pears are fantastic. The only problem with pears is the timing. Eaten too early they're hard and bland; eaten too late and they're brown mush, but in the ideal time window they're one of life's peak experiences.
The problem is that the time window when they're fantastic is far too short. A bit like relationships.
I have an allergy towards them, which makes them just as evil as birch trees, or grass.
The difficulty is that the length of the window is ... sometimes negative. (Plums and apricots often have the same problem.)
That varies a lot with the variety of pear. And there are varieties of apple that are just as bad.
Well said, sir.
Plus 'pear-shaped' is generally an unattractive build.
For fruit descriptions... grapes? Olives? Probably grapes or olives. (Bananas or Melons are probably too much.)
I thought the consensus / "research" was hourglass > pear >> banana >> apple
disagree
It's no Beta Colony earring cluster, but it's a first step.
What fruit? A fruitcake.
I'd love to see it work, but I doubt you will get women to wear it.
My general rule is, if I think it's a good or cool idea, women won't like it;. ;)
Women won’t wear it - it’s an invitation to be constantly hit on by the most socially inept guys, whilst removing the ability to say you’ve got a boyfriend to politely decline.
^^ This.
However, the "I have a boyfriend" escape is already déclassé among the set who would buy such a ring. Easy enough for her to say that she is gay or that she and her partner(s) are single in regard adding more women to the polycule, w/e.
Pretty sure this captured the Female Imperative:
<blockquote>Comments on social media accounts have pointed out the possibilities of how women who wear the ring might be solicited more often. On the other hand, men may not even buy the ring and simply seek ring-wearing women in their neighborhood and be more weird than usual.</blockquote>
Not judging. But to the extent a woman is willing to affirmatively asssume this risk, pear ring could provide a way of signaling that affirmation.
Hi there, David Tennant. (But although I think pears are excellent I agree it's not a very good name.)
I imagine they are going for the pune* "pear/ pair" because wearing this indicates you want to pair up, yes?
*https://wiki.lspace.org/Pune
I followed Gwern at some point and have been puzzling for over a year now to try and figure out who he is (not like, his identity, I know he’s pseudonymous). What does Gwern do? What is his thing? Who is Gwern??
https://gwern.net/me
A relic of a bygone age - a pseudonymous Internet mini-celebrity.
Blimey...what does that make Kibo?
Regarding 35., there are some interesting stories regarding Stalin and litterature. A famous one is the relationship between Stalin and Mikhail Bulgakov (who wrote the falmous The Master and Margarita). It seems Stalin and him exchange letters and Stalin protected him despite Bulgakov being quite critical of his regime.
For a second I read that as Stalin exchanging letters with Sergius Bulgakov, which would be... unintuitive.
I was once in an Edinburgh Fringe show about Bulgakov and Stanislavsky. Dunno how accurate it was to life, but the story in the play was that Bulgakov wrote a play about Molière being persecuted by Catholics that was obviously *really* about artists being persecuted by Stalin; that Stalin liked Bulgakov enough at the time that he could probably have got away with it; but then Stanislavsky rehearsed the play for four years, by which time Stalin's mood had turned, and Bulgakov was ruined.
Stalin had eclectic reading habits. He amassed a personal library estimated to be approximately 20,000 books. Visitors who got a chance to peruse his library were surprised by how many of his books were dog-eared and annotated by his hand — so, his library wasn't just for show. After his death his daughter, Svetlana asked for his library, but senior party officials denied her request and they had it broken up. They may have been worried that it would become a memorial to Stalin at the expense of Stalin's successor, Khrushchev, who had little education and no intellectual pretensions.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/feb/16/stalins-library-by-geoffrey-roberts-review-the-marks-of-a-leader
Stalin studied at the Tiflis Seminary for almost 6 years. Reportedly, he was an avid reader and an excellent student. He studied the Russian classics (as well as political theory and history) while he was a student at the seminary. So, it's not surprising that he wrote poetry.
And I guess they're trying to reconstruct his library, now...
https://www.stalindigitalarchive.com/frontend/node/135125
A lot of what we Americans think we know about Stalin is Trotskyite propaganda about how Stalin was boring, stupid, and uncultured. Stalin was highly intelligent, probably not as smart as Trotsky (who learned how to win the Russian Civil War by reading some books on war), but smarter than, say, the typical American president. Stalin was well read and is said to have had a funny prose style (in, of course, an extremely nasty vein). Apparently, there's a genre of sardonic literature in Russian that goes back allegedly to Ivan the Terrible in which political big shots make fun of losers they've defeated. Stalin was said to be adept at this style of prose.
I read Trotskys "My Life" few years ago, I guess it was not Trotksys intention, but I got an impression that Trotsky and Stalin were quite similar: smart risk averse pragmatists. And thats why Lenin liked them both, Stalin and Trotsky were only two who had permission to enter Lenin's office without prior appointment.
When I read it, it left me with the impression that Trotsky had a consistently high opinion of himself. Even if he was right, being a primadonna tends to alienate people. No wonder he lost to Stalin, who didn't enjoy being a star.
And btw, I am not sure that Trotsky was smarter than Stalin. Lenin and Trotsky were prolific wriers, wordsmiths by Nozik.Stalin less so. Though Stalin's "Marxism and the National Question" was a favorite of Lenin and Trotsky was a bit jelous because of it. Anyway, if one reads what these three wrote and said and talked before revolution, it is possible to make an argument that Stalin that in many aspects Stalin had bettter ability to forsee future revolution.
I fully recommend Vectors of Mind's blog. He's a smart ML engineer and this is my favorite post of his: https://vectors.substack.com/p/the-big-five-are-word-vectors
That was great, thanks!
Just saw this, thanks!
Oh, Glaze.
So, some people use artist names in AI art prompts, which is lazy even if you completely dismiss all ethical issues. Stable Diffusion (the FOSS one people use for porn) really incentivizes this in its prompting meta, because SD's prompting meta is generally a mess. One thing not that many people on all sides of this ideological hypercube notice is that *this is noise* -- for all but the most famous artists, the association between their names and their styles is pretty weak. It's less that SD demands you do that specifically and more that it's wound so tightly it wants you to write noisy twenty-billion-token prompts (though there is not *no* degree to which it wants you to do it). Glaze is built under the assumption it isn't noise, which means it doesn't actually do 'the thing it should do' all that much, but I'm no fan of prompting with artist names and would rather see fewer cringe prompts, and if all else were equal I'd be cautiously optimistic about something that could bring a ceasefire across various parts of the hypercube, even if it's placebo.
Here's where things get *really* funny, considering the copyright infringement accusations that fly around all AI art: Glaze infringed the hell out of its licensing. Not in, like, an ambiguous fight-it-out in the courts way, in a "massive chunks of plagiarised code in violation of multiple incompatible licenses" way:
https://jackson.sh/posts/2023-03-glaze/
https://twitter.com/essex7927/status/1636500422855630848
This is fixed now, which is nice. Nonetheless, it's kind of incredible that people who take the hard "all generative art is plagiarism" stance did...unambiguous plagiarism.
It isn't, because people taking the all generative art is plagiarism stance don't understand IP law.
I think at least some of those people are calling for an extension of IP law to cover what they say is a novel category of plagiarism.
The don't have to believe something to say it.
And their saying it doesn't make me believe that they believe it.
I think any law which differs on artwork generated by artificial and wetware neural networks will be horrible even by IP law standards, not that that would stop any lawmaker.
The saner way (short of cutting down on IP law) would be to just apply existing copyright (and trademark?) law to computer generated content. So if you have just invented a distinct art style, other NN can be trained on that to also generate similar art. Of course, it is up to the other NN (or the legal entity behind it) to not actually copy their training data verbatim, or reuse specific characters (outside of specific cases like parody). Someone is probably already working on an AI trained to predict court rulings w.r.t. copyright infringement.
I don't think this is an accurate understanding of Glaze. The purpose of Glaze is to prevent _training new models_ (or dreambooth/LoRAs, for people who know what those are) based on art which has been Glaze'd. And the entire point of a style LoRA is to clone a specific style, which definitely isn't a place where that style is going to get lost in the noise. That is, the authors did not misunderstand the prompting meta; they were just responding to a different part of it.
Anyway, it does actually work pretty well for that specific goal, unless people go out of their way to defeat it. And yes, it can be defeated - though I'm not at all convinced by your linked blog post, since the image it's using can't really be said to have much in the way of a specific style to begin with.
In 10 years they will be in the same position as the news media; complaining when their art is NOT part of the "conversation".
Art, like news, is sufficiently fungible that AI can do just fine on the stuff it is allowed to touch, and soon enough artists will realize that the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.
https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/gag
According to this link, the increase in partisanship *is* universal and simultaneous across countries in a way that’s hard to explain without invoking the changes in media structure and funding.
I'd buy that. I think I'd read it was due to the death of classified ads somewhere else, but I can't remember exactly where to link to it. But a media property that's chasing subscribers instead of advertisers has a lot more incentive to cultivate passionate fans, and that means being polarizing.
Correct. I've been a reporter in multiple continents for 20 years and the trend appears to hold for every country I've looked into.
Many Thanks for the first-hand and broad perspective!
In particular, selling classified ads in a particular city is a network business, thus winner-take-all. The winner pursues calm, objective journalism to avoid offending anyone. But everyone else pursues readers and is already polarized.
That's a bit of an oversimplification. I remember "The Berkeley Barb" which lived on classifieds, and was very polarizing.
That sounds like an alternative newspaper, supported by niches of advertising banned by mainstream newspapers. But it's a pretty small niche, as you can tell by the fact that they're usually weekly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_newspaper
That's wrong. The data under the link doesn't show the increase of partisanship.
When mainstream culture in a society shifts to worrying about discrimination and words sexism, racism, gender, privilege etc. rise in use it, doesn't mean that partisanship has increased. The increase in partisanship happens when one strong and influential part of society goes through the culture shift, while the other strong and infuential part of the society goes through the opposite culture shift, for instance as a pushback. The conflict escalates according to toxoplasma of rage dynamics, selection pressure for adversarial memes increases, good faith communication between people of both sides become nearly impossible. But still it's not an outright civil war and the power between two sides is more or less equal so the conflict is stuck in limbo.
And, as far as I know, USA is more unique than not in this regard. Has to do something with two party system and huge concervative lobby that managed to arrage an organized pushback against the culture shift, but couldn't actually win against the tide.
I think it took a long time to invent brazilian jiu-jitsu because unarmed one on one combat between people matched by weight is a pretty niche activity not subject to much optimization pressure.
Also short stories probably got replaced by tv episodes and comic books
BJJ is just realising the power of grappling, and grappling has existed for a long time just about everywhere.
A few theories on BJJ specifically:
1a. We got distracted by striking martial arts in the 20th century as their speed and direct power look more impressive.
1b. To make wrestling look more impressive, it was spiced up into "entertainment" in the form of Luchadores/American wrestling and this made grappling low status.
2a. The main distinction from other grappling styles is BJJ spends a lot of time on the ground (Judo/Olympic wrestling also had groundwork, but not quite to the same extent), the ground was not a consistent place in the past (uneven floors, grass vs dirt vs timber, etc), so practising there would add in a lot of noise and make coming to distinct techniques difficult.
2b. The ground was bumpy and dirty, and cleaning/mending clothes was a costly endeavour. As we came to have proper floors in e.g. boxing rings and cheaper/better clothes groundwork became more reasonable to practice.
Various forms of grappling already existed though, and BJJ became *far* more optimized than any of them.
My guess is that since it was honed on the street, that stripped away any bullshit (it seems to be a law of nature that left to its own, any martial art degenerate into stylized uselessness).
Very likely unarmed martial arts have made bigger advances in the last 30 years (post UFC 1) than in all of human history before it combined.
I'd hesitate to say that given we don't know what martial arts looked like in the Greco Roman era. Gladiatorial fighting, pankration etc, there has been a lot of knowledge lost in the industrial revolution. Just look at the work going into recreating mediaeval weapons fighting as an example.
This isn't to downplay BJJ - I did it for 5 years (and continued on with some casual MMA training for another 2 until I got injured). But we also had guys come in from other grappling arts and they certainly didn't get dominated like you saw in the early years of UFC. I haven't followed it for a few years, but when I got out, BJJ was far from dominant, as long as you had enough BJJ knowledge on how to defend against a few of the key attacks, you could make up for it in other areas of expertise. It was like a virus attacking a system which had lost its immunity. Certainly hand to hand fighting has seen some great developments in the last 20 years, but it's hard to call whether we're really seeing that much development in the last 2000 and if not, when we lost that knowledge. But maybe I'm just saying that because it's a more interesting question to me.
(Because I usually regard the rose tinted view of the past poorly, and think the drive for innovation has been a force for good in modernity)
Gladiator fighting is particularly interesting as in many cases, it was more like really dangerous pro wrestling. It has been speculated that one function of the silly helmets was to conceal that the fighters talked to each other to coordinate the fight. It would be super interesting to learn more.
When did your sparring against other martial arts begin? If it was post-UFC1, then they might just have realized that they were way behind the curve and had time to up their game. But yes, certainly, it seems to take considerably less effort to learn to defend against BJJ alright than to learn it fully (this was how the switch in dominance from BJJ to Greco-Roman wrestling in fairly early UFC happened - once heavier and stronger wrestlers knew the basic defences, that was enough to allow sheer physicality and wrestling skills to dominate). And BJJ seems much stronger than the Japanese version (that famous time Hélio Gracie lost, Kimura was a judoka, not a jiu-jitsu practioner).
One of my favorite speculations about gladiators is that they were fattened up quite a bit so that they could take impressively bloody but _comparatively_ less dangerous cuts to the flab.
They certainly believed that eating lots of fatty foods would coat the inner surface of their veins with fat and thus reduce bleeding after a serious injury!
They didn't know about blood circulation back then, so presumably had a mental image of blood being suffused in the body fairly statically, like sap in a tree. But it's strange, and not very creditable to the Romans, that it never occurred to a single person among the tens of thousands watching blood pumping out of appalling wounds in the arena that the heart might be pumping the blood around the body. They would have discovered circulation more than a thousand years before Harvey!
This whole idea is from one guy reading about gladiators' diet, thinking it sounds fattening, and making up a reason they'd want to be fat. Ancient paintings and descriptions of gladiators never show them as fat.
Nitpick: judo is a style of jiu jitsu. The most popular and widely practiced style, outside of the Americas.
BJJ is far more optimized for something that most martial arts historically have had no reason to optimize for.
For one thing, we have to keep in mind that unarmed martial arts have been a pretty niche pursuit for most of history. For the last few thousand years, up to the last 150 or so in most of the world, if you trained to defend yourself in the sort of real combat situations you might be threatened by, and you didn't focus at least a solid chunk of your training on weapons, you were being an idiot.
For another, it's intensively focused on single-person combat. Multi-opponent combat is very far from a niche concern in modern self-defense situations. If anything, self-defense situations in which BJJ offers a viable combat plan are fairly niche.
For another, it's not really that interesting for most untrained people to watch. The space in which BJJ exists as a particularly effective form of combat training is competitive fighting sports. A BJJ practitioner pitted against a pure Muay Thai practitioner will tend to win. But Muay Thai is a sport intended to provide entertainment for spectators, and it's a lot better at that than BJJ is. Wrestling is comparably effective in competitive combat sports to BJJ in style vs. style matches, but wrestling has struggled throughout the world to establish itself as a viable professional sport without being turned into a fake performance made more theatrical than the real thing, because most people similarly don't find real wrestling that interesting to watch.
Finally, it's not even that dominant in competitive combat sports. Pit a pure BJJ fighter against someone who's been training for a similar amount of time in combat sports training which includes both grappling and striking, and the BJJ practitioner will tend to lose.
BJJ is highly optimized for competitive one-on-one unarmed grappling-based combat sports with a ruleset where wins are decided by submissions, but not throws or pins. Within a lot of other less limited niches, it's still considerably more effective than having no combat training at all, but it becomes far from optimized. And competitive unarmed grappling-based combat sports whose matches are decided by submissions rather than throws or pins (both of which are more legible to an untrained audience,) is not something most cultures throughout history saw any particular reason to have.
BJJ is *no longer* impressive on its own in MMA (because it turns out that the "mixed" part is really important). But no-one can deny that it was devastating in the comparatively free-form setting and context of very early UFC, because it demonstrated that essentially everyone else had been neglecting the ground game to a catastrophic extent (Ken Shamrock, coming out of Japanese pro wrestling of all things, was the only one from the outside who seemed to have a clue in the very earliest ones).
It's true that BJJ was quite dominant in the early days of the UFC, but first, grappling-based competitive arts were less popular than striking-based due to being less spectator-friendly, and second, the Gracies were curating the roster of competitors because they wanted a lineup which would make a good advertisement for their art. Not that they weren't legitimately skilled competitors genuinely winning their matches, but even at the time, it wouldn't have been hard to find much more credible grappling competitors to pit themselves against if they'd wanted to.
I wouldn't say "left on its own", exactly. More like "left untested", either in actual use, or in multiple types of rule-based practice (to highlight the effects of the rules). And there's the big lesson of judo, which is that there's no substitute for full force practice against a resisting opponent. So any system that relies on techniques that inherently damage an opponent, will produce less skilled practitioners. (Possibly unless you're a medieval psycho who tests stuff on prisoners and peasants.)
And there's historical context for why certain styles did things in particular ways. When the context changes, it can render the style less-useful to worse-than-useless. And when the context is forgotten, something that was once practical can wind up seeming like bullshit.
The full force practice is so important. That is why even though wrestling has no submissions or striking lots of high level wrestlers can transition fairly seamlessly to MMA.
MMA certainly highlighted the effectiveness of BJJ. but it also showed how tough homegrown American folkstyle wrestlers were. And it wasn't anything about wrestling techniques it was that those guys had been competing an insanly high level since they were like elementary school kids,
And just to add way more MMA champions have come up as wrestlers than BJJ.
https://www.vividseats.com/blog/ufc-champions-fighting-style
Seriously, that's insane. BJJ is still strictly limited, in terms of what's permitted, as is MMA. There have been people fighting for their lives (literally) without weapons forever. I think this is more of an artifact of people thinking boxing was real fighting, then realizing it's not even close. And BJJ is weird because it does not have strikes. So it clearly can't be the ne plus. And if you read all the histories, it really wasn't honed on the street, and also wasn't as effective as claimed (Gracie got beat, etc.). Don't get me wrong, I think BJJ's fantastic. But I'm pretty sure there were some Romans, Japanese, Indians, whatever, who fought truly no holds barred, who were unbelievably effective. Interesting side note: I suspect many unarmed combat forms are basically designed for stag fights, where the point is to prove how tough you are without killing your opponent or yourself. So the unarmed combat we're familiar with is all stylized dueling without weapons, not focused on what's really most effective, but picking a winner. E.g., even MMA doesn't permit eye gouge, small join manipulation, groin attacks, etc. If it did, then maybe we'd learn what really works.
Huh, according to Wikipedia, the only techniques that pankration banned were eye gouges and biting, but even those techniques were allowed in, wait for it... Sparta.
And speaking of eye gouges, in my personal opinion "got your nose" should be an automatic match-ending technique. ;-)
> the ground was not a consistent place in the past
> 2b. The ground was bumpy and dirty, and cleaning/mending clothes was a costly endeavour.
In the past, athletes had to be naked. :p
Yes. Grappling is a great way to get stabbed or kicked in the head by your opponent's buddies. If in doubt, just try fighting against 2 people sometime. An exception would be for police, who can generally count on outnumbering their opponents and controlling the territory, and who sometimes have an incentive to not kill their opponents outright.
Also bouncers (who sometimes even manage to find uses for *aikido* of all practices, because incompetent drunks turn out to be crummy fighters and getting a painful hold on them looks a lot better to other customers and the management than punching them).
And corrections officers.
Also, although drunks are slower in their reactions and less accurate in throwing punches for example, they also feel less pain! So I would have thought the emphasis when tackling them hand to hand should be on restraint rather than attack.
The "matched by weight" part isn't necessary for BJJ to shine through. The early UFC tournaments had no weight divisions, and Royce Gracie famously defeated much bigger fighters (such as Kimo Leopoldo and Dan Severn).
tapology.com gives the relevant weight of the three fighters as:
Royce Gracie: 176/180 lbs (apparently he put on 4 lbs between UFC 3 and UFC 4)
Kimo Leopoldo: 250 lbs
Dan Severn: 260 lbs
I loved those early, insane UFC tourneys. A hodge-podge of fighters - mostly capable, but many using styles and techniques that did them no favors and would shortly go extinct - engaging in sometimes wildly uneven fights (in styles as mentioned, but most obviously by weight), with little structure including no rounds or time limits.
The weight and style differences, and just lack of professionalism/optimization by the fighters (folks say stats/quantitative optimization ruins sports for spectators - not a problem here! To the contrary actually...), lead to wild scenes, often entertaining or outright hilarious, and sometimes disturbing or at least unsettling.
And above and at the end of all of them (at least it seemed like all of them - certainly a lot or most if them) were the Gracies. So many Gracies! It felt like if the Saudi Royal family (with its hundreds of princes we can't keep track of) had started a fighting circuit - but it also seemed all of them dominated, or at least won. Scrawny cousin you'd never heard of? He'll be getting a guy twice his size to tap out right about when you're finishing your sandwich.
It was entertaining if it was your thing. However, it suffered from the lack of structure; essentially all other successful spectator fighting sports have them for a reason.
The Gracies always would win, but their unbeatable technique was basically to get the other (usually bigger) guy on the ground, get leverage/advantage over him, and exploit it (meaning basically never let go).
They were like chess masters who'd gain an advantage imperceptible to you or me, but which they know guaranteed them the win - all they had to do was hold on and grind it out.
There was no time limit so the bouts could be long, real long, however long it took to grind it out, to get the other guy to tap out or for the advantage to grow large enough that Gracie could apply enough pressure, pain, or discomfort to force the issue.
More importantly, the bout was continuous not broken up into short rounds. The fighters got no break, and critically no reprieve. The fighters never had to stop so the fight never reset; there was no being saved by the bell. Instead, once the desired advantage or leverage was obtained - once Gracie had his opponent in the grip or position he wanted - it could be pressed/exploited for however long it took to grind out the win.
The result could be technically impressive, or just amazing at seeing how the little guy would do it again, but also dull. A friend described why she liked it once as she enjoyed watching fit dudes with little clothes on roll around and hug each other closely - real close - covered in sweat making their bodies slide against one another; she compared it (favorably, to her) to watching a certain style of low budget p@rn from the 70's, or amateur today, where the camera angle and perspective were off, and the actors untrained (or simply engaging in sex for pleasure, not to get the best movie shot so not engaging in it in a way that lets viewers see what's going on but yields little or much less pleasure), yielding scenes way too long and chaotic but entertaining, or at least interesting or worthy of curiosity, all the same.
Any place those can still be seen?
I don't know about legally, but there are torrents
UFC happened. Before that, competions allowing grappling were either local, like Brazilian full contact fights, or, like wrestling or judo, didn't allow or favor the sumissions that are the strong suit of BJJ.
Judo has a pretty good submissions game, that unfortunately tends to be deprecated in sports judo because it's a less efficient way of winning.
Cf. the "Kimura".
I admittedly don't know much about unarmed martial arts or their history so perhaps there's an obvious answer "yes", but a question appears to me: DID it take that long? As I understand, plenty of other martial arts like military archery or jousting were widely practiced, then forgotten, and have since been reinvented in modern times. If my impression on that general trend is correct, it wouldn't strike me at all strange if pankratiasts of the Ancient Greece or practitioners of knightly martial arts in Medieval Europe did something a lot like BJJ, then the pressure to kill or incapacitate your opponents through whatever means necessary decreased and martial arts as practiced started optimizing showiness, display of manliness, safety, sportsmanship, etc (or, in parallel development, whatever works in unorganized street fight context), and once combat sports with rules similar to pankration or approximating real 1vs1 combat resumed, it was rediscovered rather quickly.
BJJ isn't really an art optimized by pressure to kill your opponent or incapacitate your opponent as effectively as possible. In that context, traditional jujitsu was more optimized, in the sense that it was a second-line measure after attempting to kill an opponent with your weapons, designed to account for an opponent who was likely trying to use weapons to kill you.
One thing that did take a fairly long time to invent was equipment for safe sportified martial arts practice where practitioners could train their techniques in earnest against each other without a high rate of injury. In Japan for instance, people were still practicing with bokken (solid wooden practice swords which could absolutely kill someone if you gave them a solid hit to the head with one,) until the 16th century. Other forms of protective equipment existed, and some parts of the world developed pretty effective nonlethal practice weapons earlier than that. But any martial art is made much harder to practice effectively if you keep getting injured all the time.
It would've been interesting to see what modern pankration ended up looking like if they'd included it into the revived Olympics.
I would be somewhat surprised if medieval knights did something that looked like BJJ. They were trained, first and foremost, for real fights with weapons and armor.
I wouldn't necessarily assume that even pankratists did something that looked like BJJ. What you want in an MMA fight turns out to be a mix of boxing, wrestling, and BJJ. The Greeks had the first two, so I'd expect pankration to be mainly those.
There are surviving Japanese koryu martial arts that are focused on grappling while in foot soldier armor. (Not in place of weapons work, but as a supplement to weapons work.)
I'm not an expert, but I believe medieval knights did care a lot about the ground game. It's really difficult to stab or bludgeon a guy in full plate armor, so your best bet is to get him on the ground and stick a dagger through his visor.
On the topic of BJJ, there was an interview with Matt Thornton (who opened the first BJJ school in Oregon) on Sam Harris just last week: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/316-self-defense-reality-and-fantasy
Matt's perspective on why it took BJJ so long to get a foothold in North America matches this "lack of selection pressure" theory. It wasn't until MMA/UFC kicked off in the early 90s that you had radically different martial arts disciples pitted against each other to see what actually worked. Up until then BJJ got a lot of pushback on the grounds of "it focuses too much on what to do when you're already on the ground. Just keep your distance and don't let yourself get knocked to the ground!"
Short stories lost their ecosystem; there’s an old Orwell article (circa 1940?) about how no-one ever buys anthologies of them so publishers won’t publish those. They survived through pulp magazines (and literary magazines to a lesser extent), which have died out (probably due to comics books and TV).
Short stories got replaced by tv episodes and comic books the same way that poetry got replaced by popular songs.
I agree. In any context where one has more than one opponent, going for a grapple will leave you defenseless.
In pre-modern times most combat research would have gone into armed combat, however I assume that basically every early society developed some type of proto-jiujitsu/wrestling. But due to low population, low amount of writing things down, and in general very little cross pollination of ideas since in those times techniques were often kept secret. But we know it happened, there are paintings in Greece of Olympians doing heel hooks - which are a somewhat advanced BJJ technique, certainly not something you would do randomly.
In the modern period many of these would have been wiped out by colonialism or corrupted by entertainment concerns. But many survived.
I think it's really important to finally recognize that BJJ is "Universal Grappling" in the sense of "Universal Culture", the BJJ of today looks nothing like what the Gracies did in the early 20th century. Modern BJJ is the composite of all those surviving proto-grappling styles, and massive amounts of research and optimization that have resulted from having a worldwide community, massive competition scene and internet connections blowing down all of the barriers to trade of ideas within martial arts.
Basically the amount of research in modern BJJis just implausibly higher than could have ever occurred in antiquity. But there was lots of stuff you would recognize as legitimate proto-jiujitsu all over the world, but just like most sports it didn't ever really get it's full development until globalization.
Tulsa article is very interesting, trying to think of a good pretext for forwarding it to some people I know.
One thing that the linked article didn't mention is that Tulsa Benevolent Dictator for Life George Kaiser is 79. I'd be worried about what happens when he passes; will his heirs just rug pull the entire city and move to a coast?
Seems like they need a Kaiser Permanente.
Angry upvote
Marge Simpson groan
Some speculation, re: 15 minute cities.
If those dense cities don't have any farms, then they have to import their food. In order to import food, they have to produce goods and services that farmers will trade for, or goods and services that are desired by other people who make goods and services that farmers want.
This is basic international trade economics, but with borders drawn around arbitrarily small regions instead of large nation-states.
So if these 15 minute cities don't have light-industrial zoning, then the economy will be propped up by finance types, or professional bloggers, or journalists, or any type of profession that generates revenue from outside the city. Those professions are not necessarily stable; what happens if the internet goes down for long periods of time?
These facts appears to be the reason that American cities have fluctuated between dynamic, energetic utopias (a la Thoroughly Modern Millie) and crime-ridden dystopias (a la Taxi Driver) over the past decades. Making cities even *more* insular might compound the problem.
Although I will concede that having grocery stores on the first floor of an apartment building is more efficient than zoning commercial buildings far away from residential building.
> Although I will concede that having grocery stores on the first floor of an apartment building is more efficient than zoning commercial buildings far away from residential building
Maybe, but it would suck to live on the second floor of such an apartment building. Why not put all the shops on a couple of blocks, then have apartment buildings surrounding that area (for people who want to live in apartments and be close to the shops), and then low-density houses outside that area (for people who want to live in houses and be further from the shops)?
Walkability vs city size vs personal space vs driveability is a set of tradeoffs, and I think there are much better ways of optimising for them all than are done in most cities I've visited, particularly in the US. But there's a certain contingent of "urbanists" who seem intent on optimising by throwing out one set of desirable aspects entirely ("no, you can't have a back yard or drive anywhere, be a good middle class peon and live in a pod"). The conversation on city design needs to move on from listening to these people.
Why would it suck? I've lived above 4 different businesses and the only one that was annoying was a pizza place that was open late because it got a lot of loud drunk people. I currently live across the street from a grocery story and I don't see any problems that would make me unhappy if I lived above it instead.
Even if it sucks, that's low-income housing right there.
And I agree with Drethelin that the worst place I've lived near is a late-night pizza joint slash sports bar slash impromptu firework launchpad.
Why would it suck ? I've lived right over different kind of stores all my life and it was great ! By comparison the couple years I lived in a residential block it was really annoying to have to walk 15 minutes every time I forgot something at the grocery store.
Why would it suck? I've lived above an 7-day retail store for the last 15 years and it's fine. And getting better: we don't get nearly as much noise from the pub down the street as we did ten years ago.
I think the answer that seems lacking from (what I can see) in a lot of US new builds is the absence of courtyards and interior balconies. It’s a brilliant urban innovation that is very common in Europe - you have one side of a complex facing the street (and with all the amenities that come with it) and relatively private internal space.
Townhouses - on this front at least - are even better. Nearly all the rowhomes and townhouses you see in the UK have fairly ample gardens and backyards. I’d venture that a fair number offer the same amenity value as (larger) lawns and backyards in suburban residential developments.
> Maybe, but it would suck to live on the second floor of such an apartment building.
That's usually where the owners of the store would live. Since they would close their own store before going home, they wouldn't be bothered by the noise from it.
I'm confused - I thought 15 minute cities were just normal cities, but subdivided differently. maybe a little denser, and maybe less freedom of movement. How does this change the fundamentals of food procurement? Everywhere has to have money or else it will be poor (with difficulty getting food being one subproblem of poverty) but modern cities don't seem even close to not being able to produce enough (financial) value to feed themselves.
Cities thrive off the network effects of large amounts of people living and working together, that's essentially what a city is.
Reimagining a city as a 15 minute walled garden that outsiders can't enter without being fined sounds great if you're a remote worker, but I am skeptical that arrangement can create the sort of exponential economic activity on suhc a smaller footprint.
To me the 15 minute city feels like trying to isolate a small rural town experience in the middle of a big city. You can get to anywhere in e.g. Grand Junction CO in 15 minutes, but why would you want to? The big benefits of big cities are only possible with the large catchment areas big cities provide
In the DSL thread that was the planned implementation of the concept in Oxford. Divvy up the city into bits and fine people for driving between them (unless of course they're well connected enough to get an exemption).
Oh, is this like that thing where serfs couldn't leave their land?
(only half joking)
That wasn't the implementation in Oxford.
Oxford was not saying "this is how we become a 15-minute city", but "because we already are a 15-minute city, we can do this" where "this" was an effort to stop people driving longer distances on local roads. If you wanted to drive from your section of the city to another section, you had to use the highway; if you drove on the local roads, then you would be fined - though everyone got a number of free days, and licensed taxis were allowed to do so at any time.
Note: Oxford has a highway that completely circles the city; one of the objectives was to get people to drive out to the highway, drive around, and then come back in. This was because residents got annoyed at the amount of traffic in their neighbourhood from people who were just driving through, not starting or ending in that neighbourhood.
Also, Oxford has a pretty good public transit system, has lots of cycle lanes and is pretty walkable - and you could always get the bus, cycle, walk or even get a taxi to another neighbourhood.
Hmm. Yeah, well I guess that's what I get for reading and believing the first comment in the thread. (This time I'll be more sensible and believe the _last_ comment in the thread.)
I feel like if the goal is to encourage people onto the ring road then maybe that's better done by improving the quality of ring road and its connections, and maybe some strategic road closures through the middle. Looking at a map of Oxford though, it's a bit long and thin and the ring road is far away from most of it.
In any case it definitely doesn't seem to have anything obvious to do with the idea of a "fifteen minute city", except to the extent that the rhetoric around one is being used to justify the other.
Really? I'll have to revisit the plan. The restriction point I know best, at Marston Ferry Road, is a transition between the ring road and neighborhoods, suggesting to me that the plan will encourage the use of local roads.
This is not what they are doing in Oxford (which seems to be the origin of a lot of these claims). You can read more about the proposals here: https://www.oxfordstudent.com/2023/01/25/15-minute-city-plans-cause-controversy/
It doesn't prevent you from driving anywhere in the city, it actually directs traffic towards a ring road around the city and fines people for driving through the city centre. The idea of this is to avoid congestion in the centre of Oxford. Since Oxford is a very old city and it wasn't designed with cars in mind, that might make sense.
From the article:
> However, it is important to note that travel to other areas of Oxford will be permitted by alternative routes, such as the ring road surrounding the city, at any time. Residents will also be able to apply for permits to drive through filters and into other neighbourhoods for up to 100 days a year, while Oxfordshire residents will be able to secure permits for up to 25 days a year. Free travel through filters will be allowed by bus, bike, taxi, scooter, and walking. Exemptions will also be provided for carers, blue badge holders, business, and emergency services.
"it actually directs traffic towards a ring road around the city and fines people for driving through the city centre"
I finally had a chance to revisit the proposal* and I strongly disagree with this assessment, which borders on bizarre. As you can see in the linked map below, the proposed filter sites actually discourage traffic to and from the ring roads.
Four of the filters sit on important routes between the A34 and the city center (ok, "centre"). Only one, at St Cross Road, will really change within-city traffic.
* Proposal here: https://www.oxfordshire.gov.uk/residents/roads-and-transport/connecting-oxfordshire/traffic-filters
Map here: https://oxfordshire.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=4dd8429028b84927970d4197948978c2
I don't follow your drift here. Look at the map that you linked to. Currently, if you want to travel between Osney and Marston, or between Osney and South Oxford, or between East Oxford and North Oxford, or between Marston and North Oxford, you might well do so by travelling directly (in the first three cases, through the "centre"). After the bus filters, you won't be able to do that, and you will have to use the ring road instead.
It looks like the western parts of Oxford will feel the impact of the filters the most*, to the extent that some of the trips you're talking about would definitely be affected. However, I think we may mean something different by "city center", which I think of as, roughly, the area bordered by the Cherwell on the East, the Thames on the south, the railway on the West and St Hugh's college in the North.
In that view, a trip from Marston to North Oxford doesn't even involve what I think of as the city center.
The trip from Osney (or West Oxford) to Marston, by contrast, could definitely take you through the city center (via the Magdalen bridge to Marson road, though that sounds punishing) or on its edge (via Banbury), but the A34 will often be the best choice for this trip anyway, unless you've got some intermediary stops like a visit to the Ashmolean (or really, anything downtown). But in that case, you're not considering the A34 anyway.
Similarly, if you wanted to drive from East Oxford to North Oxford today, I'd expect you'd try to get on Marston Ferry Road as soon as possible *instead* of going through the city center, but the St Clement's Street and Marston Ferry Road filters discourage this!
Finally, a trip from Osney to South Oxford certainly skirts the area I think of as the city center, but it's kind of a borderline case. If the goal is to reduce southbound traffic on Abingdon road, I guess I can see it.
I don't intend to be churlish, and I may be wrong about these! I mostly know Oxford as a pedestrian, cyclist, and bus passenger, and I'm not a full-time resident (I've lived there about two years, cumulatively). But, as I commented on Slow Boring when Yglesias wrote about this, I love Oxford, think it already achieves most of the positive "fifteen minute city" qualities, and I worry that a heavy-handed intervention will turn the city from an advertisement for livability into a warning against it!
* Depending on the implementation of the traffic circle filter in front of the business school. I can't tell whether it will prevent traffic onto Hythe Bridge Street only or Park End Street as well, which makes a difference).
>modern cities don't seem even close to not being able to produce enough (financial) value to feed themselves.
In Chicago last week, the newly-elected mayor mentioned poverty and financial insecurity as the primary driver behind the recent, gargantuan riot involving teenagers smashing cars and attacking bystanders. That riot accentuated the rising levels of crime in cities around the country, which exists in the shadow of sky-high crime rates in the 1980s and 1990s. All this crime has been caused by- or at least *claimed* to be caused by- inner city poverty.
So here's how I see it: if you or I live in a city, you should either be able to make money by typing on a computer, or you should live within 15 minutes of a group of people that can. In other words, the failure state of a "15-minute city" is that it transforms a part of a city into a service economy with nobody to serve, and exacerbates white flight, food deserts, and a cornucopia of other city-related problems.
I think a better idea would be to create a "15-minute commercial zone", where the most economically productive part of a city is rezoned to cater to its richest residents. E.g. grocery stores, hair salons, and strip clubs by the financial district, with public transportation to make it easy for workers in dense residential parts of the city to earn a living serving the richest residents.
Technically, I would say that "crime has been de-criminalized". ;-)
15 minute cities (as in "a city in which you can access all amenities in 15 minutes", perhaps not some specific proposal under that name) are just cities the way cities have formed/been designed from the dawn of civilization, with the exception of post-war cities (mostly in North America) where laws prohibit mixed zoning.
Yep! Mixed neighbourhoods are organic. Traversable city centres aren't. In old cities, the centre is the oldest part and often predates the car. Allowing anyone to drive across means no-one can, because of congestion. You still need to allow traffic *into* centres., but the natural tendency to go from one edge to the other via the centre has to be articially discouraged.
See Moloch for the conterargument. If people make their own decisions without co ordination, they end up with results they don't want.
The problem with that is that in dense, pre-modern city centres, you are essentially forced to choose between prioritising the interests of pedestrians and cars, which again, in dense cities are at odds (particularly when inner city congestion also diminishes the utility of public transport). You have to allocate priority to one, and (the qualitative benefits of car-free city centres aside) it is just more efficient to allocate that to pedestrians.
If the "city center" is sufficiently small, you've got a point. Otherwise I think you need to give transit equal weight (though on a per person rather than per vehicle basis). And there need to be time periods when service vehicles (trucks, etc.) get equal weight, here probably on a per pound basis.
> the natural tendency to go from one edge to the other via the centre has to be articially discouraged
You don't need to discourage it, you just need to build better alternatives -- a good road that bypasses the city centre. If there's no room to build a road, you build a tunnel.
You need the alterative, and you need people to know about it...it isn't obvious that you should head off in the opposite direction,and get onto the ring road.
Not just know about it. Habit is very strong, so you need to encourage a different one.
Even in post-war cities, you can get to pretty much any amenity (if not pretty much every _place_) within fifteen minutes, it's just that the relevant mode of transport is driving, not walking. This is a good thing.
But timing isn’t the only consideration. There are exclusive benefits to walkability (public health and pollution reductions [as measured by say, emissions exhaust on city streets], lower total public transport costs [when public buses, or bicycles, are not competing with traffic]) that you don’t get with emphasising driving.
Ultimately, the fifteen minute city doesn’t restrict driving. I live in the original “fifteen minute city” (Oxford) and I’d venture that you could drive from nearly any point to another, via the ring-road, in not much longer than that time. Before this push, I spent over an hour on a 3km bus ride because of early morning congestion going into the old centre.
I'm sorry, but I feel you need to elaborate a point. Why is driving rather than walking a good thing? Sometimes it's necessary, but why is it a general good?
Off the top of my head: you don't get rained on, you can easily go places when it's -5F or +120F outside, you're much less exposed to random street crime, you can transport much more than can be carried in the hands (or a backpack), you aren't limited by age or infirmity and many physical handicaps (e.g. a one-legged person can drive a car 20 miles easily but walking even half a mile can be an agony).
Cars are what free old and infirm people and people with assorted handicaps to live independently. They allow women to traverse places that aren't super safe and contribute to their liberty. They allow civilization to reach higher levels of efficiency and comfort in places that have harsh weather some big chunk of the time. If economical mass-produceable reliable "personal transportation pods" that can be operated very simply, by anybody, had been invented only last year by Google, they would be celebrated as the most briliant and liberating innovation since the telephone.
Being an old and infirm person, I can't drive.
You have valid points to the extent that lots of things would need to be redesigned, but delivery services aren't unreasonable.
Yes, people are routinely misinterpreting the idea as "splitting existing huge cities into small independent towns dotting the countryside". It would be called "15 minute towns" in this case.
A 15-minute city is just a regular city where each 1x1 block is zoned to contain things you need on a *daily* basis: a daycare, a school, a grocery store, a playground and a jungle gym, a community center, a cute local café (like someone quipped in the comments); and yes, the zoning might have to be denser to fit enough people to support these establishments. It doesn't mean, like Yglesias assumes, that every block has to have everything you might want from a city: a museum, a restaurant, a clinic, a movie theatre, an office block for a large corporation, a park, a factory etc. It's perfectly fine to take a bus/tram to the next block over to see a movie or to eat out or to shop for new clothes, to commute to a large office block or a factory across the river, or to travel across the city to visit MoMA or the zoo.
FWIW, some cities I'm familiar with have divided themselves into areas, and only those who live in an area have a sticker that permits them to park in that (residential) area. They've also turned a lot of streets into ... not dead ends, exactly, but mazes that only have a few entry/exit points. (The barriers are low enough that fire engines can ignore them, but if a non-emergency vehicle uses them it's a fine if they're apprehended.)
Does this count as a municipal version of balkanization?
Depends on what you mean. Parking isn't checked after 5PM, so people still socialize pretty much ignoring the areas, except you need to learn how to get in and out, and occasionally through the maze. Lots of people don't like it, but lots of people do. I think most of the time most of the people like it.
"Parking isn't checked after 5PM, so people still socialize pretty much ignoring the areas"
Many Thanks! That wasn't clear from the earlier comment about parking stickers, which, if enforced 24 hours a day, would have impeded socializing between areas.
Is parking in a different area completely disallowed, or do you just have to pay for it?
If you call a parking ticket "paying for it", then you can pay for it.
This is already often done in areas of new suburban development. The area I live in, for example, was built in the 1990s, and indeed my kids walked to the neighborhood school until high school, and there are at least small parks with play areas within stroller distance of almost every house, and you can walk to a grocery store and coffee shop if you like. Not a daycare, perhaps because walking to the daycare with your 1- or 2-year-old unless it's within a few hundred feet isn't realistic. Besides which, it's a pretty affluent area, and relatively few parents were interesed in warehousing the kids during working hours, sending them to Montessori when they were 3-4 until they reached school age was more typical.
But retrofitting this kind of organization onto an existing city, or even suburb, would be very, very expensive, so it's hardly surprising nobody's interested in that.
Typically cities are where the centers of production are (in America, suburbs and rural areas only survive at their quality of life because the federal government is de facto a massive engine for moving money from urban to rural areas). There's a reason the richest/highest QOL places in the world are city-states like Singapore or Monaco that don't have that kind of political extractive pressure.
You're valuing money over life support. Cities cannot survive without importing LOTS of food and water. Rural areas are where those are produced. Suburbs are parasites on cites, but occasionally grow up to be cities themselves.
If you're talking manufactured good, yeah, those are made in cities. But very little food or water is generated within cites.
And modern farming doesn't work without manufactured goods, equipment and planning. Everyone needs everyone else, and we use money to denote how much the traded-off things are worth in value.
Modern food production technically happens mostly in the cities, as the raw products are a tiny fraction of the food industry, and most of the value and labor is not in growing wheat or meat but rather in processing and packaging and retailing and (sometimes, but often enough) cooking and serving it.
When someone spends $10 on a lunch, that lunch generally contains less than $1 of stuff that the city had to import from rural areas, and all the rest was generated within a city.
Again you're valuing money over life support. Shaked has a good point, but most of what you're talking about can be done anywhere. It's done in cities because it's convenient. (Actually, a few decades ago most of it was done in "outer suburbia", i.e. at the edges of urbanized areas. Probably because land was cheap. I don't know about currently.)
The money extracted during the processing is NOT a decent measure of the amount of value contributed. It's a measure more of the amount of control exercised by a proportionally small number of people. When managers decide to give themselves a pay raise, they don't ask, or even inform, the folks working on the shop floor. The folks working on the shop floor don't have the same access to control over wages. This does not imply that management is that much more valuable, merely that they made decisions that favor themselves. The same dynamic exists at all stages of transaction. The guy growing the tomatoes knows that he must sell them QUICKLY or they will have no value at all. (Grain has less time pressure, but also requires more land per unit income.) But most of the value in the food is converting non-edible things (like soil and sunlight) into edible things. However because of inherent asymmetries in bargaining power, the farmer receives less cash per unit work than the purchaser. The main reason that distilling was placed under strict federal control was so that farmers couldn't convert grain into whisky, which had a higher market value, was easier to transport, and could be stored more easily. (Look up the Whiskey Rebellion. And note that rum was placed under no such restrictions.)
I can't see any more than some minority of current humans being really attracted to a 15-minute city. If you look at the actual trends of new development in affluent cultures -- where people pay a premium to live who can afford to buy what they want -- they are all in the opposite direction.
People want to live in nice quiet bedroom communities where the only thing within 15 minutes' walk are their kids' friends' houses, a park, a pool, and maybe a cute coffee shop. The grocery store wants to be located a little further, so the noise and cars and required larger transportation nexus isn't annoying, and although we would like it to also have a Home Depot, an optician, a pizza joint and an Olive Garden for out-of-town visitors (plus a trendy froyo shop and another coffee shop), we certainly don't want it to also include a bus or train station , still less an auto body shop, lumberyard, airport, or the factory to which many of us go to work each morning.
Perhaps there are people who think it would be really cool to mix residential, commercial, major transportation, and at least light industrial cheek-by-jowl, everything within a stone's throw of each other, but either there are too few of them or they don't make enough money, so no such places are being built.
There's nothing stopping both types of areas from existing in the same city. Denser stuff towards the middle, sparser stuff towards the outside.
When I was younger, single, and more noise-tolerant, I lived in a small apartment in a high-density inner area where I could easily stumble home from a hundred different bars and walk to my office. Nowadays I'm older and have kids so I live in a big house on a quarter-acre block in a quiet area. That's a reasonable set of tradeoffs, and in a well-designed city you should be able to pick any point on that spectrum that you like.
Hence why I said "minority" and not "zero." But even at that, what you describe is only a modest slice of the modern urban demographic -- hip twentysomethings who dig the city for its life. A much larger chunk are people who are older, and often with family, who are simply compelled to be there, because that's where the blue-collar labor jobs are, or the janitor/office manager/receptionist/maid/driver service jobs tending to the needs of the aristocracy. These are people who suffer with shitty urban schools and wretched urban crime in neighborhoods that sometimes look like Lebanon in the civil war. They would be ecstatic to have the choice you made -- but they don't. They don't have the reliable transport, they can't get jobs in front of computers in suburban office parks, and they can't save up the capital to buy property.
In principle, yes, one could imagine some in-between region, and every now and then it does seem to happen. Row houses in the (then) outer suburbs of Philadelpha and New York in the 1890s were one such appearance. A whole generation of poor immigrants got a house of their own for the first time, if only 100 square feet of yard, and reared a generation that went on to college and nice houses in the suburbs. The "ticky tacky" tract houses widely mocked by sensitive philosophes were another successful attempt to bring some the privileges of the middle class to the workers. They made houses cheap enough, in Detroit or Allentown, that guys with a high school diploma who turned a wrench or poured steel could afford one, and they got a shot at being middle class, and sending their kids to college to be doctors and engineers.
It doesn't seem to be any part of the current trend, and not even part of the current social philosophy. To the extent that the fate of such people is treated as anything other than a cynical political football, the intention seems to be to put them on some kind of corn dole indefinitely, to treat them as some kind of advanced class of pet, because we have no hope they can stand on their own feet ever.
Sorry, but there is. Land prices. Land prices tend to be a lot higher within cities than outside of them. If you're doing new construction, you prefer to minimize the cost of the land that you're going to build on. This is the reason modern suburbs exist. Go back a bit where transportation was more of a problem, and the suburbs were the poor areas. (I think 1800 is far enough, but most of my sources were older than that.)
> If you're doing new construction, you prefer to minimize the cost of the land that you're going to build on
That sounds like a general rule that "making stuff using cheap raw ingredients is more profitable than making stuff using expensive raw ingredients". The fact that the land is more expensive just gives you a higher selling price at the end.
I admit that this works weirdly in the US where a lot of inner-city areas are ghettoes. I'm still not quite sure how this is a stable situation. You'd think that a big one-off effort to push all the poor people out of a given inner-city area and gentrify it would be massively profitable.
Not sure about this. The most affluent neighbourhoods in the UK are in places like Kensington, which are predominately rowhomes and very easily check the “fifteen minute city” box (the absence of light industry aside). It’s a similar dynamic in much of continental Europe - the most affluent neighbourhoods are often proximate to city centres, and are significantly denser than their American counterparts. Yet, many of these cities score very highly on liveability indexes.
I grew up in Singapore, where space is at an enormous premium. Most people live in public housing. The very wealthiest live in landed houses. But even then, some of the biggest value-adds for a landed house are proximity to public transport and shopping amenities. The community the Prime Minister lives in - primarily large bungalows in the tens of millions - is minutes away from the city’s biggest shopping street, and a new MRT station. That is not for a (severe) lack of developable land for private villas further out. It’s just the most convenient equilibrium. (Arguably, Singapore suffers from a big “missing middle” problem, and I think that 5-6 floor apartments, or smaller townhouses, with courtyards and street access are nearly ideal).
I didn't say this is where the very richest already live. They do often live (or at least have a nice little pied-à-terre) in the city center, for access to major economic resources. And they can afford the enormous expense of a nice place to live in an area where land is priced by the square inch. Bully for them!
What I said is that these are not the places that are *growing* -- where middle-class yeomanry who have managed to scrape together enough capital to buy property are moving.
I mean, if you want to create places that appeal to the fabulously wealthy, and where the desperate poor need to live to service them, that's great, but as a member of the peasant class myself I think we do quite enough already for the wealthy, and my priority in land-use management would be to address the needs of those a bit further down.
Singapore is an exception in almost every important social and land-use way from the rest of the world, so whatever solutions work well there can be expected to be pretty idiosyncratic. They would no doubt be quite interesting, but not super transferable.
> we certainly don't want it to also include a bus or train station , still less an auto body shop
No bus or train station? How would one get to work, then?
By car, of course. Getting to work by bus or train is what you do when you have no choice (you're poor), the public transportation options are fabulously plentiful and dense for assorted historical reasons (you live in London or Moscow), or when your time is insufficiently valuable that the extra time commuting costs less than buying (and maintaining) a car (e.g. you're a student).
The 15-minute concept was invented for Paris, another city with plentiful public transportation. Improving public transportation to the point where it is used by everyone goes hand in hand with 15MC.
Well, when the Singularity gets here and we can undertake massive infrastructure projects that cost $billions with legions of nanobots that can get the job done in less than the traditional 10 years and without making life miserable during construction, we can get right on that. Improving public transportation has been a social shibboleth since the 70s, and staggering amounts of public money have been spent on it, with practical results that total approximately squat.
Those cites that in 1975 had excellent public transportation systems on which big chunks of the population could rely remain that way today. Huzzah! And cities that in 1975 didn't have them...still don't have them. The car is more used than ever, particularly in Second and Third World nations that are trying to achieve First World comfort for their people. At some point, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results becomes the definition of madness, as they say.
I say to hell with subways, trains, and busses. It's been tried, and where it works, it's in use, and where it's not in use, it's because it won't work. Time for some new ideas. Maybe self-driving cars will be the ticket, although I doubt it. But there are loads of other possibilities, if you free your mind from the grips of the rail and bus and general contracting lobbies. Maybe better regional road design. Better intersections and signal control -- there are all kinds of Youtube videos by clever people on this, ideas that largely languish. Real-time traffic monitoring, with two-way communication between roads, signals, traffic info and individual cars -- even if they have human drivers, the drivers can make far better decisions and traffic can be optimized. Better mixes of private and some degree of public transport, like park 'n' fly, park 'n' ride, et cetera.
So this is why New York, Tokyo, Los Angeles, London, Mexico City, Beijing are all empty and no one lives there?
To come to your conclusion about peoples preferences would require ignoring the last 100 years of urban development trends in the west and ignoring the current regulatory regimes which encourage the specific types of development you are talking about while, in many place, out right banning the type of develop you think no one "wants".
Your counter-examples would make sense if I had said something as crazy as "and this is why all the cities are now empty ruins, because nobody at all wants to live in the city, not even the rats." As it is, you are arguing with something I didn't say.
...although, I might note just in passing that both of those big American cities are in fact losing population, good jobs, and wealth, to the point where even Democrats are a little concerned about the flight.
The implication of "people want to live in a place like X" is that they don't want to live in a place like Y. In this case the cities I listed are Y and X is the life you described (which does not describe a place I would want to live).
Not sure where you got the idea that people are fleeing those cities at a high rate. They both had small declines between 2020 and 2022, but I don't think we can take those years as typical due to COVID.
Sure, if by "people" we assume the categorical "every person now alive." Since I'm not psychologically rigid to the point of dysfunction, I don't mean any such thing, and instead when I say "people want to do X" I mean "quite a lot of people, enough to signficantly influence trends" but certainly not "every single person on Earth, with no exceptions."
That being the case, it is entirely possible that there are human beings who don't fit my description, and who prefer to do something else. Indeed, you'll note I started off my comment by saying that I certainly concede the existence of a significant minority of people who really love living in cities. Hence the continued existence of big cities (1) comes as no shock to me, and (2) contradicts what I said in no sense at all.
As for the "small" declines, they don't seem "small" to the people with actual cash (as opposed to ideological viewpoints) at stake:
https://commercialobserver.com/2023/03/la-exodus-population-california-residents/
RE: Stop AI Development for 6 months, for those interested, Lex Fridman has talked with Max Tegmark who is the father of the letter (if I understood correctly; he is at least the President of FLI) and he elaborates on his reasons for the letter and what he hopes to achieve (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcVfceTsD0A, time stamped).
Interesting tidbit - he (obviously) feels like all the companies are bound together in a race to the bottom and hopes that the letter will break this system... and the main analogy he uses for this (and for most of the talk) is Scott's very own Meditation's on Moloch article (start at about minute 40 for full context, reference at 41:30). So, @Scott, how do you feel about this? It appears you contributed to the letter indirectly as well :P
Thanks, I've edited this in.
Twelve years of hanging around the rationality community and I've finally made it into an SSC post. I can finally rest now
It was a great map! Did you have to do anything fancy to make the states fit while preserving their shape, or did you just play it by ear?
Not my map! Now I feel bad for not looking up the source, I'll go hunt it down now
Damn, reverse search isn't getting any hits before my tweet. I'll ask around
Turns out it's from 4chan. More than that I doubt we'll ever discover
I don't actually think you'd have to do anything fancy, since you can just make the extra states whatever shape they need to be to fill the space.
29. I still want to see this data broken down by places that instituted the Counter-Reformation voluntarily and places where it was enforced after being conquered by Catholics. There would be no significant reverse effect because the Protestants mostly lost those wars in terms of net territory. The conquest of Prague alone could skew data significantly. Meanwhile places like Italy, Vienna, Paris, etc all continued on. They did eventually suffer their own declines. But mostly due to things completely unrelated to the Counter-Reformation. Italy had an economic crisis. Paris had Louis XIV being Louis XIV and insisting that "absolute monarch" really means absolute. Including over the universities. Poland had The Deluge. Etc.
Heh. The paragraph structure has, after King Louis of France, the Deluge.
Diets: my understanding is that due to rebound weight gain outpacing weight loss, dieters tend to gain weight over time faster than comparable non-dieters. This is deceptive, because the first diet tends to yield better results than subsequent attempts , giving the impression that better adherence or finding the 'right' diet that's easy to adhere to will change things. They don't, and the the cycle perpetuates.
Creating more diets to try will only contribute to accelerating obesity long-term through the cycle of dieting.
I think that the whole popular concept of a "diet" is wrongheaded and invites failure by default. It's like people think that if only they can suffer through a couple of months of torture their permanently slimmed down self can get back to the good life of pizza and soda indefinitely. Whereas the original meaning of the word simply applies to the stuff that you normally eat, and it seems obvious to me that a "diet" can only succeed if you approach it in that spirit - by committing to a permanent lifestyle change. If you're not ready for that then you've already failed and there's no reason to fool yourself further.
Yeah, I like the mid-Victorian diet: eat 6,000 Cal per day, and do sufficient work to maintain a waist-to-height ratio of 0.5 or less.
The 6,000 Cal, though, was mainly steamed and baked vegetables, molluscs and other sea food, and red and white offal, with beef dripping as fat. Waist-to-height ratio is a better BMI: easier to measure and calculate, and better predicts morbidity.
As the saying goes, the British conquered the world for spice, then decided they weren't interested in any of it.
I really wouldn't say that's fair - chicken tikka masala (invented in Glasgow) is widely considered our national dish :-)
Fair point. I just had some the other day, and was thinking about how nice it was of y'all to invent what most people consider an 'Indian' dish. I had it with naan, though, so I suppose I was combining national dishes.
I recently discovered that I've eaten at the restaurant where it was invented (by a Pakistani immigrant): https://www.theguardian.com/food/2022/dec/21/ali-ahmed-aslam-inventor-chicken-tikka-masala-dies-77
I think it's definitely possible to try and survive on only pizza and beer, and that'll clearly make you fat, but I don't think that's the reason most people gain weight. I think we've heard generations of 'advice' about food from what to eat, how much to eat, what balance of macromolecules is best, what size plate to use, when you can eat, what kinds of lipids are okay, how much salt to use, etc.
All the rules amount to engineering a diverse biological system based on the population mean from some underpowered study somewhere. Everyone is the average, including one breast and one testicle. This glut of 'rules' overrides perfectly good biological signals that come built in. They lead to unhealthy binging, panic eating, and other behaviors that lead to long-term weight gain (or loss for some pathologies), despite the body trying to tell you to knock it off by giving various signals of discomfort that the 'rules' once again redefine and reinterpret.
I disagree. I think that the rules are generally okay, there are no serious junk food-based diets as far as I'm aware. The problem is that following those rules is both onerous and unpleasant, and temptations to break them are ever-present. Our modern civilization is simply incompatible by default with being healthy according to evolution's designs, and it's increasingly more difficult to shape your environment such that it's possible to sustain healthy habits.
I think the problem isn't any one rule, but rather the aggregate that creates skewed behavior and distorts the individual's ability to listen to normal body cues. I know there's a common notion that modern lifestyle is incompatible with healthy living, but I'm not convinced that's true. Instead, it seems like more fodder for creating more rules to follow 'if you want to be healthy'. It becomes a moral/character issue and once again ramps up the tension, where people feel if they don't follow the rules it will reflect poorly on their character and they'll be judged. But prohibition rarely works well, and that's essentially what we're doing with various foods.
Oh, I definitely agree that social opprobrium can't solve these problems on its own. The rules are simple kludges, woefully inadequate for the task of fixing systemic issues.
About listening to your body, I agree in general, but in the case of modern diet evidence points to this feedback loop being broken. The lipostat theory seems solid, the only controversy is about which particular feature of the industrial civilization is at fault. See e.g. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/25/book-review-the-hungry-brain/
Yeah, I followed that theory a bit after Taubes was going on about carbs. I'm not as enamored of it as I used to be. It seems like an okay theory, but it doesn't feel like the kind of thing you can read and then turn around and recommend solutions that will work long-term.
I read the book Intuitive Eating and changed my lifestyle to fit that approach. Without really trying (and no stress about 'cheating'), I dropped 20 pounds that haven't come back. I no longer have 'food cravings' to the point that eating feels natural and easy, like it was when I was a kid and could eat whatever I felt like without gaining weight. I don't measure my food, cut out specific kinds of food, or worry that this cookie or soda will cause me to gain weight, because my body is fine at telling me when it doesn't want food anymore and I'm better at listening.
I don't agree with everything in the Inuitive Eating book, and some of the ideas feel a little hippy, but it worked like therapy for food-related everything in a way I didn't realize I needed until I read it.
100% the problem that creates obesity is people evolved to eat when food is available, and most people have it constantly available to them. Combine this with declining calorie burn through physical life declining, and you don't really need any more explanation.
It is not a hard problem, just a hard solution (fighting against millions of years of instinct to generally be lazy if possible and eat while the eating is good if possible).
The super hard part is that once you've gained the weight, it's super hard to convince your body that's not the new set point. That is, if you really want a healthier society, you've got to catch people before they gain the weight, rather than trying to fix after the fact. Nature is cruel.
I have long suspected that there is pretty significant variance from person in terms of how efficiently they turn “food into the mouth” into “available energy”. And maybe variation from person to person in terms of what kinds of foods are digested efficiently.
Has anybody looked into this? From the CICO crowd I’ve heard a lot of theories on individual variation on the “calories out” side of the equation (e.g. fidgeting being a way some people burn excess calories). But I’ve never really heard much serious questioning of the idea that “calories in” has individual variation - if you eat 4oz of lean beef, it has about this many calories, period.
When I was in grad school, the spouse of my thesis advisor was working on the calories out side of the equation. It seems many aspects of biology and environment are involved, to the point it becomes very complicated. I'm pretty sure body movement (including fidgeting) is a minor contributor, unless you're a big athlete. I think it's also tied into causal factors in determining whether you're more/less likely to be 'the kind of person who' engages in physical activity.
I’m particularly interested in the idea that individual microbiomes might play a role in how well you convert food into usable calories.
I think we all know somebody who can eat constantly and not gain weight, and another who seems to eat moderately but is always large, despite neither one being a gym rat. Either there is a big non-obvious source of calories out (like fidgeting) or one of them is much better at converting food into fat.
I vaguely recall reading or hearing that even differences in chewing can make a difference in how efficiently the calories in food are absorbed.
I think the best way to summarize how I see it is: feelings don't care about your facts. Decades of failure with dieting, programs, institutes, etc. have only led to blossoming obesity. You can lock someone in a room and force them to lose weight (cf. the people they hospitalize in the show "My 600 Pound Life"), and they will lose 100 pounds. Send them home again and they'll gain much of it back.
If, instead, you send them to a therapist to help them work through the childhood trauma that led to them comfort-eating you might see them naturally lose weight as they stop leaning on that crutch. Who cares how many calories you burn by chewing? It's the long-term behaviors that drive weight loss/gain.
Yeah I am kind of convinced that part of the reason I struggle so much with weight is that my gut is super "efficient". I just don't almost ever get sick from food, never get heartburn, like spicy food, don't have pooping issues, etc. I am like a garbage disposal.
Which is mostly great in a lot of ways, but doesn't do a lot to discourage overconsumption since there are almost no immediate downsides like their might be to someone who gets nauseous at a lot of smells or heartburn a lot.
And that isn't even getting into the how many calories exactly out of a 800 calorie meal does this person who has sudden runny stools an hour after every fifth meal get versus someone whose gut works. I kind of suspect it is less.
I was the same way, but I still found myself overeating during meals - especially at dinner. The two things that helped me the most were:
1.) Giving myself unlimited access to food. I felt less like I HAD to finish my meal when I knew that I could eat more later, and that I had no obligation to eat so much right then. When I realized I was 'working on' my plate, that it wasn't about satisfying hunger anymore, but about getting full and finishing the portion these ideas helped me to be okay with stopping there. If it's not enough, I have food and can eat more. Yet I rarely do.
2.) Really paying attention to how I felt both during and after the meal. I know when I eat more than I wanted to, because I feel vaguely less happy than I do when I eat only as much as I want. It's not indigestion or whatever, it's just not feeling as great about the mealtime experience. Then when I felt that way I'd remind myself that actually I didn't have to feel bad about the meal (because of 1 above - there's always more food, so why bias toward packing it in?). No single meal makes you fat, so I didn't worry about that so much, just how the mealtime experience made me feel before, during, and after the event. Slowly that conscientiousness changed my habits and made me happier about food in general.
Now, I eat what I want, when I want, and however much I want without gaining weight. I'm happy and not hungry, and I'm not beholden to 'cravings'. But it took some time to retrain my mind and my body to really understand what 'want' means to me.
A simple but effective technique is also to just buy smaller plates. The sight of a smaller but fuller plate will actually make you more satiated than the same amount of food on a larger plate.
I tried that and other hacks, and they didn't work for me. I just kept eating, getting seconds and thirds until I was overfed. It took actually feeling what it meant to be overfed, internalizing that feeling, and deciding I didn't like it to change my behavior. For me, 'tricking' my body never worked. Really listening to my internal signals was the only thing that created lasting change.
I think part of this is because the other side of the coin is that you'll always have unlimited access to food, whether you admit that or not. I was at a birthday party the other day for my kids and they had pizza. It was hot and looked good, but when I considered whether I was actually hungry, the answer was "no". I didn't want the food, and knowing that I was happy not to eat it. In the past I would have eaten anyway, because it was there and everyone was eating. I would have felt overfed afterward and regretted a decision that felt more like inevitability. That I didn't eat was driven by simple self-awareness, which looks from the outside like self-control, or like someone who can eat however much they want and whatever they want whenever they want and still be skinny. It helped me drop weight and keep it off. I don't think it's possible to replicate that as the sum of a multitude of 'hacks'.
This is true, and I've read several articles describing studies showing that different individuals respond differently to food (including fruit, not just burgers!). Finding them now, though, is harder, as is always the way. A quick search found me this one: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0934-0 - I don't currently have access to it, but the abstract sounds promising.
It is true. Every gut microbiome is different, and our microbes break down most of our foods, so it's true just on that point alone.
Nippard did a great video on whether obesity is a choice that goes over a bunch of the research on how people absorb the same amount of calories differently (study references in the description):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keBZfGAmq2Q
A friend did microbiome research in grad school. She was studying a specific type of gut bacteria that was in the mice she ordered from one source, but not another. She later found out that it was all in the food the mice ate. The vitamin mix was slightly different in one versus the other, and that led to differences in microbiome distributions across a host of species.
Sure, different people have different microbiomes, but to a large extent that's driven by diet. This makes sense, since what grows will be determined by what you feed it. (Try this at home with a bean and cabbage breakfast experiment!) I'm sure the causation you've outlined (microbiome -> diet) plays a role. But I think the magnitude of the reverse (microbiome <- diet) has a much greater effect size.
Yes, diet influences microbiome, but some people just have some microbes that are missing, so diet can't fix that. It's not clear that diet can fix them all. Fecal transplants FTW.
How about "parts of it are influenced by diet". That's certainly true, but I think there's evidence that other parts are influenced by something genetic. And, of course, whether you are exposed, possibly in some other way. Also by "in what order" you are exposed to the microbes.
And that's just what I've picked up from "popular science" articles.
A diet is supposed to be "the things that you eat". If you don't keep the diet permanently, you don't get the benefits permanently.
FWIW, I've switched to a diet of no sugar, no (almost none) starch. I expect to be on it permanently. (Well, diabetes 2 unmedicated requires something like that.)
Yes, fad diets are a bad idea. Lots of different reasons depending on the fad. But your diet is always a real thing, and if you stick to it, you get and keep the benefits it may offer. (And, of course, the detriments.)
30. I tend to think the media as cause narrative is a bit off. But most countries have become more polarized and are facing fairly severe crises over this and populists. The exact severity varies significantly. But this is a common international phenomenon among the democracies.
While I haven't actually ran the numbers eyeballing it the non-polarized democracies mostly seem to be those which are growing fairly rapidly economically (in real per capita terms) and have high trust in institutions. (And they still have polarized media.)
Specifically, this doesn't decrease feelings of difference. But it decreases the feeling that these differences can't be overcome or pessimism about the future of the country or the feeling compromise is bad. For example, a lot of Indians feel Indian society is very deeply divided but mostly believe these differences can be overcome. (There's also countries where the population feels polarized but politicians have managed to keep a lid on it. Often strong party systems where the ruling party defeated a populist revolt.)
As for how this happened the pattern in trust is easy. An institution does something and loses trust. It sometimes slowly grows (or can grow rapidly if something happens). But often it just stays low. For example, for the US government it was Vietnam. Trust in the US government at the start of American major troop presence (1961) was 77%. When the US pulled out (1975) it was 34%. And ever since then the average has been in the 30s-40s. For the banks/Wall Street it was the slowdown then crash of 2008 (from 53% in 2004 to 18% in 2010) and it now stays in the 20s. This has happened in succession such that the only trusted institutions left in the US are the military, first responders (police, firefighters, etc), and small business.
Reasons for economic growth are more complex. But the average real per capita growth since 2000 has been 1.2%. It was double that, 2.4%, from 1945 to 2000. The statistic has been consistently below the trailing century average since 2000.
Yeah, so anyway, grow the economy and get higher quality institutions. Easy to say, hard to do.
My long-held hypothesis was that media changed because the Internet demolished subscriptions as a viable revenue source, leaving advertising as the dominant factor. Since advertisers want eyeballs more than informed subscribers, the newspapers (and TV news) did the rational thing and optimized for eyeballs.
This hypothesis explains the timing (media mostly changed a few years after 1994, the year Netscape Navigator came out and the WWW became a public fascination), and the presence of clickbait. It does not appear to explain why non-US media sources haven't succumbed as much to polarization pressure... at least, not until I notice that the Internet has not pervaded the globe outside the US as much as it has inside.
That leaves weather, sports, and stocks as the only things that don't quite add up for me. They've long stood out as the only parts of news that do still have to cater to subscribers. What's keeping them fed? That information might be gathered more efficiently now than before (especially stocks), but I'm betting more money is spent on them than before anyway (even adjusting for inflation and PPP). Are grants stepping up? Is there a subscriber base I'm not noticing?
But radio, which was a much bigger thing in that era in part because it was most of what people listened to while driving, changed in this way starting before the WWW was created. It changed in this way during the mid/late 1980s regarding both news+current events (e.g. Rush Limbaugh) and sports (sports yell-radio shows).
Also, when Fox News launched in fall 1996 only 22 percent of U.S. adults yet had online access and only 12 percent were going online for political or current-events news:
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/1996/12/16/online-use/
The actual trend has been the opposite: less reliance on advertising revenues and more reliance on subscriptions. Here's a graph for the NYT (https://www.statista.com/graphic/1/192911/revenue-of-the-new-york-times-company-by-source.jpg) which admittedly doesn't go back very far. But shows how much advertising revenue has collapsed and, insofar as it's been replaced at all, it's been replaced by subscriptions.
The common theory is the opposite: advertisers acted as a moderating force. If you want to maximize subscribers you want to stick close enough to the center as to get maximum readership. Subscriptions, meanwhile, optimize for a smaller but more passionate fan base. Which leads to extremism and siloing.
That's for the NYT only, and while I'm not crazy about the way NYT slants its articles, they certainly don't strike me as clickbait. Do you have a similar graph for newspapers nationwide? The one I found on Statista is paywalled.
I'm admittedly not familiar with the theory you're calling "common". For me, the common theory was the opposite of yours; see Neil Postman's _How to Watch TV News_ for details.
In terms of incentives, news sources want audiences to keep coming back, while controlling their own costs. The straightforward method is to deliver news in the form of stories, to drip-feed and repeat those stories (less investigative work required), and embed advertising in the middle of them in a way that keeps people looking. "More after this."
I do agree there's an incentive to tell subscribers what they want to hear, but 40 passionate subscribers will still make only 57% as much as 70 slightly less passionate subscribers.
One alternative way out is to make the news more _entertaining_. There are people who hatewatch this or that news. (A running joke I used to make is that, based on how often I heard about him and from who, Rush Limbaugh was watched almost exclusively by the left.)
If you don't share its politics, NYT seems pretty obviously, carefully crafted click bait for partisan readers who want confirmation of their biases, with just enough opposing-view perspective buried deep in the piece for the NYT to claim not to be biased.
Weird how I haven't seen folk mention that we're back where media started in late 1800s/early 1900s: very, very partisan. The whole faux-objective media is an artifact of 50s-60s, and even then, wasn't really true (Cronkite wasn't apolitical, even if that was the image). Prior to that period, the media was insanely partisan, over the top, not professionalized, etc.
I've thought about that, actually, and they say in the UK it always was that way.
The thing that gets me is the total lack of interest in accuracy in conservative media. Fox News just settled a huge lawsuit over this, and Tucker Carlson had the same complaint 20 years ago and tried to make a right-wing paper with good fact-checking before giving up because it was a total financial loser.
Since the 90s my position on "when is the US actually going to see serious collapse?", has been "as soon as the economy stops rapidly growing. That promise is what holds it all together, when it stops happening it will be immediate dissolution.
> Why do East Asians have so many famous numbered lists (“Four Noble Truths”, “Thirteen Classics”, etc)?
As Gwern himself mentioned as well, monosyllabic digits play a role (I'm not familiar with India), but I think it's mostly a matter of style. Certain ways of writing can just feel more natural for no particular reason. Reminds me of how English speakers love creating acronyms that spell a word, even though English is not really a language well suited for pronounceable acronyms, with only 5 vowels.
Doesn't Celtic mythology have a lot of numbered lists? (Like, the pre-Anglo-Saxon invasion stuff, so not technically "English".) I'd always assumed that this was some sort of Indo-European thing that migrated to China with Buddhism, but probably that's wrong.
Judaism has numbered lists too. Thirteen attributes of mercy, twelve tribes, ten commandments (and Plagues on Egypt), six orders of Mishnah, five books of Torah, four matriarchs, three patriarchs, two tablets of the covenant, one is our God on heaven and on Earth.
I really think so...
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ExcitedTitleTwoPartEpisodeName
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AdjectiveNounFred
(Everyone around me is a total stranger, everyone avoids me like a seitan ranger, everyone...)
I’d put my money on not having articles or caps (for at least Chinese); “The Points for Attention” could be a title “points for attention” is too vague to know you’re referring to a specific list.
I thought it was because Chinese doesn't have plurals. Providing a number makes it clear that it's a list. The Five Great Lakes of America, as opposed to the One Great Lake of Africa.
First we should ask if there's a phenomenon at all. Lots of cultures have numbered lists, probably a mnemonic for illiterates. In the 20th century, I think Chinese stands alone.
I am torn between "there are linguistic reasons in Chinese to name things this way" (such as the lack of a definite article), and "thousand-year-old religious traditions always make numbered lists" as the explanation. As "Four Noble Truths" originated in Sanskrit, I have to lean towards the second explanation.
I'd always assumed the short list thing was to emphasise the importance of the items being listed, due to there being so few of them and in many cases an unstated assumption that they cover all eventualities.
Isn't there a comical "three sorts of fools" list pattern in Mexico, for example, "There are three sorts of fools in the World, those who dance with their wives, those who drink with their boss, and ..", and I've forgotten the third. Maybe it was "those who can't even remember three simple items!" But it's like the "Knock, knock, Who's there?" rubric, in that there are many variations.
Edit: I tried a Google search, on the Mexico fools list, and not a squeak, with any phrase combo I could think of! I'm finding that more and more now, with things I know exist, and which in some cases had appeared on the Internet. So it appears even mighty Google has reached the limits of its ability to dig up references to anything!
Oh I for sure have found search engines declining in functionality the last few years. My phones ability to interpret my "keystrokes" as well. It is notably worse than it was 2-3 years ago, and I am sure it isn't me in this case.
It's amazing how bad my phone now is at recognizing what I'm trying to type, I assume changes in algorithms for patent litigation reasons, or for the kids. And google is no longer any good for anything other than offering up the product you don't want.
I am totally making this up, but still:
It could have something to do with the connection between numbers and magical powers. In the ancient world, a person who truly understood arithmetic (and geometry !) was in essence a wizard, or at least an oracle; e.g. he could tell you how many wooden planks you'd need to fence your sheep-pen, as though he could see the future ! A rich tradition of numerology developed in many cultures as the result, attributing *actual* magic (or divine, same thing) properties to numbers; this is especially fun to do if your language conflates numbers and letters/ideograms (e.g. Hebrew).
Thus, I suspect that titles of numbered lists such as "Four Noble Truths" and so on are a kind of numerological pun, that we modern Westerners may or may not have the capacity to understand in context.
Europe has this too. Seven Wonders of the World, Nine Worthies (great knights), Seven Deadly Sins.
My favorite Chinese numbered list is The Two Whatevers.
I picture Alicia Silverstone in "Clueless" dressed in a Mao Jacket.
Unfortunately, it's not as fun as it sounds: "We will resolutely uphold whatever policy decisions Chairman Mao made, and unswervingly follow whatever instructions Chairman Mao gave"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Whatevers
Ironically, you might find the Singaporean tendency to use acronyms particularly funny. It might be the most over-acronymised country in the world - allegedly an intentional strategy, early on, to facilitate easier communication with poor English speakers after independence.
Japanese has a lot of multiple syllable digits. Don't know about Chinese.
35. Georgian was somewhere between heavily discouraged and banned so Stalin wasn't exactly facing a lot of competition. But no, it wasn't anything to do with his later dictatorship. He actually went out of his way to hide them. As a child Stalin was an excellent student and a gifted poet and singer. He was also fairly religious and had a strong interest in art and music. (The interest would stick with him for the rest of his life.) He got into a good school and had a bright future ahead of him.
Then he read Marx and Lenin and a bunch of socialist literature and became a socialist revolutionary. He walked away from his educational life to be a full time, professional revolutionary (and/or criminal). He claimed he was kicked out of school for revolutionary activities but in reality he started skipping class and eventually just didn't show up. Instead he spent his time being a bank robber, extortionist, and general criminal in an attempt to disrupt the Tsarist system and raise funds for the revolution.
Georgian was never banned. Georgia was one of the few Soviet Republics where education was even mostly conducted in the local language, not Russian. Hence the many Soviet jokes about Georgians speaking Russian badly.
I was talking about under the Tsarist regime. Stalin didn't grow up in the Soviet Union, he grew up in Tsarist Russia. I realize now that wasn't clear.
I‘m not sure but I would be surprised if Georgian was actively discouraged under the Tsars. The Tsarist regime tried to kill „dialects“ but mostly left the non-Slavic languages alone.
I would add to this that as a teenager, several of Stalin's poems were published in a premier Georgian literary journal (Source: Montefiore's "Young Stalin"). These were long poems too, they gave a nobody a lot of page space. Simon Sebag Montefiore writes that while the themes were rather generic the language was very good.
Addendum: here is a credible source confirming this, with more details:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/may/19/featuresreviews.guardianreview32
I seem to recall from Young Stalin that Iveria was Georgia's premier literary journal, not Russia's, and I find it hard to believe that Russia's premier literary journal would be named Georgia, run by a Georgian, and publish poems in Georgian. Regardless, the point is that as a teenager, he was publishing poetry in prestigious journals.
Final thought, next time some person yammers about how The Humanities will impart morality to cold STEM, you can remind that person that Hitler was an artist and Stalin a successful poet. Mao was a poet too for that matter.
I'm half trolling here but half not. There's obvious value in humanities, but there's nothing about them that makes one inherently moral, as shown by these three monsters.
They certainly each thought themselves to be moral, or even Super-Moral. I'd say that it makes sense, if you think about adjacent topics all your life you might come to consider yourself an expert scholar capable of advancing state of the art, whereas STEM-type people would be more inclined to stay in their lane.
Please add Pol Pot to this list, studied in Paris. Basically, poseur intellectuals turn into communist butchers with far greater frequency than chance, which isn't too surprising given the things I've heard poseur intellectual say about the rabble. (And I'm not kidding, I think there's an obvious, common thread here people will nonetheless deny.)
Humanism does not equal good; it simply means that the justification for all things is (somehow) rooted in humans.
Under (genuine) Christianity you justify things as being for the glory of God, not for the benefit of the state or the welfare of humanity. The suffering of infidels and pagans, and hell even of Christians, doesn't matter compared to doing the will of God. And the same is true of Judaism (eg story of Abraham, or Job) or Islam.
Whereas, Humanism justifies things in terms of benefits to humans in the here and now. This may be limited groups of humans (nationalism or fascism or communism) or claims as to all humans (liberal humanism) but all three of fascism, communism, and liberalism are commensurate and at least agree on what they are trying to achieve, as opposed to earlier religions, with which they are incommensurate.
I'm not sure you understand my comment. My point is that some people seem to believe that simply by studying the humanities (art, literature, poetry) you will become a better person. I argue that Hitler, Stalin and Mao are strong exceptions to this idea. I am not talking about humanism
I'm essentially AGREEING with you!
In a world where Humanism is the dominant religion, The Humanities are equated to good because the Humanities are (or were until recently) the narcissism of Humanism.
Same way that in a world where Christianity is the dominant religion Theology is "The Queen of Sciences", the most prestigious study, and is assumed to automatically make people better.
You're attacking this claim ("The Humanities = good") from an empirical point of view. I'm attacking the same claim from a conceptual point of view, explaining why the claim is made even though it's incorrect.
Basically, like most other horrific communist butchers, Stalin was an intellectual. People like to pretend that smart people don't do the stupidest things, but really, it takes a smart person to convince themselves and others of things that obviously aren't so.
"If there is one class of men whom history has proved especially and supremely capable of going quite wrong in all directions, it is the class of highly intellectual men."
(GK Chesterton, again)
Re: El Salvador: It's not even clear that the previous president's policies didn't work. The homicide rate had been on a downward trend for years by the time Bukele got elected. https://www.statista.com/statistics/696152/homicide-rate-in-el-salvador/
Non-American with zero geography knowledge here; can someone kill the joke by explaining #38 (the map) to me?
The physical geography is stretched, and the map has about twice as many American states and Canadian provinces as there really are. The "real" states have the same shape as they do in real life, and the fake states have plausible names.
To me, an American, it looks uncanny, as if I had been hit on the head and had forgotten half of the states.
To me, it looks like a variant of "The Nine Nations of North America" - except that instead of breaking up (and partially rejoining pieces of) nations, the map does it at the state level (but similarly winding up with more divisions than in the original).
The map is mostly false; it has over a hundred states whereas in reality there are only 50. It gives plausible-sounding names and borders for the extra states, and somehow manages to add them in while keeping the shape of the real states exactly the same, which I don't think is geometrically easy.
Easier when most of your states are square !
The Canadian provinces are not square (the western ones tend to have more straight lines), so fitting them in likely took a lot of work.
Only Colorado and Wyoming are actually “rectangular” (not really because it’s on a sphere, but on a flat map). Utah is “all straight lines” but has a corner cut out. North Dakota and Kansas have 3 straight sides.
Every other state has more complex geometries, usually because at least one border is defined by a shoreline or river.
With the deformation of the continent's shape (note Alaska and Florida being much smaller than in reality) and that many extra states, it's not actually that hard. With fewer extras there would be frustration issues, though.
Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't it really easy to just spread things out a little and then keep adding states until it looks legit? If there's a weird shape that doesn't quite look like it should be a single state, you have the freedom to just make it into two or three.
I mean, yes; I said that with the deformed continent and this many extra states it's "not actually that hard". I'm just saying that with e.g. one fake state you'd have problems, and you'd have some issues if the continent shape were fixed (because all the coastal states would be fixed at 1:1).
I think they just stretched the map out and drew in new states to fill the void. Since the new states don't have to match anything in real life, they can be whatever shape is needed to make the map work.
30. <i>My only concern about this story is that some other countries haven’t become any more extreme/partisan since the advent of the Internet - is this because their media didn’t undergo this process? </I>. I‘d argue it is because media in other countries was already very partisan before the internet. This was certainly the case in countries I know well - Italy and Austria. There were (and still are) newspapers across the political spectrum. In Italy if you wanted sports news you bought Corriere dello Sport. Sports coverage in the „quality“ newspapers was meager. Same was true of classifieds. There were specialized publications for that. Italy even has a specialized publication for crosswords - La Settimana Enigmistica. In Austria Socialist voters read Der Standard, centrist conservatives read Die Presse. If you cared about soccer you bought Kicker. What held everything together in these countries was linguistic/ethnic identity. Now that we are also losing that as social glue thanks to mass immigration it’s not clear how the center holds.
Also, lots of countries have fairly strict laws about how partisan television can be.
European newspapers don’t seem as bad as the American ones because they’re traditionally partisan; what’s grating about CNN and the New York Times is the presentation of the Democrats’ propaganda lines as objective fact.
Does European press explicitly admit its partisan bias?
That would depend on what your threshold for explicitly admitting. The general trend is that they'll freely admit an ideological bias (eg. socialist, conservative), but be less keen to admit a partisan one (eg. Labour Party, Conservative Party).
In the UK, they'll all explicitly endorse a political party when there's an election, and it'll consistent enough which party they support to be controversial if they ever deviate. They don't have an explicit partisan line when there's not an election, but there's much less attempt to hide whose side they're on than even Fox News does. They'd all be happy to be described as a right-wing, left-wing or centrist paper respectively, but would be slightly less keen on being described as organs of their respective political party.
The French papers are more ideological but generally slightly less partisan, largely because the French political landscape has been too fractured and chaotic (eg. La Monde is centrist but hasn't historically had much centrism to support; La Croix is borderline anti-republican) and this has meant that the papers are more coherent ideological blocs than the political parties. The exception is Le Figaro, which was at times been very, very close to the UMP government.
The German papers are similar, with the caveat that Bild is a right-wing tabloid read mostly by SPD voters, and the broadsheets are slightly more liberal and centrist than their main parties; probably Bild would describe itself as "common sense" and the Zeitungs would both describe themselves as liberal, but everyone knows what their political leanings are.
My guess would be places like Austria and the Netherlands which are completely pillarised have more explicitly partisan papers, but I don't know.
Well, it seems to me that both Fox and CNN describe themselves as common sense, which to some means progressive and to others conservative. Maybe because America quickly transitioned from unusually low polarization to unusually high one there's no deep appreciation that persistent legitimate disagreement can exist, and both sides view their opponents as crazy mutants.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGscoaUWW2M
I suppose it's obligatory for somebody to post that Yes, Minister clip
Yes. I believe the (right wing most Thatcherite) Murdock press supported Tony Blair (not all of the titles but most). This was unheard of at the time and it presaged a huge Labour victory.
Yep, they did. The Observer (the Guardian's Sunday edition - left-wing) endorsed the Lib Dems in 2010 as well.
>"La Croix is borderline anti-republican"
There's a seltzer water joke in here somewhere...
I know the answer to Gwern's "Whatever happened to short stories" question.
Short stories were basically found in magazines, which were hugely popular in the interwar period, into the early 1950s. All the famous writers of the period wrote for them - Hemmingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, even Dahl and Vonnegut got their start, at the very tail end of the period, writing in magazines. Gwern is focused on sci-fi, perhaps because that's his interest, but just about every genre was in just about every mainstream magazine, from Cosmopolitan to Colliers to the Woman's Home Companion. Importantly, because the magazines were big business, short stories were where the money was - you wrote short stories for money, and novels for literary kudos. And that money is why everyone was writing short stories.
Then the bottom dropped out of the magazine market due to television, subscriptions and advertisments both collapsing. Those magazines that survived had to pivot away from competing with television, and be complementary to it. One thing that TV can do very well is tell a short story - that's what an episode is, but TV can bring it to life much better than a magazine can, so magazines dropped short stories, and those few that still carried them were no longer paying much.
A lot of people still liked short stories as they were used to them, so for a while the genre limped on through anthologies and collections. But there was no longer an economic way to release a standalone short story, and TV wasn't just a competitor to the magazines, it was a competitor to short stories in total, so the short story died as a popular form, with only a few weird literary hold-outs remaining.
I had thought the Internet would see a revival of short stories, but it hasn't happened to any great extent.
What it has led to (because people buying online see the cover, not the thickness, so don't get put off by a thin book) is the revival of shorter novels and even novellas.
There are a lot more 40k-60k word novels being published; in the 2000s, 100k words was pretty much a minimum to get into print.
Short stories do get distributed online - the model of having a free site and getting some people to pay for it anyway seems to work quite well for short stories. Not well enough to pay better than novels, but well enough to pay enough to get novelists to write an occasional short story (many writers like writing short stories) and also it's very useful as a way for newer writers to develop their craft.
This is true. In many ways, what we mean by "a short story" is a story of the right length for publication in a single 20th century magazine issue. With the decline of the medium, you see the decline of that particular length, but we continue to see publication of stories of varying lengths. You could even say people are using (e.g.) Twitter to publish very short stories.
> You could even say people are using (e.g.) Twitter to publish very short stories.
People are absolutely doing this: see for instance https://twitter.com/MicroSFF .
I have to admit I haven't noticed a decline in short stories, but maybe I'm just calibrated wrong to the level of short stories there used to be. I see authors releasing short story collections, or writing short stories for zines, or just putting them up on blogs, and they look like they're very alive to me. A community I'm a part of is having a "Faire of Short-Stories" in a few days, even, where we'll be trading short stories we wrote. And it's much easier to get someone to read a short story (independent of the actual narrative style "short story", but meaning an short story by length) than a novel.
This is one bubble I didn't realise I was probably in!
The decline is from the late 1950s to around 2000. There's been something of a revival since then, so I suspect your baseline is too recent.
That sounds right. My baseline is about mid-90s. Thanks for fixing my confusion!
There are a lot of short / shortish stories being published on e-book platforms like Kindle and others. Then there's story podcasts that are also quite popular. There are still print magazines and anthologies, although I can certainly believe there used to be more.
It may be my personal taste, but I rarely find a short story worth reading anymore. I used to subscribe to several magazines, and I dropped all except the informative ones (e.g. New Scientist). And it's because a year went by without encountering even one story I wanted to finish. This has meant I don't follow any new authors on book length fiction. (The ones I liked have been dying over the years, and now there are only a couple left.)
OTOH, my tastes have always been a bit of an outlier. I think I only ever liked one that won a Hugo, and rarely like any other prize winners.
Prior to TV, didn't lots of episodic storytelling happen over radio?
Yes and TV killed that too. Completely. Short stories never died completely, but their value collapsed by about ~95%. It was said that in the 30s and 40s (and probably earlier, but I'm basing this on accounts I've read about that time period), selling one short story to a magazine like The Saturday Evening Post or The New Yorker provided a writer with a solid income for a year. Perhaps it was economically equivalent to selling a well-liked screenplay today.
Radio and short stories coexisted peacefully. My guess is radio, though popular, still left people with a desire to look at something, and colorful magazines filled that niche.
Not sure if mentioning this is relevant, but commercial radio predated decent sound recording technology for at least a decade, meaning it was a lot more practical in the beginning to use radio for live storytelling than for broadcasting music. I'd wager that the ratio of broadcasting recorded music/episodic storytelling on the radio increased steadily between 1930 and 1950.
The internet has absolutely seen a very specific revival of short stories, although the readership (and writers) are predominantly female: it's fanfic. Granted some fanfics are novel-length, but most, especially in the earlier days, were short-story-ish in length, and/or are longer but released serially, in chapters that appear once a week or once a month.
Yes, it depends what you mean. There are more short stories being published now than ever before in human history. But there are also more novels than ever before.
In the early to mid-20th century, the short story was the commercially dominant form of written fiction, highly lucrative, and culturally influential. Then magazines went away, and there's a lot of fixed publication and distribution costs in a book (you can't sell a 1 chapter book for 1/10th of the price), so novels became the only way to make money.
I thought the internet would make short story writers rich and famous again, because you now can sell your 1 chapter book for 1/10th of the price, and short stories are the perfect length, viable to read in one sitting, unlike a novel which takes much longer. But, as is now obvious in retrospect, what the internet really did is give us a superabundance of stories with cheap distribution, making it really hard to be a professional fiction writer full stop.
So yes, people are writing lots of fanfics, but no-one is becoming a millionaire from writing them, unless you leverage your fanfic's success into writing a novel that gets turned into a movie, or leading an apocalyptic cult.
Very interesting thank you :-)
It's a strange market failure, because it's much easier to write a short story than a novel, so you would think folk would focus there (but novels have the bragging rights), and many folk have one great story in them (just like many have one great song).
"Much easier to write a short story than a novel": Writing is not like building a brick wall, where the difficulty is roughly proportional to the number of bricks/words in the finished product. Some writers are naturally attuned to writing in a short, one-idea format, and so find short stories easier to write than novels. Other writers are naturally attuned to writing long, wandering storylines that don't reach a climax for tens of thousands of words, and so find it easier to write novels than short stories. For the latter, switching from writing novels to writing short stories would be like switching from being a marathon runner to being a rock climber. Just because no mountain face is 26 miles tall doesn't mean that rock climbing is "much easier" than marathoning.
Short stories are still going strong in the Finnish SF community. The prestige SF price in Finland - Atorox - is for short stories.
This is a really useful historical explanation, thank you.
One other part of the picture is that MFA creative writing programs focus on writing and workshopping short stories, and there is a flourishing ecosystem of small magazines that published the best stories that emerge from these programs, for a readership almost exclusively of fellow writers. Most successful literary authors' first books are story collections, for this reason. A handful of the most successful publish stories in the New Yorker or the Atlantic, and continue this as a prestige move alongside the novels that make them famous. And a very few, like George Saunders, become big names entirely through short stories published in famous legacy magazines, above all the New Yorker.
RE 2 "Why are there so few pairs of extremely successful identical twins?"
There are some, such as the Bryan brothers, who hold a bunch of tennis records in men's doubles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_brothers
Extending to siblings, there have been a lot of musical families. The Jackson family, the Staple Sisters, the Pointer Sisters, the Isley Brothers, the Everly Brothers, Sly and the Family Stone, the Osmonds, the Jonas Brothers, Hanson. Those are just some where the group was named after the family. There are also other groups that included siblings like the Beach Boys, AC/DC, and Radiohead. Google turns up some identical twins who are musical duos, but not any that I've heard of.
I never realized that Sly and the Family Stone actually included siblings. But I'd put them more in the category of the Beach Boys, as many of their core members were not siblings.
Ross and Norris McWhirter are another prominent example.
Isn't the answer simply that twins, on average, get half the resources in utero, and are hence disadvantaged compared to the rest of the population?
A quick scan of studies told me that a difference exists, but disappears by adulthood. That suggests to me that it's plausible that twins are disadvantaged enough to not be on the right tail of the distribution. It's possible that the rarity explanation is better, though it appears that they are 3 percent of live births, which is not a number I would consider so small that over time you wouldn't see a few very accomplished pairs. It's also possible that the two explanations interact.
That’s the way it works in horses, but not in people. Horse breeders are often encouraged to abort one when a mare is carrying twin embryos — otherwise you expend a lot of resources and get two very undersized foals that are not sellable. But horses and people have different placenta designs.
In people what happens is the person pregnant with twins consumes more resources, grows bigger faster, and has a lot more of the unpleasant pregnancy symptoms like foot swelling and nausea, earlier. Twins are generally smaller coming out, but that’s because they come out earlier. The cervix can’t count, so it assumes the mass of two babies is one ginormous baby and it’s time to send it out. Hospital norm is induction at 36 weeks if they don’t come out by that point. But by two years, if not a year, most twins are on the normal growth curve for singletons.
Yes, I’ve gestated identical twins, now happy and healthy toddlers.
A very quick scan of the research suggests that twins seem to have small early cognitive deficits relative to singleton babies that go away by the time they reach adolescence. Premature babies (which you suggest twins are) also I believe have similar patterns. Highly speculative, but plausible that these kind of issues prevent extreme right tail performance of the kind that would be needed to distinguish them in history, while not affecting their ability to lead successful lives by the standards of 99% of people.
There’s two pairs of highly successful identical twins playing in the Australian Football League. Max and Ben King and Harry and Ben McKay.
(There is a running joke that the McKay brothers are actually one person because despite playing at the top level for eight years now they have never played in the same game - whenever their teams play each other one just happens to be injured or whatever.)
In gymnastics, there are identical twins Jessica and Jennifer Gadirova on the bronze-winning 2021 British Olympic team, and also Paul and Morgan Hamm who were on the US Olympic team, and in fraternal twins, Alice and Asia D’Amato on the Italian Olympic team and Sanne and Lieke Wevers on the Dutch Olympic team.
My theory is simply that getting a person to extreme success takes a lot of family resources, and unless music or sports is the entire family’s business (you would see that a lot of the sibling duos had a parent as coach or manager), at some point they look at the costs of summer intensives, international competitions, training with a world-famous coach, and decide they can only afford it for the sibling seen as slightly more talented, and the other one should pursue something else. Or one twin gets to a stage when they want to be as different from their sibling as possible, instead of competing on a field where only one can win, and switch career aspirations.
Successful people are rarer than average. If one twin is successful, does that improve the odds for the other twin to be successful?
Well, maybe. Likely they will communicate, and if success is behavioral, then they might influence one another. But a non-successful twin might influence a potentially successful twin into being non-successful, too.
If it's a question of success being in the genes, then you could consider the twins to be individuals, and so successful twins would be as common relative to non-successful twins as successful people relative to non-successful people regardless of birth.
The Winklevoss twins come to mind. I wonder if twins usually have such a strong connection to each other that they lack the ability to be as cold and calculating as you need to be to be extremely successful.
In Gwern's list of questions, he asks if there are any drugs that work as "anti-psychedelics": i.e. are there any drugs that strengthen your sense of identity, rather than dissolving it. Gwern asks "Why [isn't there a drug that makes me feel] with the same absolute certainty that I feel ‘all is one’, that I am a unique snowflake utterly unlike any other human being or organism?"
Gwern thinks that stimulants don't qualify on the grounds that they don't induce psychedelic effects. I disagree. During coke highs, people often report that they believe themselves to be possessed of superhuman qualities and their demeanor changes to become more arrogant and narcissistic.
This sure sounds like it's approaching "unique snowflake" territory to me. It's almost as though stimulants are turning up the amplifier knob on somebody's sense of identity, magnifying their sense of themselves to mythic proportions.
How reasonable does this sound to other people? I don't have much expertise on drugs, and I'd appreciate somebody who knows more about habitual stimulant use who could explain how frequent this egotistical high really is.
(Tantalizingly, this entry on "ego inflation" on the Psychonauts wiki mentions that habitual stimulant use can lead to increased narcissism and egocentricity, even when the addict is sober. Can anyone, maybe a clinician, shed some light on whether or not this is a real feature of stimulant addiction? https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Ego_inflation)
Maybe I just drink it rarely and am sensitive, but a significant part of my 'conscious' time is either an unusually good night of sleep or coffee. And on reflection I got as much self reflection out of my Adderall trip as my mushroom trip
Re approval voting in North Dakota: I'm confused, because this more recent article states that a more recent vote on Wednesday failed to override the governor's veto of the ban. Meaning the ban has not been put in place, and approval voting is still ok? Has my brain been overwhelmed by the double negatives? https://www.valleynewslive.com/2023/04/20/bill-eliminate-approval-voting-fails-override-veto/
I think yours is more up-to-date than mine, so good work, I'll mention it on an Open Thread. The one I linked said the banners had enough votes to override a veto, but I guess it was wrong!
No, I think you were right - the article I posted also mentioned the vote from March which overrode the veto. But then they voted again last week and didn't override it. Maybe the governor vetoed it twice? These news articles aren't making it very clear.
(Edit: hey, the ND legislative branch has a pretty detailed summary of what happened here: https://ndlegis.gov/assembly/68-2023/regular/bill-actions/ba1273.html
It looks like the 33-13 vote was passing the senate. Then after that it got vetoed by the governor, the house overrode the veto but the senate didn't. At least that's what it looks like.)
I think you're also mistaken to say that voting experts unanimously dislike first past the post. Your link shows that 5 of 21 like it. Also FPTP has significant advantages - sharper accountability and ability to act for instance, which countries that have proportional representation systems struggle with
Thanks - I think I misremembered the result of "none of them gave it first place" as "none of them approved of it". I've edited that word out.
Oh, so you're saying FPTP is preferred by experts despite it not being anyone's first pick?
:P
Based on the original vote, there was enough to override; but 6 state senators who voted for the ban switched their vote. (https://bismarcktribune.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/push-to-override-veto-of-approval-voting-ban-fails-in-north-dakota-senate/article_5781b8fe-dee2-11ed-989b-9b9ac228ab73.html)
Yes, the ND Governor was able to veto the ban. Fargo will continue to use approval voting. Here's a link from yesterday: https://www.inforum.com/news/north-dakota/push-to-override-veto-of-approval-voting-ban-fails-in-north-dakota-senate
Typos:
In 32, the links are backwards.
In 33, the first link goes to the substack itself, not the pronoun article.
Thanks, fixed.
> surely it would be even better if you spotted someone wearing the ring and then you could use your smartphone to call up their dating profile.
What? If you've already spotted them in-person, you can just go up and talk to them. Why would you want to dance around with dating profiles and instant messaging to set up a time and place to meet in person, when you can just walk up and say hi?
Maybe I'm old but I don't get it.
Something like checking for deal breakers and / or common interests before doing the hard social task of cold approaching someone. I was assuming the online profile check would be done in the moment and then, if it met your criteria, you would personally go up to the pear ring person, not approach through the dating app.
Isn't talking to them the best way to find out if you're compatible and have common interests? Yes, it's intimidating to go up to a girl and try to chat her up, but if you can't do it when she's literally wearing a "Please come chat me up" badge, then how is the profile going to help? You don't need the picture, because you've already seen them in person. It seems that reviewing the profile before going over is more about providing an excuse for inaction than anything else ("Well, they're not into D&D, so I won't bother...").
Yeah, valid. I dunno, most of what draws me to people is not their looks, so seeing them IRL without any context wouldn't really make me interested in approaching them. I don't really think the kind of info people put in dating profiles would be much extra help in my case though, so your point stands.
Seeing them in person goes much further than just whether you find them physically attractive. We do tons of signaling through how we dress, manners, presentation, and language. Imagine a man with a partially shaved head and partially six inch pink hair. Now imagine a man with a military-style crew cut. I just made up these people, so there's no way that either of us "know" them, but just based on one of potentially dozens of signals we can begin creating an impression of who they are, what their interests might be, and whether it may be a good idea to "chat them up."
Sure. I think the best case scenario for the pear rings is feeling some sense of connection (whether that's physical attraction, signaling that matches your preferred culture, something funny they said or did, etc) with someone who is wearing one and using that as reassurance that overt flirting would not go completely amiss. In fact, that is possibly what the lack of a wedding band signaled back in the days where people didn't spend much time in non-marriage relationships.
Strong agree. Unfortunately I doubt that's going to be the result, even if it did catch on. I think every moderately attractive or more female would be inundated by guys if they saw the ring, even if there were no signs that they were compatible. Guys wearing a ring might get some genuinely helpful responses - but men tend to pursue women and so the signals are backwards. Maybe it would help out gay guys? Lesbians?
There are class or culture social cues that are reliable indicators of who you'd enjoy hanging out with and can be gotten from a few sentences of interests or background info. It feels awkward to end a conversation because she brought up zodiac signs (everyone's example is different and personal to them) and I would prefer a world where I could avoid that conversation in the first place
People who are socially anxious need a lot of extra excuses and information before they are willing to go up and talk to a stranger.
I'm socially anxious too. But I think the truth is we are looking for a lot of extra excuses and information so we can tell ourselves why it was OK that we didn't go up and talk to the stranger. But at some point you have to (wo)man up and go for it.
Besides, why is the service trying to optimise its appeal to socially anxious men? A dating service is a two-sided market, and I would wager the key to success would be getting lots of women on board. If you do that, the men will follow. If you sign up loads of socially anxious men, I am not sure all the women will be desperate to follow.
Right? The one other time I had heard of the pear rings, it was explicitly framed as an alternative to dating apps that let you have real conversations with actual people.
25. My big question with the El Salvador crackdown is whether it's financially sustainable. That's 2% of the population, and a higher percentage of young men - can the government afford to keep them locked up for a long period of time?
27. The opposition from the North Dakota state government is bizarre. They're getting hung up on approval voting when there's a ton of different ways that local governments have experimented with government structure? It's a pity.
36. I was wondering why all the 5-over-1s all had the same block design (the three-story walkups seem to have more variety in design).
Regarding 25, the cost of locking them up only has to be less than the presumably net negative economic effect of having them free, right? (Not to mention all the other aspects that aren't economic.) From reading the articles, it sounded like one of the government's "negotiating strategies" involved putting members of rival gangs in the same cell and locking the door, leading to some or all of them dying, so I'd expect that the government is spending a lot less money on lockups than would be the case in the USA.
Since the government gets around one fifth of GDP in El Salvador, the economic benefit from locking them up would have to be five times the cost for it to be profitable/sustainable for the government.
That's just in the short term, though. And even putting aside the other benefits to society (which do have economic aspects, albeit ones that are harder to quantify), this could be seen as an investment. What's the return on sustained not-being-murdered? Will this increase the rate of economic growth enough to eventually recoup the cost? Do normal economic models have regions that contain the "before" and "after" points, or do they just sort of assume the latter?
No, I was thinking in the medium term. In the short term, governments can run a deficit.
But I think a 5x multiplier isn't too implausible in the short term either. I saw somewhere that they were spending $130M extra on this, which is like half a percent of GDP if that's yearly. With a 5x multiplier, we only need 2.5% extra GDP growth for the government to break even.
> Regarding 25, the cost of locking them up only has to be less than the presumably net negative economic effect of having them free, right?
That depends what fraction of them actually are criminals, and given that we're talking about mass imprisonment with no safeguards, I suspect the answer may be frighteningly low.
From https://www.vox.com/world-politics/2023/3/5/23621004/el-salvador-prison-bukele-ms13-barrio-18, discussing this:
"Under Bukele’s rule, people might not have to worry that much about gang violence and extortion, but that doesn’t mean they live without fear. Bullock recounted a conversation with a Salvadoran friend, a taxi driver in the outskirts of the capital, about life under the state of exception.
“He said, ‘It’s great, I don’t have to pay extortion, I don’t worry about the gangs.’ I said to him, ‘Do you worry about getting detained?’ He said, ‘Every day.’”"
Identifying criminals is hard, even with tattoos. If you rapidly round up and imprison 2% of your population, without any kind of due process or safeguards, it's pretty much inevitable that a lot of economically productive innocent people (and economically productive criminals, and economically unproductive innocent people) are going to get caught in the net.
27: I suspect the state government has detected a possible threat to their power base (being the sorts of people who do poorly under approval voting) and seek to kill it before it can threaten them for real.
In my city, that's what they did. I'm not even sure whether it was anything about "approval voting", per se. I have a suspicion that it might simply be that they don't want grassroots groups to have success in dramatically reforming aspects of government.
The cost of crime is extreme both directly and from the standpoint that the country loses out on investment from abroad because it's unsafe.
21. I speculatively attribute this to the aggressive campaign of misinformation about the burden of student loan debt. In reality, for about 70% of four-year graduates, it's less than or equal to about one year of the college wage premium ($30,000).
Granted, there are taxes, and the median college graduate differs from the median high school graduate in terms of cognitive ability and/or conscientiousness, so college doesn't literally pay for itself in one year, but in a large majority of cases it pays for student loan payments.
Thanks, that's great (and surprising) information. I'm guessing this is the usual thing Freddie deBoer always complains about where people act as if the Ivy Leagues are the typical college experience.
I am pretty surprised that the average college loan supposedly takes 10-20 years to pay off if this is true, though I can't find a great source for this and maybe it's a fake statistic.
Nah, it makes sense: the smaller the cost of college, the smaller the wage premium for that college (there are exceptions, but the average wage premium is inflated by the Ivy League just as the average cost of college is).
The college wage premium to which I referred is defined by medians, not means.
Then I'm wrong. Thanks!
I should probably mention my source for this claim, which is the College Board's report on college pricing and student aid. It's in the Cumulative Debt section.
https://research.collegeboard.org/trends/college-pricing/report-archive
I should clarify that this does not include the 7% of undergraduates who went to for-profit colleges. They tend to have more debt. Just don't do this.
About 46% graduate debt-free; the median for the other 56% is under $30k. Average debt loads have actually been outpaced by inflation for several years.
Ivy League students actually have less debt, because they all have need-based financial aid that allows everyone to graduate debt free. There may be some exceptions where parents refuse to pay the expected family contribution, but every student gets a financial aid package that should allow debt-free graduation.
Another initially surprising fact is that default rate is negatively correlated with initial loan balance. This makes more sense when you consider that people who couldn't even make it through the first year of college, and thus borrowed very little, are generally not headed towards high-paying jobs.
Median earnings by education is here:
https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2022/data-on-display/education-pays.htm
The median 4-year graduate earns $525 more per week than the median high school graduate, which is $27,300 per year. (Now largely hypothetical) payments on a $30k loan are going to be around $4,000 per year, maybe a bit higher with current interest rates.
Per the College Board report, total U.S. student borrowing in constant dollars has declined every year since 2011. And nearly all of the decline is in borrowing by undergraduates: total annual borrowing by college students is now only half what it was a decade ago while borrowing by grad students is down just slightly.
That seems like a broadly rational shift, since borrowing for a graduate degree in law/medicine/engineering/etc is far more likely to be an economically-rational choice. There are still, I know, plenty of contrary examples. But overall it looks like some sensible change underway in how students and families are thinking about borrowing for school.
I took over a decade to pay off my student loan debt even though I had the money to pay it off after two years. With interest rates being what they were, it just didn't make sense to pay it off any faster than I had to, so I just kept making payments on schedule.
My student debt is lower interest than my mortgage, so if I’m paying down a debt it is my mortgage, which I have played down quite a bit. I think I’m on track to pay my student loans off some time in the next couple years, but I graduated in 2012, so 10-20 years is right on track for me.
When I was in high school there was widespread disinformation about even being able to afford to attend college. We even had a college information night at my high school where a financial aid expert told us that financial aid was capped at something like $10,000 total and so we better get good at applying for scholarships.
Had I known how easily financial aid was obtained I would have been more ambitious in which colleges I applied to. As it was I nearly enlisted in the reserves to help with my in-state tuition, which as a poor kid was still a daunting sum.
I've seen several discussions recently pointing out that tuition has actually been falling the past few years, likely because people were getting so hard-hit by the story about rising tuition (and also because the demographic that goes to college has been shrinking):
https://www.forbes.com/sites/prestoncooper2/2021/12/02/why-college-tuition-is-falling-for-the-first-time-in-decades/
1) 30% of students having more than $30k in debt is still a lot though
2) The “college wage premium” is not evenly distributed at all - there are definitely some careers for which $30k is a year or less of premium, but plenty others that aren’t. Colleges charge frustratingly similar fees for computer science and social work degrees.
The problem is that “college is always worth it for everyone no matter what your interests are” was the message, when the truth is more like “as long as you focus on a well-paying field, you graduate more or less on time, and you don’t literally max out your available loans, college is a good investment”.
Its also the fact that people are increasingly questioning what the college wage premium actually is coming from. Colleges (and high school admins) have, for years, tried to claim that there is a causal relationship between college education and the wage premium. As more people are exposed to what little is actually taught there, more people are coming to the Bryan Caplan side of the argument, even if they have no idea who Caplan or signaling is. They just have a general feeling of "this institution isn't really doing anything of value."
In Caplan's three-factor model (human capital, ability bias, and signaling), only ability bias is acausal. Signaling still has a causal effect on earnings.
Signalling is causal, but charging that much for it is basically blackmail and it's not surprising people would turn against it emotionally even if it looks individually rational to pay (c.f. all the studies about people being willing to pay money to punish defectors in micro-econ experiments)
I think most of the horror stories about crippling six-figure college debt come from people who borrowed money to pay for *grad school*. That can get expensive, because a lot of the traditional financial-aid sources go away after the BS/BA, and because by the time you are in grad school your lifestyle may no longer fit in a shared dorm room (if your university even has graduate dorms).
There are probably some fields where taking on a six-figure debt load to complete grad school makes sense because A: that's the standard for the field and B: as a doctor or a lawyer or whatever, you'll be making the six-figure salary to pay off that debt without too much trouble. But this requires budgetary skills and disciplines that many twenty-somethings lack; if your $100K starting salary goes to support a $120K lifestyle like all your friends seem to have, then the $100K debt can become a problem.
In most of the STEM fields, borrowing money for grad school is a sucker bet because *paying* money for grad school is a sucker bet - if you're good enough to go to grad school, they'll pay *you* for your research and/or teaching assistance, where you are creating real value.
And then there are the fields like History or English Lit, where you're paying six figures for a lottery ticket that gives you a 10% chance of wining a tenure-track professorship, otherwise you're going to be stuck as an adjunct or a barista forever.
Counting only the literal debt misses out on any money put in up front by parents, and the 4 years of lost income.
eg. PhDs are generally a bad decision economically, despite having no tuition costs and receiving a small stipend, simply because they take many years and the opportunity cost is thus very high (including in the sense that getting work experience boosts future income by more than having a PhD, in almost all fields)
34. I can't figure out what Loeb is doing here. He's a serious scientist who has made good discoveries. But the whole thing with Oumuamua being an alien light sail, despite little evidence of that, and this new thing with the "interstellar" alien technology at the bottom of the ocean is weird. Is he using it for publicity to attract funding for research? Astronomy could certainly use more money, but I'm not sure "aliens!" is the way to go. I mean there's a small possibility he's right, but for Oumuamua we really have no way of telling and the chances of finding a small rock that might have come from interstellar space at the bottom of the ocean are basically zero...
Isn’t the point (from a sensationalist perspective at least), that if the other object is aliens it’ll be much easier to spot the wreckage of their dilithium tesla hyperdrive than if it’s just a boring ol’ space rock?
No I think they are just using magnets or something. IIRC, nothing too fancy in terms of how they expect to find something.
It doesn't sound like he anticipates finding interstallar alien technology around New Zealand, just hoping to collect rock fragments from rock originating outside the solar system. I think his graduate student got private funding. I have no idea how they'd determine if a rock is from the solar system or not. It actually surprises me that anything but powder might survive an impact at that speed, but maybe that's all they'd need if it can be sifted in some way.
Isotope distribution.
He did at least raise the possibility of finding alien technology around New Zealand: https://www.npr.org/2022/08/31/1119941103/astronomer-searches-ocean-extraterrestrial-meteor-alien-life-avi-loeb
ahh. I hadn't seen that quote about him saying possibly a button or some component surviving. He's gotta be pulling legs with the speed/energy of the impact. Based on podcast conversations It sounds like he thinks there may be swarms or arrays of information gathering devices scattered throughout the galaxy and passing through star systems - so I guess maybe everything has a small chance to be that.
7. I'm having trouble understanding the 15 minute city idea. The PDF someone linked to said there was a priority on protecting local centres, which... I guess means strangling out their competition? I don't know how else you're protecting them.
The first link makes it sound like they're trying to turn Oxford into Midgar. That's a good way to get yourself stabbed in the back, and also blown up by Godzilla and smushed by rocks.
My guess is that several different groups have used the same phrase for several different things and now they're all getting their wires crossed.
I'm specifically trying to figure out the Oxfordshire County Council policy that the first link is referring to. I guess this page has the PDF link. https://letstalk.oxfordshire.gov.uk/central-oxfordshire-travel-plan
Just noticed the wonderfully idiotic phrase from the guy's third news link:
"There is an element of government control here. It is a reasonable, limited control of the same kind that tells us we can’t drive into lakes or other people’s living rooms."
That's right, just like driving through a lake or a living room, if you try to drive across districts the government is going to total your car and kill its occupants.
They explain it in this press release - the 15 minute city is a positive aspiration not directly related to congestion style charging to reduce through traffic in a medieval city.
"The misinformation online has linked the traffic filters to the 15-minute neighbourhoods proposal in the city council’s Local Plan 2040, suggesting that the traffic filters will be used to confine people to their local area. This is not true.
The 15-minute neighbourhoods proposal aims to ensure that every resident has all the essentials (shops, healthcare, parks) within a 15-minute walk of their home. They aim to support and add services, not restrict them. "
https://news.oxfordshire.gov.uk/joint-statement-from-oxfordshire-county-council-and-oxford-city-council-on-oxfords-traffic-filters/
This goes into detail about how this has been misrepresented on social media:
https://www.timeout.com/uk/news/the-small-english-city-at-the-centre-of-the-global-15-minute-city-storm-022023
7. It seems worth clarifying that this was an Oxfordshire County Council plan. While Oxfordshire County Council is a government entity within the UK, it's not "the British government"!
Wrote a new post on how gaming has shaped and informed Japanese and American cultures
Would love a read!
https://hiddenjapan.substack.com/p/pachinko-vs-pinball
Neat, I'd be curious to see comparisons to other rich countries (something in Europe and South Korea come to mind so you get a mix of West and East). The USA seems at the puritanical end of the spectrum, not just with gambling as you say.
The three-step gambling system for pachinko parlors is hilarious. You wonder if there's some Japanese law banning a two-step system, it seems one more step than I would have thought of, but then I'm not Japanese.
I’m impressed, actually a bunch of interesting stuff here
22: "Comments on social media accounts have pointed out the possibilities of how women who wear the ring might be solicited more often."
...Not "might". "Would". That's the entire point.
Technically still "might", only "would" if the ring works, which is dubious.
I mean, I guess. Still, the sentence is baffling - it's treating it as a horrible side effect rather than the intended and consensual result.
It seems almost unbelievable that women would wear such a ring - these signals have existed for ever in terms of shoe choice/low cut top/short skirt etc. Most women I know complain of too much attention despite not putting out clear signifiers.
The existing signals aren't very good. Plenty of women wear low cut tops for reasons other than signaling availability. Everyone involved gets frustrated.
There's a significant signaling problem in dating. Women actively want to attract a potential mate, but end up attracting a significantly larger number of unappealing candidates. A pear ring would seem to make the second situation far more likely, and may not actually increase the main goal.
Good prank if the pear ring thing becomes slightly successful but not to the point where most people know about it: give someone else such a ring, and see hijinks ensue.
Wasn't this tried in Star Trek?
"Do you seek jamaharon?"
If it gets me a romantic vacation interlude with twenty-something Jennifer Hetrick, go ahead, prank away. Bonus points if there's also a low-impact Indiana Jones adventure to go with it.
But I think the average outcome would fall into the "Mostly Harmless" category.
28. "Trevor’s understandably morally anxious about benefiting from his Jewish ethnicity. Should he be? Is this any worse than benefiting from white privilege or male privilege or whatever other forms of privilege they’ve invented since I last checked?"
I imagine Scott is just trying to provoke us into saying the following (but I think the following is correct):
This is a false analogy. To the extent "white privilege" and "male privilege" are still a thing, they are *statistical* realities, or even just decoys for the real thing (whiteness correlates with class, which in turn determines much of what gets called "white privilege"). The right analogues here would be "in the US, "Jewishness" [defined as straight maternal descend from Orthodox Jews living in 1800, say, or whatever else you want] correlates with class" (very likely true) or "being brought up in Judaism makes you less likely to be molested by a priest" (also true).
The right analogy would be with Old-Style white privilege - being entitled to certain things if and only if you were white (or white enough for whoever is testing). A thing in Apartheid South Africa, certainly. The G.I. Bill also worked out this way in the U.S. South, though perhaps in a slightly less openly declared way (though my understanding was that it was completely deliberate, and other people saw through it). Would you sign up for a generously funded benefit program open to whites and only to whites? Or Asians, people of Latin American descent, etc.?
"Is it any worse than benefiting from being an American, and so having access to social support and benefit programs that Sudanese and Bangladeshis can only dream of?"
That's a thornier issue. Your average citizen of a rich country probably does not think very often of what an enormous privilege it is to be born with that status - and they would be baffled to hear that that privilege is questionable. (Of course, that doesn't make it *not* questionable.) I've even heard it said that, if it weren't for those privileges, citizenship would be meaningless - that is saddening and unintentionally funny, as that is exactly what you would associate with Roman decadence, say: citizens thinking of citizenship _merely_ as a set of privileges (which are great, because they have them).
Of course that may also why most Israelis wouldn't wink twice at the proposition: unlike most American Jews, they are brought up to think that "Jewishness" is a nationality - and most Israelis are completely comfortable with having preferences for the dominant nationality in their country (and in fact, according to a recent poll, most of them openly believe citizens of that nationality should get preferences over fellow citizens not of that nationality).
(Or again, of course, being perceived as "white" can of course cause you to be perceived differently by many individuals (better for the most part, worse in some (expanding?) set of circumstances). ("White-skin privilege" is probably a much better name for this, since it doesn't depend on whether your background of family origins are in the main "white" demographic, however defined, or whether you pass any sort of one-drop rule.) But, again, having a Jewish last name can cause you to be perceived a little differently by some individuals (better in some cases, worse in others, though fortunately nowadays it's largely a non-issue for the most part), so *the analogue is already there*, sans Tulsa, and is different from what's going on in Tulsa.)
The problem becomes more apparent when you flip the inclusion/exclusion paradigm. It's not only inclusive or Jewish people, it's exclusive of everyone else. It's pretty obvious to most Americans why joining a group that implicitly says "no blacks allowed" is suspect. We've long heard of the injustice of white country clubs and old boys clubs excluding vast swathes of the population, and it's pretty difficult to oppose something like a whites only country club as you form a Jews only country club that is at least comparable in influence to the white only clubs of yester year. Is it or is it not a legitimate move to hoard resources and opportunities within your ethnic group?
Yglesias' point about crackdowns - that the first requirement was an honest and effective force capable of doing the cracking down, and that once you have such a thing, the exact method by which you use it to deal with the gangs is really irrelevant - seemed to me the really useful insight.
If your police (or military or paramilitary) force is capable of being bribed by the gangs, then it doesn't matter what orders you give it, it's not going to crack down in an way that is effective.
I think the method would really affect the false positive count...and whether it was acknowledged.
30. 15-20 years ago, I remember seeing someone point out the contrast between the WSJ, which at the time had made its editorial page free and kept its news behind a paywall, with the NYT, which at the time had done the opposite. It might have been Tyler Cowen, but I can't find the post now.
That seems relevant here.
What was the contrast at that point? Right now the NYT paywalls everything but it's easy to defeat, whereas the WSJ paywalls everything and I can't figure out how to get past it. The NYT seems much more partisan to me, but then I'm to their right. ;)
It was what I said: NYT paywalled their opinion page and gave the news away for free, while the WSJ did the opposite, the implication being that subscribers read WSJ for their reporting and the NYT for the opinion pieces.
Right, but what was the effect on the quality of each? Or were you only making the original statement about paywalls? (Which is fine...)
Oh, I don't know what the effect was. I just thought it was relevant that, at the time, the NYT thought that the opinion page was what people were willing to pay for.
23: My hunch is that people partially support those policies because they support / like Trump (i.e. reverse causality). So once he is elected his supporters no longer really care cause goal accomplished.
Or that people who previously supported those policies on some level just detest Trump so much that they don’t want to be associated with him so their support for the policy drops. A case of the all powerful “Social Desirability Bias”.
I know I'm late here, but this is exactly what I was thinking. When Trump is elected moderates and liberals who might once have supported populist policies are no longer willing to, because those are Trump policies and you wouldn't want to be mistaken for one of THOSE people, would you?
Hell, protective tariffs and immigration restrictions were coded left-populist until extremely recently. As recently as 2015 Bernie Sanders was giving interviews about how open borders are a Koch brothers-backed policy designed to disenfranchise the American working class [1], which minus the Koch brothers bit could come right out of a Trump speech. You'd better be damn careful expressing that sentiment in liberal circles today.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf-k6qOfXz0
>My only concern about this story is that some other countries haven’t become any more extreme/partisan since the advent of the Internet - is this because their media didn’t undergo this process? Why not?
The American "city newspaper" is not a typical model for most countries. I live in Britain; we have city newspapers, but they are the second-tier publications, like the Manchester Evening News (my city paper). The first-tier newspapers are national newspapers. All of them are based in London, though one (the Guardian) used to be based in Manchester until the 1960s. Because there have usually been around ten national newspapers (there are seven that have been continuously in print from before WWII; there are currently three others in print), they have had to compete with each other, and have often done so on the basis of their political positioning.
The city newspapers were usually exactly the sort of inoffensive entities stuffed full of ads that was described, but the national newspapers have always been viciously partisan. A famous 1992 headline, on election day, ran "If Kinnock wins today, will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights" https://pressgazette.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2016/04/The-Sun-If-Kinnock-Wins-Today-600x755.png This was in the then highest-circulation newspaper in the country.
The reasons for this are pretty simple: you can get an overnight train from London to just about anywhere in the country, so the first copies of the paper off the presses at about 10pm were loaded onto trains for the most distant parts of the country, with later printings progressively headed for closer regions. The upshot is that the entirety of Great Britain could, by the 1860s, read the national press. Americans, accustomed to newspapers being associated with a city, tend to refer to The Times as "The Times of London", to distinguish from the New York Times; this isn't incorrect (its editorial offices are, indeed, in London), but The Times of England or of Britain would be more informative.
It wasn't possible until the arrival of air freight to physically distribute a newspaper around the entire United States overnight, so a late-evening printing of the New York Times could be delivered in San Francisco the next morning, and air freight would make newspapers very expensive. The only national American newspaper is USA Today, which operates by having 37 printing presses spread around the country and electronically transmitting page layouts to each, so identical papers are printed in a variety of places. The technology to do this didn't exist until the late 1970s, and USA Today was founded in 1982, by which time the American "city newspaper" model was established.
The other upshot is that the UK distribution model (until it broke down recently with the internet) was that there were large numbers of independent newsagents who hired deliverers who would deliver the paper of choice to each household, so the newsagent would have a few hundred houses on their books, and each would order the paper they chose, and then the deliverer would deliver that paper to that house, then a different paper to the next house, and so on. The US distribution model was for the newspaper itself to organise delivery; this made it much harder for new newspapers to break into the market in a city. USA Today was usually only available at newsstands.
Just as an example of how different it was; in the 1990s and 2000s, if you stayed in a hotel in the UK, they would ask you which newspaper you wanted in the morning and would then deliver the requested paper to each room. In the US, you generally just got USA Today, or the local city newspaper, and they didn't ask.
During the time period in which USA Today has existed (1982-present), the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post have doubled as national papers as well despite their histories as local/regional papers. Newsstands and public libraries throughout the country typically carried all three, home delivery subscriptions (both full daily delivery and weekly delivery of the Sunday edition) were available and advertised through the country, and I seem to recall that WSJ at least was commonly available at hotels frequented by business travellers. There are also a bunch of national weekly news magazines: US News, Newsweek, Time, etc.
In addition, there's a long history of newspapers local to different parts of the country printing the same content outside their "local" or "metro" sections, through various combinations of syndication, partnership, shared ownership, and wire service articles.
That said, I believe you that the UK's geographical compactness has traditionally given their broadly-circulated papers a more national character than US papers, as the reach needed to be a regional papers in the US would make for a national papers in the UK. In addition, London dominates the UK far more than any American city does to the US, being by far the largest city as well as the capital, the central hub of the transportation network, and the main financial and cultural center; which combined with geographic factors really blurs the lines between "London newspaper" and "national newspaper".
I never get the impression that the NYT and WaPo see each other as competitors in the way that, say, the Times and the Telegraph do. I chose those British papers because they have similar ideologies to each other, and have similar class/status positions (ie, they are both "broadsheets", both have a serious image, and both aim at middle class and upper middle class customers), which I'd say is largely also true of the NYT and WaPo. Both compete for journalists, but I think of the British pair as much more competing for readers, where the US pair would expect non-locals to read and subscribe to both.
Most European national presses are exactly that: national, as opposed to regional papers that are available nationwide.
The German press is mostly regional: Süddeutsche Zeitung (Munich), Frankfurter Allgemeine (Frankfurt), Handelsblatt (Dusseldorf), Die Welt (Hamburg), Der Tagesspiegel (Berlin). Bild and Taz are both national (and both are now based in Berlin), and all of those "regional" papers are available nationwide.
Even though the papers are regional they tend to be divided by political allegiance: SZ is the left-liberals, FAZ, the right-liberals, Die Welt is the right, die taz is the New Left (one of the groups that formed the Greens). There isn't really a social democrat (SPD) paper, though SZ is probably the closest since 1982 (when the liberal party joined a right-wing coalition and most left-liberals split with it). Handelsblatt is the main business paper - the equivalent to the British Financial Times or the American Wall Street Journal, ie in a different market.
The French press is dominated by Paris (Le Monde, Libération, Le Figaro). There isn't a French tradition of a popular tabloid press the way there is in Britain (Sun, Mirror, Star, Mail) or Germany (Bild), so circulation was always much lower than in the UK or Germany, and the French regionals (Ouest-France, Dépêche du Midi, Midi Libre, Sud Ouest, etc) used to be a much bigger deal than the British equivalents (Yorkshire Post, Manchester Evening News, Liverpool Echo, Evening Standard, etc).
With the exception of the ideologically regional press (e.g. the Basque and Catalan papers in Spain or the Scottish papers in Britain) I can't think of any European country other than Germany and Switzerland where there are major newspapers that aren't national and the vast majority are based in the capital city (about half of the Italian press is based in Milan, other countries are solidly capital-centred).
Just to clarify: I think if you asked an NYT marketer "why should I read the NYT instead of the WaPo?" or vice versa, they'd probably say "you should read both" or "because you live in New York / Washington and we have local coverage as well as national".
Whereas if you asked someone in Britain, you'd hear "the Telegraph is overly committed to the Tories and the Times is more of a critical friend", or "you can't trust the Times not to support the Lib Dems", or "the Guardian is too left-wing" or whatever.
I seem to recall the NYT being marketed widely in the pre-Internet days (e.g. TV and radio spots hawking NYT subscriptions (sometimes Sunday only) to people living in Michigan).
I don’t know that they ever said “read us, not USA Today” but they definitely were positioning themselves as a national source of news for anyone who wanted to consider themselves well read.
100%, was really big throughout the 90s and early 00s, in the Midwest in places where there were colleges educated consumers.
My impression is that NYT and WaPo have had a long-standing rivalry with each trying to position itself as being the best American newspaper for serious, respectable journalism. They compete mainly in terms of quality of access to well-placed sources and the ensuing ability to break big stories first while still being responsible about verifying accuracy, aiming for the same market niche and taking very similar technocratic center-left editorial stances. The Wall Street Journal also aims at high levels of respectability, but emphasizes financial and business news over politics and takes a center-right editorial stances when it does get political.
There's also a secondary differentiation that WaPo has a really good comics section (or at least they did in the 90s and early 2000s when I was reading them somewhat regularly), while NYT takes the stance (dating back to their 19th century rivalry with Pulitzer's New York World and Hearst's New York Journal) that comics are a gimmick for gossip rags.
Within their respective home markets, NYT's and WaPo 's main local rivals (the New York Post and the Washington Times) compete by emphasizing local news and sports reporting (especially the NY Post, which has a reputation for excellent in-depth coverage of NYC sports teams), taking populist-conservative editorial stances, and inclining towards being sensationalist gossip rags in their national news reporting. Both have some national presence now, but I get the impression that that's mainly a function of the blogging era when sensationalist partisan news is a good way to get links shared for your articles and there's a particular market for conservative populism.
Disagree: even in 90s, if you wanted sunday times in DC, you had to go to some bookstore that carried it, and get there early enough to get a copy. Times and Post really didn't become national in any sense until 90s, after USA Today paved the way. WSJ was (and remains) a different case, because business has to read it (somewhat like the economist).
> They also hoped that sometime in the future there would be a “fire alarm” - something would happen to get people and policy-makers’ attention - and then the political route would open up. [...] I personally am pretty surprised it was just “GPT-4 got released and was very good”. [...] I’m starting to worry that the problem won’t be building a political coalition against unsafe AI, the problem will be not overshooting and banning all AI forever.
It's a bit early to worry about *that*.
AFAIK there no mainstream politician has publicly come out in support of slowing down AI research. The idea of AGI risk is seen with contempt and derision by your average tech-savvy internet nerd, let alone your average 40-something blue-collar worker.
Sure, big names are coming around, but as far as the public goes? There's about as much support for AGI safety as there would be for a carbon tax in the 1980s.
I don't think there's a massive public upswell of support for regulating prediction markets, crypto, or basically safe medical studies that have slightly-too-short-consent-forms, but all those things happened.
I'm not imagining this as "Congress passes a law saying no AI ever", I'm imagining it as regulators, in the normal course of their regulating, comparable to the way they regulate social media, putting so many restrictions on AI that it becomes prohibitively expensive to do it and nobody does.
Well, in the absence of a massive public upswell of support you need some powerful vested interests, which explains all your other examples. Laws don't pass randomly, or by a handful of lawmakers' whimsy because nobody else was paying attention that day in Congress.
In the case of prediction markets, you have a long-standing broadly popular opposition to (and laws heavily regulating) gambling, plus companies that do legalized gambling that might cast a jaundiced eye on upstarts. In the case of crypto you have long-standing broadly popular financial regulation that tries to avoid anything that seems scammy, and trading an asset that has zero intrinsic value seems mighty close to that, on first inspection. And in the case of medical studies you have the most powerful interest group of all, which is lawyers.
I expect a massive up-swell of anti-AI sympathies as it starts causing the job markets to be restructured.
If the latter ever happens, I think you are entirely correct, and moreover that swell would be sufficient to cut off any further use of AIs. So either way I think it's never going to happen -- either because it can't happen at all, or because people won't let it happen any further once they see it get started.
What may very well happen, on the other hand, is that use of AI technology disrupts some minor sector or other of employment, and some people do indeed lose their jobs and have to refocus. It will be permitted because the benefits to most people outweight the losses to some. It happened to typists, travel agents, and grooms, I see no reason it can't happen to code monkeys, English teachers, and journalists.
Not sure how you define AI in ways that you can't avoid by calling what you're doing software of some other type, and regulators never, ever act on a 6-month time frame, let alone impose immediate pauses, basically can't do so given requirements before they act. So if there's urgency here, don't look to the regulators, even if all you care about is U.S.
Don't worry. That will only affect publicly acknowledged efforts.
The bill was authored by representative from WEST FARGO THEY WERE JEALOUS
I really love everything about HustleGPT, especially because it turned out to be absolutely useless and the guy is desperately trying to convert his 15 minutes into money, but it looks like that's not going to well either.
2. "Why are furries so artistically and economically influential compared to other fetishes?"
I don't know, 50 Shades of Grey sold a lot of copies, people are using ideas of consent drawn from kink in vanilla sex (sometimes to unreasonable lengths in my view), role-playing games are using the stoplight system...
5. Extremely un-PC hypothesis: a lot of the academic rules on dating are invented by lesbians trying to compete for bisexual women by driving out straight (or bi) men. I don't know where else to put this that will actually get reasonably smart people to come up with critiques but won't dismiss it out of hand or simply believe it as part of the 'gay agenda'.
6. So more money won't make chronically unhappy people happy, but will make everyone else happier? Yeah, I'd believe that. Didn't someone show here it was actually logarithmic, such that going from about $100K to $200K is like going from $50K to $100K, but it was hard to recruit enough rich people to prove it? Tracks my personal experience but that proves nothing.
15. I suspect the cat's out of the bag on that one, but worth trying.
21. With the college thing I think the debt problem has grown to the point it's reaching parity--i.e., jumping ahead in the job queue with a college degree no longer justifies the now-huge debt you acquire. That's assuming you don't get into Harvard, of course, and what point in the prestige hierarchy breakeven is reached is probably questionable and depends on a bunch of other things.
22. Seems like a nice idea, silly though it is. A lot of people don't want to be flirted with, so they made it socially dangerous to do so (at least in liberal areas)...so this solves that problem. I kind of doubt it'll catch on. If there's one thing we know we nerds suck at it's romance.
23. The obvious answer is their policies don't work. ;) You could say the same about communists, and I wonder if there's a certain symmetry there. My guess is right-wing populists drive off the professional class necessary to implement policy successfully, which was certainly a problem with Trump--he had to rely on people more interested in tax cuts to staff his administration. Honestly he wasn't doing so bad in some ways until COVID hit--the economy was growing without inflation and he didn't start any wars. A less narcissistic person (which is to say, anybody) might have pulled out a close reelection.
28. Go for it, dude. The thing I've realized after reaching middle age is, everyone takes advantage of their privileges, and then lies about it to make well-meaning, honest people feel guilty so they don't take advantage of theirs. This one seems pretty good for everyone--Middle America seems underinvested right now. I don't know about the culture clash between the 'blue' Jewish arrivals and the 'red' locals, but as David Brooks has pointed out, blue cities in red states are doing pretty well. Maybe the challenge is to keep either side from getting all the power.
35. Well, that other genocidal dictator was a painter.
5. I feel like there’s not enough lesbians or bi women for them to wield this kind of influence. A more likely and equally un PC explanation is that it’s ugly women who are jealous of the attention certain women get from men so they problematize it by demonizing the men and making the women victims as a cope.
There’s some truth to that. I think the ideas “trickle up” in the sense that even attractive women benefit from using them to 1.) control men and 2.) protect their self esteem when they get hurt.
But wait, it’s definitely a common name but if you’re the comedian I just wanna say I’m a huge fan. If not, well you share the name with a pretty famous comic/podcaster.
Sailer had something like that theory for why media would have stories about how horrible it is that young co-eds are being asked out on dates by MBAs.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/lesbian-dean-angry-female-harvard-mba/
You wouldn't think there is enough, but the movement against it is really driven out of feminists/women studies departments and the HR world, and those are all areas where lesbians are vastly overrepresented.
I doubt that is the main driver, but I bet it is some part of the story. When I was dating a woman in a masters of women's studies program (briefly...it wasn't a good idea), I was really struck by how the department seemed to be half (or more) lesbians, and that their main focus was on getting women to hate men and problematize women's relationships with men.
Not that a lot of their criticisms weren't correct, but they tended to be unnecessarily hostile and myopic as regards benefits of heterosexuality, which um clearly has some direct benefits to them.
5. Eh, it's a semi-plausible just-so story, those are a dime a dozen. I wouldn't use it except as a cheap shot against an outgroup. Are bi women that much of a percentage out of Lesbian's dating pools ? Don't Lesbians already have several significant advantages when it comes to competing with men over bi women, chief among which are (1) The exotic factor (not many of them) (2) Being the same gender they are chasing (3) Being a minority and the automatic cookies that come with that.
If you replace "Lesbians" by "Feminists", you might be onto something. Feminists in general, Lesbians or not, are into demonizing men. Even the saner subsets believe - at some level or the other, explicitly or otherwise - that men are inherently a threat to women in the gender competitions. The name itself invites looking at gender relations as a classical ingroup-outgroup dynamics, with *all* what that entails.
So yeah, "A group that is suspicious of men is trying to make their life harder", not that surprising, however offensive it is. The only thing you need to prove now is that Feminists wield significant authority at the right administrative levels, which is also not that hard.
"
Don't Lesbians already have several significant advantages when it comes to competing with men over bi women, chief among which are (1) The exotic factor (not many of them) (2) Being the same gender they are chasing (3) Being a minority and the automatic cookies that come with that.
"
Well, against that is the fact that they are a PITA to have relationships with...
(source: every female or gay comedian ever, along with the fact that lesbian couples divorce at about 3x the rate of gay male couples: https://www.metroweekly.com/2020/12/lesbians-much-more-likely-to-divorce-than-gay-men-according-to-data/ )
"Are bi women that much of a percentage out of lesbians' dating pools?"
Yes. The two major groups within LGB orientations are gay men and bi women, this is well established. If you're an exclusive lesbian you're almost certain to have either a bi girlfriend or no girlfriend. (Conversely this is also the source of some lesbians being comically rigorous about never having been with a man in any capacity, while gay men do no such thing.)
Regarding research about the Catholic Church from Martin-Luther-University: I'm working there (science department) and can assure everyone that we're pretty much the most secular institution in the least religious part of the world (former East Germany). ;-)
By the way, regarding nuclear power, it's worth noting how utterly different the attitudes to nuclear power are in comparable countries. At the same time as Germany has proudly switched off its last power plants, Finland - smaller, but similar to Germany in many ways, though also different in many ways - has basically all parties in the new parliament supporting more nuclear power, and in a recent poll 68% of people see nuclear as "positive" or "very positive" and only 6% as "negative" or "very negative". https://twitter.com/Kaikenhuippu/status/1649011146362433539
Americans are also, in most polls, more pro- than anti-nuclear (see, for instance, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/03/23/americans-continue-to-express-mixed-views-about-nuclear-power/), though not as positive as Finns.
Most Germans oppose the shutdown of nuclear, however. They just happened to end up with rulers who are of a different opinion. https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/majority-of-germans-against-nuclear-phaseout-survey/2872156
Re why there are no more successful pairs of identical twins, until recently twin pregnancies were associated with many complications with sequelae such as lower IQ (-4 points or so on average). This is not seen in more recent cohorts, e.g. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228853282_Is_there_still_a_cognitive_cost_of_being_a_twin_in_the_UK
For the same reason, many twins from earlier cohorts lived as singletons when the other twin died. Ronald Fisher, for example, had a twin brother who died in infancy. Accordingly, you would expect the number of highly successful twin pairs to be increasing over time, especially very recently.
I never knew this about twin iqs, but my explanation is that tiny differences that exist between people make the difference between “great” and “extremely great”. So even if two twins are 99.9% identical, thar 0.1% is enough of a difference to make one a household name compared to the other. If Ronald Fishers twin brother would have lived, he’s likely to have been brilliant and successful, but perhaps not quite to the same degree. He probably would have been a doctor, or something, and may have been in the top 100 scientists of his day rather than top 10 like his brother. What’s really the difference between, say, the 92nd and 6th best scientists of the early 20th century? Not much. On a grand scale they’re basically equal in intelligence. Yet from a legacy perspective one is far more “successful” than the other. It’s just that being “extremely successful” brings together a whole bunch of low probabilities that are unlikely to happen twice, let alone once.
But it's not just that it's rare to have pairs of famous identical twins, but it seems to be rare to have _one_ famous identical twin.
Roughly one out of every 125 people is an identical twin. Among the thousand most famous people in the world there should be about eight people who have an identical twin, but it's hard to think of any. From a bit of googling I find the following famous twins:
1. The Winklevoss twins (both twins are famous)
2. The Olsen twins (but they only became famous because their twin-ness allowed them to be cast as a single person in Full House)
3. Rami Malek, the somewhat famous actor, has an identical twin
4. Uh, two of the guys from Good Charlotte?
Other lists of famous twins seem to very quickly get down into people I've never heard of.
I don't think any of the people I've mentioned count within the thousand most famous people in the world, and certainly not the thousand most famous people in history.
2. The twins thing has an intuitive explanation for me:
There’s probably so few “extremely successful” identical twins because the marginal difference between “highly successful” and “extremely successful” is often razor thin. I’m going to use sports as an example because it’s very easy to evaluate objectively, but I believe the talent distribution we see so clearly in sports exists in other domains as well.
The difference between a guy who, for example, ends up playing 12 seasons in the NBA and a guy who never makes a roster and plays overseas is extremely tiny, especially from an outside perspective. If you have 2 twins, one is 6’8” with a 7’ wingspan, and one is 6’6.5” with a 6’9.5” wingspan, that alone is enough to make one person an NBA prospect and the other just a great D1 basketball player. Even though both guys are functionally the same, in todays world of max efficiency those small differences determine whether someone is “extremely successful” or just regular old successful.
I assume the same principle applies to the difference between, say, a world renowned physicist at MIT vs his twin brother in the physics department at Ohio State, or whatever (example is purely hypothetical). Both brilliant and successful, and on a scale of all humanity pretty much equally smart.
I think this, combined with just how rare identical twins are pretty much explains it fully.
I'd even go as far as saying that two 1000% identical twins by any reasonable measure, of which one became extremely sucessful, the other twin still only has a moderately increased chance of becoming extremely sucessful. Which still rounds to almost zero since the baseline is so low. Just from my own field, the difference between an experimental result that "goes viral" and another equally well-done experiment that becomes just a run-of-the-mill lowly cited paper is almost 100% unpredictable before you've done it. Or the difference between an arcane detail of a contentious theory being solved, and that arcane detail turning out to be a major breakthrough that makes the theory dominant. And so on.
Exactly. There’s not much randomness involved in being “successful” but the jump from there to being “extremely successful” has a massive amount of randomness and chance involved.
There's an easy NBA example here, with the Lopez brothers, one of whom is significantly better than the other, has been an NBA champ, etc.
I forgot about them lol. I was thinking of identical twins Keegan and Kris Murray, the former was drafted 4th overall last year while the latter is still at Iowa and likely to be a much later pick this coming draft.
Pear ring seems like a great idea, but I wish that someone would invent and publicize a gay version so I can advertise my singleness to the correct gender. Rainbow? Purple? I pass as straight, and I definitely don't want a piece of jewelry to cause me to be constantly approached by men.
There used to be (decades ago) a whole gay thing about bandanas in one's rear jeans pocket, and which pocket it was was significant (top/bottom).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handkerchief_code. Apparently it was left and right though.
I'm...guessing you're a lesbian? You could get a little rainbow ring thing. Men might think you were bi though. I don't know, go to lots of feminist stuff. Unless you're a right-leaning lesbian (unlikely but hey, this is SSC), in which case I know OkCupid had a 'hide me from straight people' option fairly recently.
The other possibility is you're gay, in which case you could continue passing as straight and have a small rainbow wristband or pin or something for when you want to go out and meet someone.
Does anybody know of a transcript or commentary of the interview with Ryan Kupyn on forecasting AGI? Video doesn't work for me - esp. 1 hour.
Banned for one week for implying something is stupid but refusing to explain why; I realize this is harsh but it's a pet peeve of mine.
Re #28, why would these billionaires think this is a good idea? They do realize this exactly plays into (and in this case confirms) the anti-Jewish trope of Jews being more successful because of nepotism, where other Jews in high places preferentially grant jobs and benefits to their "tribesmen" over the "goyim," right? I fail to see how they think creating the exact classic conditions for resentment against a local Jewish community would be a good idea for their local Jewish community. Maybe a few more talented Jewish people move in because of this program, at the cost of all the locals who find out about this program viewing them (and by extension the Jews already there) as privileged interlopers and not wanting anything to do with them. Seems like a pretty obvious net loss to me.
(Edit because I realized I confused the words "interloper" and "interlocutor")
If the locals also get benefits from the billionaires' projects I don't see why they would be so upset
Also, it's silly to care more about playing into stereotype than achieving your goals. It's also a stereotype that jews are rich. Should jews eschew good paying jobs? Obviously not.
Exactly. And to Drethelin: the point is not just that these are stereotypes, but that these are stereotypical *vices*, which will also reflect poorly on people who do not engage in them.
With regards to Gwern's question on writing vs. coding in the morning. My best coding time is usually around 9-11am. 8-9am I'm still waking up, 11am I'm starting to get hungry for lunch. I usually eat at noon, then I'm tired from eating lunch from roughly 1-2:00. 2:00-3:30 can sometimes be ok if I'm well rested enough and I'm usually getting tired again as the afternoon wears on. The later I code, the more easy mistakes I make, which I usually catch the next morning while wondering what on earth I was thinking.
I've also noticed that most of my best ideas come in the morning, oftentimes I'll wake up with them. To me, there is very clearly some mental background process that continues to work on whatever problem I'm dealing with at the time, and whose results generally filter into my consciousness in the morning after waking. If we assume this process is similar, this would explain why writers feel more effective in the morning: they are getting the creative output of their sleep processes when they wake up.
As to why coders stereo-typically like to stay up late, while I might be biased, I think coding is probably more rewarding that writing is and this leads people to get wrapped up in it in a way writers typically don't. You can write a bit of code that adds a bit of functionality, then you can test it and figure out all the little bugs that inevitably creep in, fixing each one is a little reward like solving a puzzle. And when you fix all of them and the code works and you can see the new feature, that's a bigger reward and so, so satisfying. Fixing the bugs can also task you, because you are so close to having it working and you just need to iron out those kinks so 5 more minutes to try 1 more thing.... can become 1 hour, then 2 (it's pretty easy to get into a flow state when coding). That said, as I mentioned before, my ability to code degrades the more tired I am, especially as the evening wears on and irrespective of how focused I am on the task, so I place being well rested at a premium to maintain optimum coding ability. Everyone else seems to just rely on caffeine (I don't use it so I'm pretty sure I'm an outlier, for whatever that's worth).
> To me, there is very clearly some mental background process that continues to work on whatever problem I'm dealing with at the time, and whose results generally filter into my consciousness in the morning after waking.
Definitely. Background processing is going on while awake too. I’ve seen programmers in the middle of an unrelated conversation raise an index finger say “Oh yeah, gotta go” and go back to their desk with a solution to a knotty problem. Weird, but it does happen.
Then there’s the whole sitting up in bed in the middle of the night thing too. “So that’s it”
Or Alan Turing’s processing during long runs.
Or the dream of the double helix…
https://blog.genleap.co/the-shape-of-dna-was-inspired-by-dream?hs_amp=true
> My only concern about this story is that some other countries haven’t become any more extreme/partisan since the advent of the Internet - is this because their media didn’t undergo this process?
UK newspapers were always partisan. UK broadcast media aren't allowed to be. If you want to understand US polarisation, the repeal of the fairness doctrine should be your first port of call.
If you've never heard a left winger complain about the BBC, you don't know manu left wingers.
I mean I'm sure there's far left-wingers who think that the BBC isn't far enough left, but you gotta be pretty far left to think that.
Maybe the rightmost 50% of the population think the BBC is too far left, the next 30% think it's pretty fine and the leftmost 20% think it's too far right.
Maybe you have some evidence.
A big reason behind #21, the drop in people saying college is worth the cost, is that the opportunity costs went way up: youth unemployment went from 16.3% in 2013 to 7.5% now.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/youth_08202013.pdf
https://www.statista.com/statistics/217448/seasonally-adjusted-monthly-youth-unemployment-rate-in-the-us/
"The alignment community always figured their concerns sounded too weird for normal people to care about, that politics was a lost cause, and that our best hope lay in technical research. They also hoped that sometime in the future there would be a “fire alarm” - something would happen to get people and policy-makers’ attention - and then the political route would open up. I personally am pretty surprised it was just “GPT-4 got released and was very good”."
And this was always a bizarre belief. Rationalists did not invent AI fear, or even AI doomerism. How much of science fiction is about a mad scientist creating a being that turns on him? That's what Frankenstein is about, and that was written in 1818! Isaac Asimov's "I, Robot" series, written in the 1940s and 1950s, is about the problems of AI alignment. One of the most iconic evil AIs, HAL 9000, is from the 1960s. So are Daleks, who want to exterminate the whole universe. More recently, we have movies like Matrix or Terminator, TV series like Battlestar Galactica, and video games like Horizon Zero Dawn.
Storytellers have been taping into the public's fear of AI since before AI existed. Whether they like to admit it or not, rationalists are embedded in this culture and take their inspiration from it. It's no surprise whatsoever that improved AI capabilities would heighten AI fears and potentially lead to the government snuffing out the most revolutionary technology since electricity.
OK so this is pedantic and I can't believe I even know this, but: Daleks aren't AIs, they're aliens in suits.
Re #26 - remote work
I've been saying for several years that remote work is not sustainable for businesses, maybe any large business. That we're seeing significant drops makes perfect sense to me, and I don't think we'll ever get to the point where a majority of jobs are even partially remote. Honestly, it seems that any discussion of significant remote work is a symptom of the types of people who have the freedom to write about such things being one of the few professions where it might work (journalism).
The core problem is that most employees do not have the knowledge and drive to start a career remotely. Even if experienced employees can complete their tasks from home, new employees need direction and training (this includes experienced employees starting at a new business in most cases).
If you allow your long term employees to work remotely, there's no one around to enculturate and train the new employees. You've also got potentially significant problems making sure that work is being completed and that employees are using their time effectively. Many information jobs that could work remotely involve long term projects from multiple people, which permits some people to ride on the accomplishments of others or pretend to get their work done before some deadline looms and stuff crashes. This exists in person, but proximity allows managers to have more opportunities to review and notice problems.
Compounding this is the fact that the vast majority of jobs require a physical output at a particular location. You can't be a remote nurse, mechanic, farmer, dock worker, etc. That he thinks only 40% of workers will be fully in person is pretty much insane, if you understand the types of work that exist. We're not going to have WFH for the service industry, manufacturing, construction, retail sales (distribution network), let alone the more obvious like mining and agriculture. These fields make up about 80% of the private sector workforce. That a few people could work remotely for companies in these fields is probably true, but we're talking well under 1%, probably far less.
Even speaking theoretically, it's probably the case that fewer than 10% of jobs can even be done partially from home. The chart pictured above is probably only a subsection of jobs - likely not polling too many restaurants or nursing homes to determine the percent of people working from home.
These are great points. It’s a bit annoying how entrenched the “bosses only want us in the office to feel important / because they don’t actually do anything valuable” position has become.
There is a grain of truth there - I think bosses were genuinely way too paranoid about WFH being an excuse to slack prior to COVID forcing the issue. And the idea that the workplace is a magical place of essential collaboration that is absolutely worth the added cost of maintaining a building and commuting in all circumstances is dumb.
But the idea that WFH is cost-free for all or most office workers is equally dumb.
Well, it is essentially magical as far as our understanding of collaboration and skill transfer is concerned. Whether it's worth the cost is another question.
IT might be different but my first job was in one of the FAANGs and the mentorship I received, or expected, was exactly none after the first day on boarding. Of course 18 years of education was behind all that. I was expected to work it out
I also got no formal mentorship, but I absolutely spent a lot of over-the-shoulder time with more experienced engineers and my technical lead. In some sense I think this is MORE critical if you don’t have a great, formalized onboarding and mentorship program. Informal training and mentorship is easier in person.
I haven’t really seen that happen much, although it might be more common in places with bespoke procedures and software.
Could be. I suppose at Google one could Google most of what it takes to be successful, assuming a high base level of talent?
+1 on all of this. If you are a veteran knowledge worker who doesn't mind finishing out your career as a siloed content creator, full remote is great. It doesn't work nearly as well for newbies, or collaborative teams, or anyone who wants to advance beyond solitary content creation. And as noted, it doesn't work at all for the vast majority of jobs. And for the jobs it *does* work for, hybrid is usually better than remote.
I'm also with Gbdub on how annoying it is to be told that it's only the evil bosses trying to preserve on-site work because they get their jollies watching their minions slave away. As a lazy manager, I've always found that the best course is to hire the sort of minions who almost don't need managing. But that works best when they can most easily reach out to one another for assistance. And during COVID, it was my staff who took it on themselves to organize all the off-site get-togethers and invite me, not the other way around.
Full remote is for people who have a very strong reason to live 100+ miles from their workplace, and are willing to accept the resulting limitations, and almost never for new hires who want to succeed.
I don't know about businesses, but it's my feeling that it's not sustainable for the employees. If you are out of touch with the company, you will be among those surprised by being let go.
"A few years ago a weird object called Oumuamua entered the solar system and a few astronomers speculated in might have been an alien spacecraft (it’s since left). "
It's basically just Avi Loeb and his students/postdocs. Loeb has been labelling everything in sight aliens, not just the interstellar comet, but also fast radio bursts (which have since been shown to originate from neutrons stars with strong magnetic fields): https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/an-audacious-explanation-for-fast-radio-bursts/
He definitely has a lane he has been cultivating.
I was taught that the Catholic Church becoming anti-science for the Counter-Reformation is what allowed Protestantism to seize the pro-science position.
Copernicus, after all, did his fateful research in the employ of the Church trying to develop a better calendar that correctly dated holidays with respect to the life of Jesus. His book didn't really get much traction even in the scientific community until it got an endorsement from Tycho Brahe, on account of some testably wrong predictions Copernicus made based on a much too small solar system. (The endorsement being posthumous and probably actually attributable to Brahe's student Kepler is another story.)
Initially, the Protestants opposed heliocentrism as an "innovation". They complained of a pattern of behavior by the Church of interpreting the Bible to the point of, in the Protestants' eyes, changing the meaning. Heliocentrism is one of the flimsier ones. First, the orthodoxy here was more Aristotelean than Biblical. But even the Biblical textual argument is weak; as I understand it, the argument comes down to two passages: Bereshit 1:1-3 (God split Heaven and Earth before creating light), and a single line from Joshua (*something* happened to the sun by Joshua's command; the Protestants translated it as "stopped", modern Jewish scholarship has it as "disappeared", perhaps like an eclipse). Both were sort of flimsy arguments! But in the Protestants' eyes they fit into a larger pattern, and taking cheap shots at an opponent's controversial theory is a common way people score points.
But as part of the Counter-Reformation, the Church chose to go fully hard-ass on heliocentrism. Possibly *because* the Protestants were so ineffective at stamping science out, the Church might have felt they could make the case that they were holier and more originalist than the Protestants. They had the institutional advantage to run those inquisitions, after all. But by this point the Scientific Revolution was clearly in full swing, and while Galileo was a jerk his trial was clearly a bit funky, and so the Protestants had the opportunity to pivot to the pro-science position.
That equilibrium lasted a few hundred years. For my money, it seems less true now; these days Evangelical Protestants seem at least as skeptical of science as the Church.
It’s more than this - the Protestants were generally less keen on science than the Catholics, but they were also much weaker in their own countries as they were completely dependant on the local monarch/nobility (who liked guns, clocks and fireworks, and went to the same parties as the scientists).
Interestingly, the central difference between Catholicism and Protestantism can usefully be summarized as the debate between "trust the experts" (i.e., the Pope) and "do your own research" (i.e., read the Bible in your own language). I think this debate has complicated interactions on many levels with the development of science.
Except that, in Protestantism, you had to absolutely (and fundamentally) accept the bible. Hence fundamentalism. That’s also an appeal to authority, even if multiple sects understood the authority differently.
The main reason science and Protestantism seem to accelerate at the same time is the printing press is necessary for both.
But Catholics weren't typically super-fundamentalist about the Bible.
I should have said “except that with Protestantism..”. Corrected now.
A big reason for Luther's Reformation was that during the Renaissance, Italian cardinals had gotten highly worldly and elitist -- which included art and science. About a half century into the Reformation, the Catholic Church decided to fight back by adopting a lot of anti-elite Protestant tendencies during its new Counter-Reformation. Eventually this led to the Galileo controversy, which dragged on for about 20 years at the highest levels of Italian Church, before finally coming down against Galileo about a century after Luther started the Reformation.
Before anyone comes up with a rationale for the result of this study, I'd like to point out that its methodology is laughably bad - all the author did was count the English-language Wikipedia's entries for people he thinks should qualify as scientists, with very dubious criteria: "Additionally, either for robustness purposes or in order to augment the number of observations, we will sometimes use the more-broadly-defined metric ‘intellectuals’".
6. From your summary, if they were both right, then neither was right. My understanding is that they concluded "some people get happier with more money, whereas some people don't."
31. I never agreed with Guzey's conclusion from that first debunking article (the only one of his that I read) -- IMO plenty of sleep is obviously important. But his meta-point seemed more important: that most evidence is pretty muddled and popularizers disingenuously present it to the public. But reading this link, maybe I was just projecting this meta-point onto him if he actually tried to sleep 4 hours a day.
I took it to mean that unhappy/depressed people won't be made much happier even with a lot more money, while generally happy people will go "another $10,000? now I can afford to do that thing I wanted to do!" and they express that happiness/satisfaction.
I think “these people form two discernible groups, it’s not just random” is an important finding.
Yes. This is more important than quibbling about which side was right.
I agree with you about Guzey--his article struck me as bizarre, because he spent most of it explaining how all our scientific evidence about sleep is very low quality and doesn't replicate, and then concluded "sleeping a lot is almost definitely bad for you and most people should sleep less".
The answer to why Brazilian jiu-jitsu took so long to invent is simple: for all it likes to pretend, MMA is not like actual combat. If you really want to win a fight, you bring a friend or use a weapon. Both of those give you huge advantages, and it's what everyone did: norms of "help your friend in any fight and ask questions later" and "always carry at least a knife" are extremely widespread across cultures. Extended, one-on-one, completely unarmed combat just didn't happen often at all. No one got good at MMA until people started playing by MMA rules.
Should have read the comments before commenting myself, see the thread started by Drethelin for people making these same points better than I did.
First time I spent some time reading Gwern’s stuff. I really like the way this guy thinks. Special thanks for this link.
That link doubled the interesting links on this post. I’ll never sleep again with this kind of carry on.
"Also that AI wiping out humanity is “not inconceivable . . . that’s all I’ll say”
Completely unsurprising. We have two centuries of literature conceiving of AI being bad in one way or another (I count Frankenstein's Monster as AI), and as soon as "wiping out humanity" became a thing, AI was fingered as a possible villain the next day.
I think Curtis Yarvin was right when he recognized AI alarmism as a modern manifestation of the golem myth (man creates thing to do his bidding, it gets out of control and goes on a rampage).
You can do as much psychoanalysis as you want (and maybe even be correct about the sources of people's feelings), but it has no bearing on whether there's an actual risk. Yarvin's arguments for why people shouldn't worry about AI destroying humanity are 90% bloviating and literary references, and 10% "but how will it build robots good enough to keep the data centers running".
I think he was still spot-on in his argument to the effect of "AI would still need to build massive testing facilities in meatspace to develop a superweapon, and people would be able to easily notice that and shut it down." This being a result of the fact that physical systems are chaotic, and you can't simulate them well enough to engineer any device of any significant complexity without real-world testing, no matter how much computing power you have. This might not address all the potential doomsday scenarios in the AI risk gish gallop, but it at least covers the ones of the "AI does some sort of nanomachine magic and everyone dies" type that Yudkowsky likes to go on about.
I don't think that the stealth nanobots are impossible, but they aren't the load-bearing part of AI risk, and Yudkowsky's emphasis on them is but one of his many PR blunders. But even a flawless PR campaign probably wouldn't help if alignment is anywhere near as hard as he thinks it is, and would still be irrelevant if it's easy.
I don't think it's just a PR blunder, it's an intellectual blunder.
I think that stealth nanobots are the load-bearing part of AI risk... and if not stealth nanobots then some equivalent technology. If I were convinced such a thing was likely to be possible then I'd personally be a lot more concerned about AI risk.
I agree with this. The "sudden AI death" scenario depends on the AI somehow being able to kill us all basically (or literally) overnight so there's no time to respond. Which has never made any sense to me, personally.
I mean, if stealth nanobots existed, wouldn't this be a big concern all by itself, even in the *absence* of any hint of AIs? It's not like only AIs would think of using them.
I'm curious what you do think is the load-bearing part of AI risk, then. This relates to why I described AI risk discourse as a gish gallop, because it seems like as soon as you explain why one proposed vector of AI doomsday is impossible and ridiculous based on how the physical and computational systems involved actually work, the AI risk theorist has come up with another crazy scenario, and once you defuse that possibility, they now have three more. The whole thing seems almost to be based on a pre-established assumption that AI represents an x-risk, justifying any scenario that leads to that conclusion, no matter how contrived (just like how the creationist gish galloper takes creationism as an axiom, and then comes up with endless supposed evidence to justify the conclusion he's already settled on).
To me, the load-bearing part is admitting that sufficiently smarter than you entities are possible. The default expectation, given that, is that you can't control them and eventually they will amass more resources than you collectively have, at which point you're at their mercy. I think that Karnofsky's overview is pretty good: https://www.cold-takes.com/ai-could-defeat-all-of-us-combined/
The thing about the golem myth is that it’s a myth because it was impossible to *make golems*, not because it’s obvious that golems would be rampage-proof.
2: off the cuff twins theory. What drives people to greatness is a fundamental insecurity and feeling of loneliness that is uncommon in twins.
Or that twins, especially identical ones, try very hard to be distinguishable personalities, because everyone tends to treat them as a unit. So perhaps if Bill works on becoming the world's leading expert on reed buntings, Ben will decide to become a musician.
Furthermore, at very high levels of achievement, one of them will almost certainly be obviously better if they pursue the same field. So one probably abandons the effort and finds their own path lest they always be the “less successful twin”.
Not my experience with identical twins. If only a particular set of twins I worked with a few years ago had even changed one thing - hairstyle, clothing, voice, demeanour I wouldn’t have annoyed them more than once by getting their name(s) wrong.
(Which genuinely annoyed them.)
Of course the other thing they could have done to avoid this problem was not work in the same place.
Does anyone know whether the Minnesota twins studies (specifically MISTRA) analyzed mean differences in personality traits between twins raised together versus apart? I'm aware MISTRA primarily focused on heritability, so maybe not; curious about the influence of the unique twin bond on traits, and if it's evident when comparing average levels between groups.
https://mctfr.psych.umn.edu
Regarding Glaze, I saw a paper today that appears to defeat a similar sort of masking by just...JPEG-ing the image: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.02234
(To be fair, their stated scope is to allow for AI editing of the image, not using it as training data. Still, there's bound to be SOME crossover)
Pic of example: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F03f18c55-674f-4a1f-a7ca-13b8b43d93e5_1922x1614.png
"Jiankui He is back"
And has anyone checked up on the babies he used as living experiments? Are they okay? Did it all work out? If we're going to decide that cut-n-paste humans are the way forward, at least let us find out if it worked okay or not the first time.
I will definitely be reading the Lutheran paper 😁
I mean, realistically, nothing is going to work out all that well the first time, or even the first 20 times...
"The twins spent their first weeks in a hospital neonatal intensive care unit. Lulu and Nana were born prematurely, by emergency cesarean section at 31 weeks, and initially had difficulty breathing. The health problems that Lulu and Nana experienced at birth could be a result of known risks of twin pregnancies and conventional in vitro fertilization treatments. Or they could be the result of unknown risks associated with CRISPR gene editing. Today the children are reportedly healthy, but their future is unknown."
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/04/opinion/gene-editing-crispr-fertility-medicine.html
I mean, whose future isn't?
It could be that Stalin was the best poet in the Soviet Union because he was the only poet in the Soviet Union who wasn't afraid of Stalin.
Heh, that’s pretty good, Phil.
“I can’t tell whether they’re claiming Stalin was actually very good - or that he pretended his poems were anonymous, and everyone else praised them lavishly while pretending not to know Stalin wrote them.”
Stephen Kotkin’s biography suggests his talents were recognized even when he was an unknown revolutionary under the Tsar:
“As a teenager, he had abandoned a successful trajectory, with high marks in school, to fight tsarist oppression, and published first-rate poems in a Georgian newspaper, which he recited in front of others. (‘To this day his beautiful, sonorous lyrics echo in my ears,’ one person would recall.)”
Could this be a piece of evidence in favor of a "g-factor" that makes certain individuals simply much more likely to have extreme success at whatever they put their efforts towards? The skills necessary to write a nationally-prominent poem and to scheme your way to controlling one of the world's superpowers seem quite distinct, and yet Stalin apparently had a several sigma above average level of ability in both, which seems unlikely to be a coincidence.
They're both just "a way with words," aren't they? Poetry and revolution are both about presenting an idea in a way people want to hear.
I could see that argument holding if the man in question was Lenin, but Stalin wasn't really a proselytizer of the revolution - he was the guy who got his hands dirty, from robbing banks for the proletariat, to brutally undermining and backstabbing anyone within the party who got between him and power. So I'd say it was less a way with words and more a Machiavellian ability at power games and scheming, which seems less immediately connected to the cognitive processes behind poetry. Hence the theory that there's some sort of generalist factor at play.
It can't be too generalist, or he'd have been better at more stuff.
It seems more likely to me that Stalin simply had a strong ability "for something", and found a way to leverage it both to write poems, and also to seize control of the largest country in the world.
>It can't be too generalist, or he'd have been better at more stuff.
Are we sure he wouldn't have been, and poetry and dictatorship just happened to be the areas he decided to turn his passions towards? Are there any areas where he was known to have been passionate or made an attempt to master, but failed? Such a case would be what would differentiate between the two hypotheses.
That's a good point. Seizing control of the largest country in the world probably doesn't leave a lot of spare time for anything else. And it's not like stepping down would be a possibility, if he wanted to live. So once he set down that road, he could never leave.
I do think it says something that he seems to have been better at getting and keeping power, than he was at actually running the state. The Lysenko saga seems like a good case there.
He oversaw the transition of a lethargic agrarian backwater into a nuclear-wielding superpower, with a victory in the largest ever war in between. There's a common refrain in certain quarters how all of that was "in spite of him", but it doesn't look like countries saddled with incompetent dictators usually manage to achieve much in spite of them.
Stalin really had three talents, two of which were relevant to a dictatorship. The first was his skill at art (and the least relevant). The second was his extremely good organizational and management skills. The third was his masterful ability to be a political knife fighter. Stalin was also always a workaholic.
However, Stalin he was actually a notably weak Marxist theoretician. Something he was embarrassed about and tried, with limited success, to rectify throughout his life. He was also not very good at geopolitics or diplomacy and also not very good at military affairs. His knowledge of technology wasn't amazing either (he famously held up the development of computers). He wasn't a master criminal either. So he was a man with strengths and weaknesses rather than some all consuming ability to be successful at anything.
> 27. [...] One of the few rare victories for these voting systems was Fargo, North Dakota...
Approval voting has struggled to gain momentum. But ranked-choice voting has actually been having a run of successes in the past few years: the mayoral primaries in NYC, the mayoral election in Burlington, VT, statewide elections in Alaska and Maine...
The voting nerds have good theoretical reasons to like approval voting, but I've tended to think ranked choice/instant runoff is a lot easier to understand and makes more sense to voters. The problem with approval voting is how much it requires strategizing. You're supposed to vote for whichever candidates you "approve" of. But if you really like candidate 1, you think candidate 2 is not great, and you absolutely hate candidate 3, should you "approve" of candidate 2? To answer this you have to be following the polls closely and figuring out what other voters are likely to do.
Instant Runoff isn't a big threat to the two big political parties, whereas approval voting is.
IRV, at least in the US context, can be expected to result in continued dominance of the big two parties. Some people will vote for a minor candidate as their first preference, but inevitably all votes wind up getting directed either towards the Republican or the Democrat.
Approval voting is more dangerous because the natural winner is some kind of likeable centrist. I would actually worry that in approval voting nobody can ever win except for a likeable centrist. Pretty soon all candidates are competing to be the most centrist of all, and the two political parties are left right out.
Some of us might consider that a good thing. :) Which is why it'll never happen, because the two parties have all the power.
I do feel like there's some game-theoretic explanation for a lot of our polarization problems in terms of the duopoly which the MSM is burying because it might hurt the Democrats.
Australia has IRV (or ranked choice, not sure what the difference is) and mandatory voting, and the observable result has been both major parties competing to occupy the centre - which is way better for the country than the mess the USA has.
I will note that while IRV does still lead to 2 dominant major parties, it also has allowed a number of minor parties to get a bunch of seats, with the Greens having a bunch and a variety of other parties managing one or two seats each. Not enough to ever form government, and usually not enough to cause minority governments, but it still allows for a lot more ideological viewpoints to be aired in Parliament.
One of my hobby horses is to point out that, while the most common implementation thereof, IRV is merely a subset of RCV methods and Condorcet methods have significant advantages.
Do you have a link that explains why Condorcet methods would be better? Condorcet seems like quite a bit more effort for voters to understand, which means likely reduced participation. And a quick google search suggests the Condorcet winner can be problematic. For example, from an essay about the 2022 Alaska race (https://democracysos.substack.com/p/alaska-election-results-show-why):
"With RCV, winning candidates in a single-winner contest (like a governor, mayor or a representative of a legislative district) must have BOTH a broad base of support AND a strong core of support. RCV rewards both deep support as evidenced by a high number of first rankings, and broad support, as evidenced by many backup rankings. But with Condorcet and these other methods, winners only need to have a broad base of support, and do not need much core support."
Again, Condorcet is a form of ranked choice voting (RCV); if you mean IRV, please say that.
Voters do not need to understand how to *implement* the algorithm as long as they understand the purpose: Condorcet methods select the candidate who would beat every other in a two-way race.
There used to be a nice table on Wikipedia showing which methods met which criteria (obviously none meet all per Arrow), but it seems to have been edited away. IRV satisfies fewer. The core v. breadth of support argument is just FUD.
Yeah, in that quote it says RCV, but from the rest of the article it's clear they're comparing Condorcet with instant runoff.
I think it's important for voters to understand how the outcome is reached in order to have a reasonable level of trust in the voting system. Yes, the idea behind Condorcet is pretty simple--but if you're adding it on (presumably with instant-runoff as the backstop if there's no Condorcet winner?) then you're increasing the complexity, and frankly most voters are not going to bother learning how the new system works, they'll just understand that it's a complicated system and they don't know how the conclusion is reached. And if their candidate loses, they'll be angry.
Number of criteria satisfied is not actually very relevant, since they don't all have equal importance. And some factors are harder to formalize, like the idea that someone who is almost nobody's first choice would lack a governing mandate and the emotional support of the electorate. You can certainly make an argument that compromise candidates are an improvement over see-sawing between opposed viewpoints, but I don't think it's obvious at all.
I wish that table were still available so I could check my memory, but I think that it showed Condorcet meeting every criterion IRV did and then some, and one of the extras was from Arrow's main set (clone independence, perhaps?).
There are Condorcet methods that have built in breakers if there isn't a single winner; best I've been able to tell they are functionally equivalent (reverse the closest pairwise result) even if the implementation details differ. I like to use a rock-paper-scissors analogy as an example of this sort of problem (you'd only ever get two remaining candidates if they exactly tied): the paper is in shreds after cut by the scissors, the scissors are bent uselessly out shape when smashed by the rock, but the rock is unaffected by being covered by the paper -> rock wins.
Personally I would rather elected officials be boringly competent and *not* have an emotional connection with the populace. Calvin Coolidge FTW. The alternative is just demagoguery with extra steps.
Every complex system is equivalent to FPTP when there are only two candidates, and I can't see why any system would be preferable if it picks a winner who would lose (by definition) in such a race to the Condorcet winner.
To be clear, I'm not opposed to IRV; it would be worlds better than FPTP, and once the electorate is comfortable with ranked ballots Condorcet *might* become politically feasible (I'm under no illusions that it currently is). Mostly I'm just salty about IRV proponents coopting the term RCV, making that future conversation unnecessarily harder.
It’s a bit odd you giving out to him about getting voting systems wrong. Your original post was full of acronyms and could convince nobody of anything, except people who agreed with you to begin with.
It was primarily nitpicking about terminology (the abbreviations were of terms in the comment I replied to, so I took it as given that their meanings were inferrable), with a side of merely stating a thesis that was developed over the rest of the conversation. An infodump about the latter would've obscured the former & was beside the point until there was a request for additional information.
Oh hi! Thanks for the mention :)
I absolutely agree that I'm doing a "special crackpot that works mostly for me" diet but hoping to find what the magic button is ;) It would be great if we could interpolate from all those one-off crackpot diets that work and find one common ingredient. Maybe not, but maybe.
We've been chatting about it in the discord server if you want to weigh in!
The magic button is probably the hypothesized 'fat-thermostat' (sometimes called the lipostat), which is a sort of thermostat that determines how much fat your body 'wants' to carry. Losing fat is relatively easy an can apparently be done in a variety of ways. In fact, it almost seems as if general-purpose fat loss formula is: do something markedly different what whatever you've been doing in the past and your body will respond by becoming (temporarily) leaner. But if you don't change the fat-thermostat's set-point, your body will eventually fight back and add fat until you get back to your old shape.
A problem with the fat-thermostat thing is that nobody seems to know if it exists or what it is. But I have a theory. This theory is based on the observation that we can tell who will become fat in the future, even if they are not fat in the present. This on its own would make a neat experiment: take a bunch of photos of attractive young adults and ask the experiment's participants to predict the subject-of-the-photo's BMI ten years in the future. I'll wager that people's predictions of future-BMI will be highly accurate - even if you eliminate or control for indications of socioeconomic class in the test photos. I'd love to see this experiment done, but my fat-thermostat hunch requires us to take the future-BMI-is-predictable hypothesis at face value for now, because my proposal for the identity of the fat-thermostat is that the fat-thermostat is just those traits we observe that allows us to predict future BMI - small localized fat pockets.
When we see an attractive young adult but bet that they will be fat in the future, we're responding to the presence (or absence) of small patches of fat - the cheeks and jowls, maybe under the arms, the love handles, certain places on the abdomen etc. - all of the so-called 'baby fat' spots. Even a lean person can have these little slight deposits that act as a good predictor of future corpulence. And the reverse is true too - when a heavy person loses enough fat to become lean, they retain pockets of fat in these 'hard to lose' places. Which in turn betokens that they will become fat again in the future if they abandon their diet and exercise regimen. Or, probably even if they don't! My fat-thermostat idea is that it's these pockets of fat the are the source of the signals that produce the metabolic and behavioral changes that drive up BMI.
How might we test this idea? Liposuction. It's well known that liposuction is generally ineffective. BUT! there are two broad types of liposuction procedures. One is so-called 'sculpting', which removes precisely the fat deposits I'm talking about - jowls and cheeks, under arms, love handles etc. The other is of course bulk, general purpose fat removal from the abdomen, legs, thighs etc. My hypothesis is this: if we had access to data about past liposuction procedures, that we'd see two clusters: people who became fat again and a small set people who stayed lean, and that the cluster of people who stayed lean are correlated with having had 'sculpting' procedures done in addition to bulk fat removal. I'm imagining that people who are obese enough to resort to liposuction usually don't get any of the 'sculpting' work done. Who needs to sharpen their jawline when they've got an enormous abdomen? But I'm proposing that those few who also get fat taken from their jowls, and under their arms etc - that these few stay lean(ish) compared to those who don't. Secondly, I hypothesize that if you look at people who have only had 'sculpting' liposuction on hard to lose fat deposits, that their BMIs decrease afterwards.
I definitely think there is a "lipostat," at least functionally. I doubt that it's an exact number of body fat % or whatever saved off in the brain somewhere, like one might imagine, but it might just be a local equilibrium between competing hormones or other signals.
But that's not the "button," that's the thermostat. What's the button we can press on the thermostat to lose fat?
I disagree that we can easily lose weight. There are plenty of "eat something different" experiments without any significant weight loss. In fact, I'd say we don't know of ANY reliable way to sustainably lose fat. We can starve people for a while and they'll lose a bit of fat, but it also drives their metabolism into the ground and almost all of them gain all the weight back quickly.
In fact, I don't think I know anyone who's lost over 25lbs and kept it off except by doing a version of low-carb, and then only those people who were drinking excess soda and fruit juices.
So the lipostat is not "the button," but the "button" only works if there is a lipostat.
'relatively easy' to lose fat - relative to how difficult it is to keep it off, which is nearly impossible. The lipostat isn't a button - it's a dial, but turning it down will cause fat loss. Once the lipostat has been turned down, then a bunch of metabolic and behavioral changes kick in. Suddenly joining a beach volleyball team seems like a good idea. Suddenly veggies taste great. Suddenly you're too busy to eat full meals and so you grab a sandwich on the go. etc. The lipostat /might/ be competing hormones, but I'm saying that I think it's pockets of baby fat. Those are the signaling nodes.
I think the lipostat isn't a button/dial, it's a feedback loop. But it HAS a button or dial (hopefully). "There exists a lipostat" is not actionable. A button you can push, a dial you can turn.
E.g. maybe the button is insulin. So to turn down the lipostat, eat less insulinogenic foods, or eat them apart from energy-dense foods (1 carb/protein meal, 1 fat meal?), or concentrate them only in 1 period of time. This would explain a whole bunch of marginally successful diets (low-carb, time-restricted eating/OMAD, even low-fat).
Of course just speculation that it's insulin, but it's one of the better hypotheses I know of.
I'm not sure if the baby fat pockets are causal or simply symptoms.
On 5, British Universities are different to American ones. In particular, 18-year-olds are viewed entirely as adults, and the university is a business they pay to provide them instruction in a specific subject. There’s no expectation that they’ll provide any pastoral care, and you only rent a room from them in your first year (where they’re basically just your landlord). They’re not in any sense responsible for you; if any of them tried to impose an honour code, that would be as weird as McDonald’s imposing one on its customers.
Dating your lecturer (who may or may not be a professor) doesn’t seem any stranger to me than dating your dentist, with the caveat that they shouldn’t mark your exams to stop them being biased in your favour.
(Exceptions to this are that there’s been a slow pressure towards Americanising for the last few years driven by the general infantilisation of society, and Oxbridge works completely differently from everywhere else).
Dating YOUR professor seems potentially problematic from a power dynamics standpoint. Dating “some other professor” really doesn’t.
That said I think if you mean actual “professors” there is likely a pretty wide age gap, which feels at least a little distasteful when one of the parties is barely legal.
You say Americanizing, but I think the degree to which e.g. workplace romance or dating your doctor is actually avoided in practice is fairly limited. At my big faceless corporation for example, intra office romance is fine as long as you aren’t in the same reporting chain (and this has as much to do with nepotism as it does with concerns about consent).
I didn't mean Americanising in dating, so much as in the relationship between students and their universities; in the US, it always seems much more paternalistic/pastoral than in the UK, where the relationship isn't really different to what you'd expect if you enrolled in a car repair course aged 40.
That makes more sense. I don’t have experience with UK universities to compare, but US ones do have some paternalistic instincts. Although it would be nice if they’d focus a little more of that paternalism on “make sure students they matriculate are actually academically and financially prepared to make college worth their time and money”.
I have the impression that doctors are not supposed to have sexual relationships with current patients according to professional ethics guidelines. Maybe dentists are different, I don’t know.
Also apparently at least some British universities apparently ban relationships between staff and students eg UCL.
The Gathering Place in Tulsa (funded by oil millionaire turned banking billionaire, but who's counting) is really quite amazing. Both Tulsa and Oklahoma City are doing impressive things in terms of family-oriented public infrastructure, even if they are still essentially giant sprawl exurb metropolitan areas. Purple cities in red states can be pretty nice places to live.
>New weird either-genius-or-crackpot anthropology blog (origin of pronouns, snake cult theory of everything). My heuristic is that as soon as someone uses the phrase “Basque-[Anything]” they’re beyond salvation, but this person is trying very hard!
Would point out it's only the second most radical take about snake mythology. The anthropologist Jeremy Narby was studying a tribe in the amazon, and he participated in their Ayahuasca ceremonies. Like them, snakes appeared to him. Then he notices that creation myths link snakes to knowledge across the world. Egypt, Jewish, Australian, Amazonian, Indian...why are there always snakes? He suggestion is that western science is wrong, and that there are mystical ways of knowing, somehow connected to snakes.
My take is that snake venom is itself a hallucinogen, maybe it was used as part of a self-domestication package when recursion / self-awareness was first emerging.
I have heard that human visual processing has "special code" to detect snake-like movement. (Also ripe fruit, and naked humans.)
They were probably a major threat back in the day, like big carnivores.
I recall reading (in the Atlantic, before the paywall) apparently most animals are afraid of the human voice. To steal from TV Tropes, in most of the natural world, humans are Cthulhu.
There really was a bear in Georgia that OD'd on cocaine, but the bear corpse in KY is not that bear, and their story of what happened to the real bear is a complete fabrication. The outfit displaying the supposed cocaine bear finally admitted as much.
https://www.savingcountrymusic.com/confirmed-cocaine-bear-at-ky-for-ky-origin-story-fictionalized/
I'm the anon commenter quoted in that article,, and I'd looked into the corpse-journey story a couple of years ago and found it was clearly BS (some parts didn't make sense, and I tracked down multiple people who could have verified parts of the story, and got "definitely didn't happen", "definitely not the bear", etc.)
Re the Tulsa thing, I am not sure how much he's correct in crediting Tulsa's transformation to Kaiser et al. Obvious disclaimer, I live in the other city in Oklahoma and am not super-familiar with Tulsa. But a lot of what he talks about (at least the non-Jewish parts) I'm seeing here in OKC, too, despite a lack of billionaires funding it (at least as far as I know). Which makes me suspect that structural factors (land is cheap, the government is pretty hands-off) and general demographic shifts are driving a lot of it. If you have people who want Culture, Culture will appear, and both OKC and Tulsa are big enough to have demand.
I'll definitely second the message that Oklahoma is a pretty nice place to be. My mortgage is about the same as my rent was in deep suburban LA for a place a third the size (and I had a really good deal there) and the government mostly leaves you alone. Gas is cheap, and it's safe. The only downside is the lack of battleships and that the local ACX community isn't that strong, but if you move, we can change that.
I can't help but read your last sentence as suggesting that with enough ACX commenters moving to OKC you could rustle up some battleships :D
As a member of the Feline-American Community, the reason we like earwax so much is the proteinaceous taste.
Boy, I’m glad you guys lack an opposable thumb.
Cerumen, your staff is broken.
Love it!
> Why are furries so artistically and economically influential compared to other fetishes?
I have a few theories:
First, unlike many other fetishes, the furry fetish can ONLY be satisfied by art. Into bondage? There's plenty of videos on PornHub. Into feet? The industrious editors of wikiFeet have you covered. But for furries, there is no photography, only art that has to be drawn, painted, or created digitally. Naturally, this results in the creation of a lot of art. A minority of furries are interested in photographs and videos of actual people having actual sex in fursuits, but they're definitely a small percentage (and even then, someone has to buy a fursuit from an artist who created it).
Second, the furry fandom is identity based. It's commonplace to have a "fursona" to represent yourself online (which is where furries spend all their time anyway). This creates a lot of demand for art, since people will want a visual for their furry avatar. In terms of porn, this makes it rather unique in that you can pay to have a representation of yourself in the pornography. I think it's pretty easy to see why that would appeal to people and lead to increased investment in furry fetish artwork relative to other fetishes.
Third, it's an internet-based culture. This leads to certain demographics associated with economic success. There's an overrepresentation of people in tech/IT. It's mostly male. When folks from other countries participate in English-speaking furry communities, you'll only be interacting with the people in those other countries who speak perfect English (a correlate of intelligence and economic success). And for what it's worth, the community is extremely autistic, something like 4x as likely to be autistic as the rest of the population (though I'm not sure what impact this has on their income).
Although...
I'm not actually sure if furries are that economically influential. It certainly seems that way based on the quantity of furry art, but is there actually data to support that idea? Sure, they appear to have a lot of money to burn on art, but furry art isn't always expensive. A lot of furry artists live in third world countries and make a living off doing commissions for people in first-world countries. Even if those commissions are only $10 USD, that can go a long way in a developing economy.
Plus, appearances could lead to a biased sample. I think a good analogy would be related to somebody hating gay people because they think they're all flamboyant and annoying. The issue here is that they don't notice the normal behavior of non-flamboyant gays because they don't realize non-flamboyant gays are gay at all. For furry art, we only see commissions from the wealthiest and most successful furries who can afford it. For every one of them, there might be 10 furries living in poverty.
Seems like a good question for someone like aella to answer via survey data.
Do you think there are good programming jobs at a non-profit in tulsa?
Have you read David Chapman's Better Without AI (https://betterwithout.ai/)? He thinks we don't need AI to accelerate progress (https://betterwithout.ai/radical-progress-without-AI), and even says that intelligence is not a real bottleneck in science (https://betterwithout.ai/intelligence-in-science), such that superintelligence may not result in superscience.
There are other possibilities here than AI salvation/destruction and collapse.
Chapman has this peculiar duality when he allows himself wild flights of fancy is his philosophical theories, but when it comes to science and intelligence he suddenly starts asking for perfect rigor or it doesn't count. He admits that we don't know exactly how science works and how AI works, which apparently means that we should dismiss certain intuitions about these topics (except for his).
I could buy that the state of academe is the main bottleneck on science but that won't limit an AGI (it might stop it getting published, but it wouldn't stop it *doing science* for its own purposes, and (if aligned) putting it all on arXiv)
item 21 link doesn't work.
The discussion on DSL is uh...
> The Roman Emperors thought Christians not performing the relevant sacrifices to the Gods were an externality, too.
Yeah, that's some real high-level discussion there. They've definitely got a grip on what externalities are and have good ideas on how to handle them. This definitely isn't just throwing out the laziest possible argument to avoid having to consider the possibility that you're having a negative effect on other people. I wonder if the response is the same to the externalities imposed by homeless people on the sidewalk or drug markets in public places.
That doesn't even seem false to me. Of course decreasing patriotism and social cohesion is an externality of personal religious choice.
I'm pretty sure the notion of an externality is nowhere near that old, so I doubt that Roman emperors had any such opinion. Even if they had some notion that was vaguely related, "this idea has been misused in the past" is not just a fully general counterargument against all externalities, it's a fully general argument against literally any idea!
Edit--also, it's not even clear to me that social cohesion is the relevant effect. It sounds to me like the reason this example was used because the emperors thought that gods actually existed and cared about sacrifices, to try to associate the concept of an externality with something that doesn't exist at all. Of course, this is complete nonsense--the externalities of cars clearly exist.
Isn't your counterargument is a fully generalized argument against ever noticing which ideas have good or bad effects in practice or history?
No, you can do that. You just have to put some actual effort in to making the argument rather than throwing out 1 example (a debatable one at that). No one seriously believes that it's impossible for one person to do something which inadvertently has negative effects on someone else. They may not call it "externality" but that's exactly what is being suggested when someone says they don't want an apartment building near them because of shade or congestion, or they don't want to take the train because there's a homeless person shouting obscenities on the platform, or they don't want to live in the same neighborhood as poor people.
Yes, I can. I am perfectly allowed to point out one glaring flaw in your argument. You are not owed my time and effort to debunk your entire worldview. You do not get to set the terms of the debate and demand everyone else adhere to them and dismiss them if they don't.
"Someone else once used a similar idea and it was bad" is not a "glaring flaw", it's about .01% of the way to an argument. You don't have to spend time and effort on anything if you don't want to, but a weak argument is still a weak argument. Making some irrelevant claim about "the terms of debate" won't change that fact.
I have no idea what you are arguing about here, except pedantry on the term “externality”.
The most important part is that "this concept was once misused" isn't really an argument against it.
Re 5 on professors dating students - I expect that most people are actually much more fine with that than most people affiliated with universities would be. I suspect the American poll results would be pretty much in line with the British ones. You can find plenty of examples of it happening in TV shows (here's a list that includes a lot of *high school* students dating teachers, as well as college students, not too many of which are portrayed very negatively: https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2017/08/168506/teacher-student-sexual-affairs-on-tv-shows - and it doesn't include cases like Jeff Winger dating his math professor in the first season of Community).
Meanwhile, within universities you have a lot of sentiment that is too far in the opposite direction. The Texas A&M University System (i.e., the thing controlled by the legislature that has authority over the College Station campus, as well as the others, so not the "woke" part, more the Republican part) a few years ago dropped a rule banning *all employees* from having "romantic, sexual, or amatory relationships" with undergraduate students, with only 24 hours notice to the campuses before the rule went into effect. Whoever wrote the rule realized they needed an exception for undergraduate student employees, but didn't understand that basically all graduate students count as "employees", and that the university is large enough that incoming grad students who are single are going to accidentally hook up with people from other parts of the university if they try to meet anyone in a forum other than carefully controlled online dating.
It is just more nonsense safetism and puritanism.
If you don't want to have sex with your professors, don't! It is that simple. I had a couple of close friendships with gay professors who desperately wanted to fuck me (I am straight as an arrow). One turned into a 25 year long friendship and we had/have hundreds of lunches/poker games etc. The only cost to me in that whole time was just shooting down a couple awkward passes every couple of years. Wow what a huge struggle, impossible to overcome. How will my psyche survive?
If you are worried about faculty manipulating or punishing students over romantic entanglements, make that the thing that is actually forbidden/tortable.
I do think it's a good thing, both for an individual and for their classmates, if it's clear that this sort of extracurricular activity between a current professor and a current student is off-limits - both so a student doesn't feel there *could* be some quid pro quo if they went along with something they weren't that into, and so that the classmates are clear that there isn't any quid pro quo that they are being shut out of. But I wouldn't endorse anything like the blanket policies that some institutions impose.
But they're not being shut out of it! You too can fuck your professor!
Re: the African birth rate decline: Scott’s gloss of it makes it sound like it’s consensus that Africa was terrifying everyone and pushing us towards overpop catastrophe.
This is the OPPOSITE narrative from what I’ve been hearing for the past several years in my circles: that overpopulation is mostly a eugenicist myth, that huge numbers of countries of developing countries are headed for UNDERpopulation crises, etc. So what gives?
Lots of other countries (especially East Asia, but also Europe) are on track for underpopulation crises, Africa was on track for an overpopulation crisis. You could theoretically solve both crises by redistributing Africans to Asia and Europe, but the Asians, Europeans, and Africans might have objections to that plan.
Regarding #37, article is paywalled but here is the nut of it:
"....few have noticed a wealth of new data that suggest that Africa’s birth rate is falling far more quickly than expected. Though plenty of growth is still baked in, this could have a huge impact on Africa’s total population by 2100. It could also provide a big boost to the continent’s economic development. “We have been underestimating what is happening in terms of fertility change in Africa,” says Jose Rimon II of Johns Hopkins University. “Africa will probably undergo the same kind of rapid changes as east Asia did.”
The UN’s population projections are widely seen as the most authoritative. Its latest report, published last year, contained considerably lower estimates for sub-Saharan Africa than those of a decade ago....
Yet even the UN’s latest projections may not be keeping pace with the rapid decline in fertility rates (the average number of children that women are expected to have) that some striking recent studies show. Most remarkable is Nigeria, where a UN-backed survey in 2021 found the fertility rate had fallen to 4.6 from 5.8 just five years earlier. This figure seems to be broadly confirmed by another survey, this time backed by USAID, America’s aid agency, which found a fertility rate of 4.8 in 2021, down from 6.1 in 2010. “Something is happening,” muses Argentina Matavel of the UN Population Fund.
If these findings are correct they would suggest that birth rates are falling at a similar pace to those in some parts of Asia, when that region saw its own population growth rates slow sharply in a process often known as a demographic transition.
A similar trend seems to be emerging in parts of the Sahel, which still has some of Africa’s highest fertility rates, and coastal west Africa. In Mali, for instance, the fertility rate fell from 6.3 to a still high 5.7 in six years. Senegal’s, at 3.9 in 2021, equates to one fewer baby per woman than little over a decade ago. So too in the Gambia, where the rate plunged from 5.6 in 2013 to 4.4 in 2020, and Ghana, where it fell from 4.2 to 3.8 in just three years....
Demographers are divided over how much to read into these recent surveys, particularly since the data they produce can be noisy. “When you see a precipitous decline in fertility, your starting-point is that something is wrong with the data,” says Tom Moultrie of the University of Cape Town....Yet even comparing only within iterations of the same survey (as The Economist has done with the figures above), the trend is evident. Comparing across them in the case of Niger, which has the world’s highest fertility rate but few surveys, shows a decline from 7.6 in 2012 to 6.2 in 2021.
Others are also reducing their projections. In 1972 the Club of Rome, a think-tank, published an influential book, “The Limits to Growth”, warning that consumption and population growth would lead to economic collapse. Now it says the population bomb may never go off: it reckons sub-Saharan Africa’s population may peak as soon as 2060, which is 40 years earlier than the UN’s projections.
Even so, fertility rates are not dipping uniformly. Some countries, including Angola, Cameroon and Congo, are seemingly stuck at relatively high rates. And there are often big regional differences within countries such as Kenya. Almost everywhere in Africa, fertility rates are much lower for urban women, who typically have 30-40% fewer children than those in the countryside....
Family planning, especially when promoted by outsiders, has often caught the ire of religious leaders. Yet in some places that may be changing. Clerics talk more often about family planning these days, notes Amina Mohammed, a devout mother on the outskirts of Kano. “There is no verse in the Holy Koran where Muslims are forbidden from controlling, planning or restricting the number of children they have,” says Shuaib Mukhtar Shuaib, one such cleric. The Prophet Muhammad tacitly approved of the withdrawal method, he continues. These days Idris Sulaiman Abubakar, a gynaecologist in Kano’s biggest public hospital, is more worried about the impact of Nigeria’s film industry on contraception than that of religion. “They’ll bring a story-line that the woman’s reproductive system was damaged because she uses pills,” he explains.
Girls’ education also makes a big difference to fertility rates. In Angola, for instance, women without any schooling have 7.8 children, whereas those with tertiary education have 2.3. Educated women have a better chance of a job, so the opportunity cost of staying at home to look after children is higher and they are more likely to win arguments with their husbands over how many kids to have.
Research by Endale Kebede, Anne Goujon and Wolfgang Lutz of the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital suggests that a stall in Africa’s demographic transition in the 2000s may have stemmed from the delayed effect of cuts in spending on education in the 1980s, when many African economies were in crisis. The rapid falls in fertility rates that now seem to be taking place could be because of the huge push to improve girls’ schooling in the past few decades....
"....the implications of continued or accelerated declines in fertility rates are enormous. For a start, Africa’s population—and therefore the world’s—would be considerably lower than most current projections. Take Nigeria. If the latest surveys are correct in finding that its fertility rate was 4.6 in 2021, this would suggest that it was already at a lower bound of the UN’s estimates and on a much lower fertility trajectory than the UN’s main forecast. Assuming Nigeria stays on the lower trajectory, then its population would get to about 342m people in 2060. That is some 90m people fewer than the UN’s current base estimate and some 200m fewer than it forecast ten years ago.
This is good news, though not, as some would have it, because Africa is overcrowded. In fact sub-Saharan Africa has an average of 48 people per square kilometre, which is far lower than Britain (277), Japan (346) or South Korea (531). Of sub-Saharan Africa’s five most populous countries, all are below Britain’s density. There is little evidence of whole African countries being stuck in a Malthusian trap, named after Thomas Malthus, who claimed population growth would outstrip food supply, leading to catastrophe. Trade and global food production, which is rising while the amount of land used for it is falling, means that neither sub-regions nor even countries need be self-sufficient provided their economies produce the wealth to buy it.
Nor is it because high population growth necessarily means economic growth per head is low. “It’s not very clear that we have the data to be able to say for sure that the population growth rate itself is bad or good,” says Anne Bakilana of the World Bank. Richer places have fewer children and higher savings rates. But teasing out the causality is tricky.
What is clearer is that the transition from high population growth to a lower one can bring a bevy of benefits. Women and children are both more likely to prosper as fertility rates fall. Fertility drops usually mean wider gaps between births and fewer teenage pregnancies: both help reduce risks to a mother’s health. And falling fertility rates mean there are more working-age adults relative to the number of children. With fewer mouths to feed at home, each child is more likely to get enough food, as well as books and uniforms for school. At the national level smaller cohorts could allow governments to spend more per child.
Falling fertility rates also excite economists because they boost both the working-age share of the population and the number of women in the workforce. More people working should boost prosperity. The faster fertility rates fall, the bigger the impact. A study in 2017 by Mahesh Karra and David Canning of Harvard University and Joshua Wilde of the University of South Florida estimates that lowering the fertility rate by one child per woman in Nigeria could almost double income per person by 2060. Yet for countries to reap a big dividend, those entering the job market need to be able to find productive jobs—a monumental challenge in a continent that must invest trillions of dollars in the infrastructure (such as roads, power lines and ports) needed to generate them."
Thanks, very helpful!
3:
> The plan, along with the Taiwan Strait Tunnel Project, has been widely mocked in Taiwan.
Everyone laughs at the Taiwan Strait Tunnel Project until a hole opens in the ground and a million Chinese soldiers jump out.
"Bugs, Mr. Rico! Zillions of 'em!"
The part I didn't get was why Scott said there were *2* obvious problems with the plan. De facto territorial borders are rather a major glaring flaw, yes, but what's the second one?
Lost it at "gibber".
I'm not sure what you're talking about - I don't think that word appears in this post.
It's one of the fictional states in that map.
Ah, that's where "gibberish" comes from.
Yes, an unfortunate stereotype about the good people of the state of Gibber.
Man that North Dakota one is frustrating. It's just maddening to have local political change rugpulled on you. Like when the Supreme Court ruled states weren't allowed to put term limits on their federal representatives.
Tulsa has a long* history of oil billionaires using their wealth to indulge their particular whims and create cool stuff (see: anything beginning with "Phil," The History of Science collection (now in Norman), etc.)
*relative to the existence of Tulsa.
Matty: "Crackdowns don't work."
Also Matty: "Tee Hee, look at me snitch this BMW owner to the police!"
I saw that, I know it technically doesn't impact the intellectual content of his opinions per se, but it really wasn't a good look. Something something Bayesian updating on his reliability.
I fail to see the connection. Highlighting the fact that DC police do not enforce the law regarding license plates doesn't seem to have much to do with saying that cracking down on violent gangs doesn't work. It is not hypocritical to want laws to be enforced and to be skeptical of the efficacy of crackdowns.
When someone selectively and performatively uses the law to punish People He Does Not Like, it is a sign that they regard the law as something which should be used to hurt Bad People (and therefore his definition of what working looks like). It also explains why the Stasi was so successful.
Who are the People He Does Not Like? Lawbreakers? I don't like criminals much either. Does wanting the laws to be enforced mean you want to hurt people? Laws, particularly regulations around motor vehicles, are meant to keep people from being hurt. You might as well say that someone who wants current gun control regulations to be enforced does so out of a desire to hurt people.
Go back to that selectively and performatively part. Because he sure isn't snitching on "lawbreakers" like prostitutes and drug users. And no, license plates have nothing to do with safety and everything to do with revenue.
License plates allow speeders, hit and runners, drive by shooters, etc, to be identified. We didn't mandate that every vehicle needs to be registered and display a license plate because the government needs more money, we did it because cars crash into things and run over people and there needs to be a way to identify whose responsible when that happens.
What evidence do you have that his highlighting of people who break the law regarding car licenses is "performative"? Typically that implies that he's doing it not for the reasons stated but for some other reason. What is that other reason? You previously mentioned it was punish People He Does Not Like, and I asked you who those people are. Why do you think he *really* tweets about people driving cars without a license plate, if its not merely that he believes that law should be enforced for the reasons he puts forward for why they should be enforced?
> Why do you think he *really* tweets about people driving cars without a license plate, if its not merely that he believes that law should be enforced for the reasons he puts forward for why they should be enforced?
At a guess, he wants to pick on people whose cars are nicer than his. Does he tweet about every shitty old Toyota he sees without a front plate, or just nice new BMWs?
"We didn't mandate that every vehicle needs to be registered and display a license plate because the government needs more money, we did it because cars crash into things and run over people and there needs to be a way to identify whose responsible when that happens."
We? Really?
And I can only assume you must be very young or never have moved from one state to another with a car if you believe it's not about money. Heck, NY will charge you the sales tax you "should" have paid if you bought your car in your previous state of residence prior to your move. If I get a speeding ticket in Montreal, it goes on my NY driving record because there is this little thing called "computer networks" that make it easy to identify my car regardless of where or if it was registered.
If you don't understand how tweeting out an action for your followers to see is performative then we will be unable to communicate on any kind of useful level.
"In the 80s and 90s, Tulsa experienced a decline. It got gross and dangerous. "
As someone who lived there (and was a stage electrician), this is completely wrong. You could run around downtown after midnight. It had a symphony orchestra, an amazingly good youth orchestra, a ballet company, and at least three theater companies.
Didn't basically every city experience a decline, relatively speaking, in the 80's and early 90's, becoming gross and dangerous?
Decline is relative, but gross isn't and to somehow consider Regan/Bush/Clinton era Tulsa as being "dangerous" when compared to Boston... RYFKM?
I particularly thought "Lizzo is coming to town!" as a selling point giggle-worthy, since every major pop/rock/country/Broadway touring company act had a show in Tulsa, I set some of them up.
Tulsa seems to often get bigger acts than OKC. Maybe it's easier to book the BOK Center than the Paycom Center because of NBA Games?
That explanation only works for as far back as when OKC stole the Thunder.
The Thunder have always been in Oklahoma City.
I was afraid the pun wouldn't work; guess that was valid.
No data, but my intuition is that the 70s was when things got fucked up. The 90s were the era of Giuliani turning Times Square from hooker central into a tourist hotspot using sweet, sweet brutality.
If you want to know what percent of Americans think college is worth the cost, you should just look at what percent of Americans go to college. Any delta between this and your poll results is cheap talk.
This doesn’t let you study what people <18 or who have already gone to college think though.
Also there is a confounder for polling purposes: many Americans have an exaggerated impression of how much college actually costs. The published sticker prices and average retail (actual) prices paid are a good bit lower than what people being polled will have read in media accounts about "the cost of college", because the media invariably banners the sticker prices not the actual prices paid.
For the 2020-21 school year the U.S. national averages (per the College Board) for one full school year were as follows. PSP is the sticker price, ARP is the average price actually paid. These average totals include room and board and fees in addition to tuition.
Public 2-year colleges: PSP $18,550, AVP $14,560
Public 4-year colleges, in-state students: PSP $26,820, ARP $19,490
Private 4-year colleges, PSP $54,880, ARP $33,220
That doesn't account for people who did go to college and end up regretting it. Or people who wanted to go to college but couldn't.
Not true. Plenty of people feel they have to go to college merely because that’s what gets them an entry level job, a job that needed a high school diploma a few decades ago. They can resent going to college and still go to college.
Right, they think its worth it because it lands them a job.
This is just the "Revealed Preferences" bullshit again, built on the 2 fallacies of assuming that actions are always reliable indicators of desire, and that an individual's desire is the only desire that matters when deciding their actions. Both are wrong.
There are cases in which actions are arguably not reliable indicators of desire (eg addiction), but I’m hardly convinced “doing a four year degree” is an example of this. If someone bothers to to go to university, presumably they think it is “worth the cost” in some meaningful sense. Maybe it’s worthwhile in instrumental rather than intrinsic terms, and maybe this is only due to mafiaesque capture of the hiring pipeline. But if that’s what you’re interested in, ask questions about that. By contrast, if you want to know what people think the value of X is, sale prices are better data points than survey questions.
What most interested me about #6 was actually the magnitude of income's effect on happiness, rather than the non-linearities in the most + least happy groups:
> KD reported that the effect of an approximately fourfold difference in income is about equal to the effect of being a caregiver, twice as large as the effect of being married, about equal to the effect of a weekend, and less than a third as large as the effect of a headache.
Interesting to put this into perspective - I wish this had been emphasized! It was buried in a single paragraph in the middle of the paper.
That is fascinating! thanks for sharing! Surprised being married is half being a parent (which I assume is most of the "caregiver" category?), but I guess the not-married category includes plenty of people in relationships that haven't married yet, not only single people.
#20: "In fact, I’ve updated so far that I’m starting to worry that the problem won’t be building a political coalition against unsafe AI, the problem will be not overshooting and banning all AI forever. " Wow, that seems really implausible to me. Here's why: (1) Government has done very little so far to regulate the big tech companies, even when they are doing things that are harmful in a ways that are much more immediate and easy to understand than Foom -- for example, providing powerful vehicles for spreading misinformation. Why would AI change that? (2) There are enormous amounts of money to be made from AI. That will motivate the makers, and also the many many industries that can benefit from it, to support its continued development. (3) The main danger is hard to understand. I am smart, well-educated and have spent a lot of time reading about and discussing AI risks, and I still feel unable to judge how great a risk it poses to humanity. (4) My impression is that most of the public's not a bit concerned. Even most of my professional friends sort of chuckle when the subject comes up, as though it's an urban myth like that killer bees are about to invade.
I can think of 2 things that might nudge the US in the directing of reining in AI development: One would be some well-publicized bad events resulting from widespread use of GPT4: Cybercrime greatly increases; or a bunch of business go under because they give AI too much responsibility and it makes a big mistake; or some AI use in the financial industry causes alarming events in the stock market. The other is the reaction of groups of professionals whose jobs are shinking because AI can do so much of them. Recently saw a study of accuracy of AI and radiologists at making a yes/no judgment from a medical imaging result relating to a certain pulmonary problem. It was a problem where after a few days you knew for sure whether correct answer was yes or no. Radiologists alone were about 80% accurate, AI alone was about 84%. If the images AI was unsure of were passed to the radiologist, combined accuracy of AI plus radiologist was about 86%. Seems likely to me that training AI a bit more on the difficult-to-judge cases will result in AI alone being the most accurate way to handle ALL the images. Of course there will still be things for the radiologist to do -- but a LOT fewer of them. Seems like GPT4 & similar, unlike other advances, is going to be taking away the jobs of some upper middle class professionals.
But still I doubt that even the 2 things above that might make the public more afraid of AI and more resentful of it are enough to overcome the very powerful forces that nudge events in the direction of continued AI development.
Apparently the Fargo/approval voting thing has resolved positively! https://www.kvrr.com/2023/04/19/fargos-approval-voting-system-lives-on-after-state-senate-fails-to-override-veto/
(8) has been a fun story to watch unfold from the inside - for a lot of physicists in condensed matter room temperature superconductivity is the ultimate holy grail and absolutely nothing gets them wound up more than a good old fashioned USO (Unidentified Superconducting Object). These happen occasionally but the fact that this one actually got published in Nature makes it totally unique - they are going to get a huge black eye at the end of this debacle.
This has basically devolved into the physics version of a slapfight between Dias and Hirsch, conducted in the traditional way via weekly combative back-and-forth rants very thinly disguised as arxiv papers (see: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.00190).
https://transformer-circuits.pub/2022/in-context-learning-and-induction-heads/index.html
Referencing an earlier comment from the hidden thread but I knew someone had to be doing this! Don’t understand how this doesn’t solve almost the whole thing.
Why are there so few pairs of extremely successful identical twins?
Because they are very rare. One every 300 or so.
#6 matches something that I've been thinking for a while. Money doesn't buy happiness if you're a baseline miserable person, but it does if you're a baseline-happy person.
As a baseline-happy person, I tend to be content unless I've got some particular reason to be miserable. As I've increased my wealth, I've managed to use money to remove many of those reasons to be miserable. I used to be too hot in the summer, now I have air conditioning. I used to sleep less comfortably on a cheap mattress, now I sleep very comfortably on a fancy mattress. I used to be miserable doing housework (or miserable living in a filthy house), now I pay someone to do it for me. There are still some other miseries that I'm not rich enough to solve, like flying economy class or needing to go to work, but with more money I could solve those too and be even happier.
Scott should read stratechery. Yglesias' article on the media is a pale imitation of work Ben Thompson has been doing much better for years.
Regarding right wing populists: It's because they usually advocate some degree of "law and order." Everyone wants to have law and order, no one wants to do it. High effort, high resistance.
It's like people voting to clean their room, and then support dropping when it's time to actually clean their room.
(28)
>keep it a good place to live while the rest of the Midwest hollows out
I beg your pardon? First of all, Oklahoma isn't centrally Midwestern. Neither is rust-belt Ohio or barren Wyoming. The states in between have plenty of nice healthy towns and cities (sure the rural population is declining, but that happens everywhere) that are great places to live if you can handle a little snow. We like our rich farmlands and tight-knit communities; California can't have them.
(Yes, I'm still salty about the Wall Drug bit in Unsong literalizing "flyover states"; why do you ask?)
Yeah Tulsa is both not midwestern, and not in the top ten of interesting/nice midwestern cities to live even if it was.
100% would take most midwestern cities over the Bay Area.
Midwestern _large_ cities, I agree.
But in fairness it is true that our (I'm a lifelong Midwesterner) small/medium cities are a special kind of dismal these days. Decatur Illinois and Battle Creek Michigan, those sorts of cities, probably a couple dozen of them across the Midwest. I'm old enough to remember when those were much livelier/healthier places than they are now.
For sure. Though some like Duluth, Bloomington, and Madison are doing ok.
#2 : I have a hypothesis that numbered lists is just a good propaganda/educational tool from a purely memetic point of view. I don't have evidence, it's just a plausible just-so story that came to me when I thought about the question deeply.
As a starting point, I note that modern clickbait journalism and buzzfeed-style content mills have always loved the numbered list, "7 REASONS TO <insert random thing>, NUMBER <insert number between 1 and 7> WILL SHOCK YOU". Communism was also famous for its 5 year plans and 4 things that need to abolished and things like that. Judaism has the Ten Commandments, Islam has (off the top of my head, and translated non-professionally from Arabic) the Five Pillars of Islam, the Ten Companions of The Prophet Foretold To Enter Heaven, the Seven People Who Will Enjoy Allah's Shade On Judgment Day, etc.... Martin Luther upended Europe and Christianity with a 95-point list.
What are the common factors of clickbait journalism, Judaism, Islam, Communism, and East Asian philosophy ? I can find nothing except that they were all ideologies or families of ideologies that needed to indoctrinate, to preach, to capture attention and hold it. Indoctrination and propaganda are not necessarily bad things, some forms of education are and should be indoctrination, and lots of good Art is propaganda. Indoctrination and propaganda are just general purpose tools to capture attention and convince people, they are understandably favorite tools for ideologies like Islam, but they are neutral tools nonetheless.
Anyway, can we find reasons why numbered lists are a good indoctrination and propaganda tool ? Here are the 7 reasons why numbered lists are a good linguistic tool :
(1) The number serves as a simple checksum against data corruption or forgetfulness. You might forget how many The Pillars of Islam were or mis-remember the number to be 3 or 4 or 7, but you can never (or very rarely) make that mistake with The Five Pillars of Islam.
(2) The number serves as an attention grabber that builds tension and invites a listener or a reader to continue paying attention to get to the final thing. A classic template for a joke is "3 Xs are Y", where X is any general category and Y is any activity or action. Stories has evolved numbered chapters, television shows has numbered episodes nested inside numbered seasons, and movie series has numbers on every movie. Media players has a timer countdown to tell you how many hours and minutes and seconds remain. Etc..., Numbers are a "Progress Bar" service that tells you how much of the thing remains, and this is valuable from an attention regulation point of view. It's a simpe musical rhythm that starts at 1 and gradually builds up to climax.
(3) Lists are a good info organization structure in general, striking a sweet spot between free-form text on the one hand and elaborate diagrams or other overly-structured complex data structures on the other. Lists are how lots of writers outline essays, speeches, stories, screenplays, etc...[1]. When Dan Bricklin, the inventor of spreadsheet software, was thinking about a way to reference variables, he striked upon the grid system (i.e. a numbered, lettered, 2D list) as a way of organizing and storing the values in a spreadsheet[2]. Arguments in Logic and Analytical philosophy are written as numbered lists of premises and conclusions. High-level overviews of algorithms and code in Computer Science and Software Engineering are often written as ordered lists of steps. Laws and Constitutions are written as lists. The oldest surviving writings are lists of financial transactions. TODO lists.
(4) Numbered lists invite sorting along some natural or important axis. For example, the Pillars of Islam is sorted according to difficulty. First you simply have to profess that there is no God but Allah, just say a single phrase with your mouth. Then you have to pray 5 times a day, slightly harder but still within the realm of easy. Next you have to donate 2.5% of your money yearly, now we're talking money, but still a relatively small amount. Next you have to fast in Ramadan, spending anywhere betwen 12 and 16 hours without food or water or sex, for 30 days. It's hard, especially in the summer, especially in the near-equator regions that Islam is the main religion in. Finally, you have to go to mecca to perform the Haij, an ancient Arabic religious practice that Islam kept. The Haij is so difficult that it's optional, you can be a Muslim whose health or finances don't allow you to perform the Haij.
Other lists may sort according to importance or historical recency or any other topic-specific notion, numbered lists allow and suggest that to you by their very nature.
(5) The number can invite comparisons, metaphors, imagery and analogies, whether justified or not. Humans have built a lot of culture and mythology around numbers, and plenty of important things in our biology and in nature in general has distinct numbers. Two eyes, Two hands, Five fingers per Hand, Ten fingers in total per pair of limbs. 7 as a holy number, 13 as a lucky (or unlucky) number. Addition to mean conjunction or unity (e.g. "A man and a woman, 2 people unite in love to be 1"). Etc... If your numbered list can invoke a number with already a rich cultural imagery or history, it can be more effective and memorable. One such cultural imagery is the concept of the numbered list itself : you can piggyback off a more popular and established numbered list to get your numbered list to the audience quicker and more effectively. For example, if I name my list The Three Laws of X, Newton's and Asimov's (both Issacs, coincidence ?) immediately come to mind, boosting the attention my audience give me, even if its mocking or hostile (e.g. "Who this guy thinks himself to be ?").
(6) The list serves as a FAQ that followers of the ideology can always refer new comers or hostile opponents to in order to know the ideology better or to correct misconceptions or reiterate the ideology's core values.
(7) Lists are flexible, each point has a variable scope so you can always shorten or lengthen the list as you please by selectively splitting or fine-graining points and conslidating them. This point itself is such an example, I thought of it purely to get the list's length to 7.
tldr; numbered lists are a natural tool for storytelling and oration, they have plenty of educational and memetic advantages and disparate ideologies and propagandists have gravitated to them independently.
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZtMsyMP5F7zzP8Gvc/reader-generated-essays
[2] http://www.bricklin.com/history/saiidea.htm
re 35: Eddie Pepitone at 29:35
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ik-skhmSFLI
"I was listening to Stalin on, uh, Spotify, on the way over here...
And I'm talking about I listen to early Stalin. Not the later shit when he sold out. Early Stalin, when he was paranoid and he had the military behind him. Not when he started talking about wheat!"
LOL....he delivers that well.
"_early_ Stalin!!" is a line that will stick in my brain for while.
And you can see him almost "break" (crack up) while delivering it.
29. The paper starts the clock on counting scientists in 1450. But what about before then? Before Francis Bacon was Roger Bacon. During the Renaissance there were lots of scientists in Italy, and then they went away. But were there many before the Renaissance? I don't know. Maybe it was just a return to normal.
Re: 5 I think what's going on is that the people most likely to talk about professor student dating are likely doing so either because:
1) They are in academia themselves in which case they have an incentive to signal that they totally aren't creepily into dating their students (and a lesser but still powerful signally concern for female academics).
2) Because it's an issue of concern for them. Few people who are just 'shrug it's not a big deal' are going to be very animated about it.
Overall this seems like an issue which suffers from a strong bias to overreport only one direction of concern. And that's bad because I think we are making things worse by imposing such strict rules for professor-student and, especially, TA-student dating.
Let's be honest, there is a great deal of temptation for this to happen. There are women who find that relationship sexy and men who are tempted to date younger women. So let's play out how this happens under a regime that says we fire professors who date their students and one that just requires reporting or class switches or mild punishment.
The student who dates under rule that says it's fine just give notice won't feel pressure not to ask to be transferred to a different class, advisor or even just to seek advice from someone else. OTOH, a relationship under the firing rule will necessarily start with the professor explaining that it's critical it be kept secret, that they'll lose their job if anyone ever finds out. That's going to make the student feel very reluctant to reach out (especially because they probably still have some feelings for the prof and just want get out of the situation not get them fired) for any help and absent that will have no way to extract themselves from the situation. And abusive relationships tend to make the victim doubt themselves. They, no matter how wrongly, may feel guilty for inducing the professor to put their career on the line.
Yes, you'll deter some professor student relationships from happening at all. However, that deterrence will be concentrated primarily among those who are best adjusted/most rule following and thus least likely to use psychological pressure, threats etc.. to manipulate a student. So the end result is you've probably denied some people a fun time and created a really awful trap for the most vulnerable students for the worst abusers of power to use against them.
Sounds like a typical regulation then, making things worse for everyone, especially the people it purports to be helping
The AI Risk phenomenon is a great example of why humanity will probably never implement most of the transformative technologies people have been theorizing about for centuries, if not millennia (i.e., nuclear energy - both fission and fusion, genetic engineering, gene therapy for common diseases, stem-cell therapy, space travel, etc.). Instead of working finding ways to properly integrate a new, transformative technology in ways that benefits our society, we consistently choose to regulate it either to death or near-death. Think about the number of problems that exist today because we have such low risk-tolerance and fail to organize enough cognitive capital to create ways to integrate these technologies in a sustainable way and make sure errors do not lead to a public outcry and subsequent bans.
As our world develops its communication technologies, any negative effect of a potential new technology will immediately be known to most of the world and will most likely be regulated to death, near-death, complete-uselessness, or near-uselessness.
Part of the problem is new tech is always on some pathway to worldwide use with time. Almost everyone will be using it given a reasonable amount of time. This propagates problems that otherwise would have been contained and effects which would be minimal. Part of the way to mitigate risk is to make sure the tech is only used in a constrained space where leakage is very low.
On BJJ and the related question of traditional martial arts vs. MMA, the explanation is simply that traditional martial arts have become stylized to fuck as it's become less acceptable *and* less needful to straight up murder a guy without using firearms. You can find video clips of traditional martial artists smashing someone's face in; they'll just look remarkably like e.g. a boxer or MMA fighter doing it. A fifty-year-old guy doing some feckless wavy-hands Tai Chi has just been wasting his time on ineffective martial arts because there was no pressure to be effective and he was probably too genteel to want to pay the cost of being effective in the first place.
23. Didn't Trumpism prevail on the anti-international trade issue? Biden signed that huge bipartisan bill with a lot of "America First" items on it. I doubt we would be here on this issue were it not for Trump making it hugely popular.
You could say that world events, not Trump, helped prod this attitude along. But I think it's hard to make the case that the USA is penalizing trade with England, Germany and France because of Russia, Covid or China.
In regards to El Salvador and "tough on crime policies" in general, I think a point that gets overlooked is that a lot of "tough on crime" rhetoric combines two policies that are often treated as a package deal, but in principle can be separated. These are:
1. Increasing the likelihood that a criminal will actually be arrested and punished.
2. Increasing the severity of their punishment.
"Tough on crime" policies like the one in El Salvador often do both at once. However, a lot of psychological research indicates that 1 is the policy that does most of the work. 2 isn't actually that effective. Criminals care much more about the odds of getting caught than what exactly happens if they are.
It seems to me that this might allow some kind of effective compromise between tough on crime activists and human rights activists. Give the human rights activists lighter sentences, nicer prisons, and more serious efforts at rehabilitation. Give tough on crime activists can get more cops on the street and more arrests.
“However, a lot of psychological research indicates that 1 is the policy that does most of the work. 2 isn't actually that effective.”
That's entirely accurate if you change the statement "2 isn't that effective" by adding "it isn't that effective at deterring people from committing crimes who are not in prison." I agree that increasing sentence length and such doesn't have a significant impact in that regard.
However, what you seem to overlook is that increasing sentence length and other similar measures can be extremely effective at preventing individuals who have already committed crimes and are currently in prison from committing further crimes. For example, on average, a murderer has 21 (!!!) prior convictions.
Swedish registry studies indicate that approximately 70-80% of violent crimes are committed by just 1% of individuals. This is supported by a recent New York Times article discussing shoplifting, which found that 350 individuals were responsible for the majority of incidents in a city of 10 million. By keeping these few individuals behind bars for longer or implementing stricter policies, such as three-strike rules, crime rates can be significantly reduced. This is not achieved through deterrence, as you correctly pointed out, but rather by the impossibility of incarcerated individuals committing further crimes.
I also wholeheartedly support the concept of comfortable prisons with amenities like libraries, TVs, and pleasant living spaces, as long as are to escape from.
"Daniel Kahneman and Matthew Killingsworth"
The thesis-antithesis-synthesis process really does work a fair amount of the time.
I do it on Twitter a lot: I say X, somebody responds with "What about Y?", I'm stumped for awhile because Y is true, and then figure out Z would account for both X and Y being true some of the time.
30. Your answer is government-sponsored media with a compulsory tax payment that everyone pays (like the BBC).
I think the "do less AI" movement is pretty doomed. To me, it feels analogous to degrowth arguments related to climate change. The incentives are just overwhelming in the other direction, and trying to regulate against those incentives is just going to cause unintended consequences. You'll just end up with shadier AI researchers making more progress relative to those that care about safety, at the margin.
Again analogizing to climate change and how solar, batteries, nuclear and so on are apparently the best solutions to the problem, I think more positive technological progress in both AI alignment, in tracking safety risks like bioweapons, and in progress on rapidly rolling out vaccines and whatnot should be what we emphasize. I'm glad that more of these concrete proposals are coming out along with the ultimately not very useful ones like the 6 month pause and the EY Time article.
I also think we need a ground-up rework of the concept of AI alignment. I'm not even necessarily aligned with myself from 8 hours ago, so how are we going to align a nebulous concept of AGI with a nebulous concept of humanity? In my opinion, a 21st century version of Asimov's laws seems more promising: for instance, do no more than acceptable harm X (e.g., hurting someone's feelings by disagreeing with them) as a fundamental AI rule.
On "21 - College no longer worth the cost" - it's just... If you keep rising the cost and the real margin of benefit against something that you can learn yourself lessen in all possible metrics - what exactly were the expectations here? Real "surprised Pikachu face" moment.
Pretty sure if the question was about "is going to college beneficial" - the results would've been different. But is it beneficial ENOUGH to also go into the personal bankruptcy for years? No, it isn't.
Okay, it's a bobcat not a Lynx but it's an interesting 2 minutes of safely removing a wild cat from behind a car grill.
https://bringmethenews.com/minnesota-lifestyle/watch-bobcat-pulled-out-from-car-in-wisconsin-by-officers
LOL, that's a fun video clip.
(And actually it is a lynx, because bobcats are one of the four species within the wild cat genus Lynx. The critter for which our common name is "bobcat" is the species Lynx rufus i.e. "red lynx".)
Regarding the linguistics article and the mysterious prevalence of 1s pronouns based on the phoneme /n/, I don't have time or energy to properly read the full article or to give a very carefully thought-out response. But throughout a couple of decades of being an amateur comparitive linguistics enthusiast I've always been extremely skeptical of hypotheses proposing language proto-families, and, while I appreciate how well the article thinks through multiple sides of each question it treats, quite a few things in it subtly triggered my crackpottery radar even apart from its speculations about the dawn of self-awareness and snake mythology and so on.
For one thing, while I don't have time to actually check through the hypothetical roots for 1s pronouns among the ancestors dozens of language families, from the few I do know about I'm immediately suspicious that the author (and linguists he cites) might be cherry-picking certain roots and certain debated forms of roots. For instance, Austronesian (okay, mainly the Malayo-Polynesian branch) is one of the few language families where I am familiar with a few roots and knew that the 1s pronouns come from a pretty clear *aku root, no nasal consonants involved. I just checked this on Wiktionary, and not only does it back me up on this, I don't think it lists any 1s pronouns in the living daughter languages with /n/ in them. So why does this article list *’a(ŋ)kƏn as the root and count it among the evident roots based on /n/? It looks like this alternate proposed root has only possibly a nasal before the /k/ and that it ends in /n/, but (and this may be just an amateur assumption) the fact that a two-syllable root ends nasally seems like very weak evidence of it being related to another proto-language's root which begins with or is based mainly on /n/. It also goes to illustrate one of the main reasons (I'm sure) why linguists typically don't like to give much credence to proto-family hypotheses: the exact roots of the proto-language are already very hypothetical and up to much debate (in this case, apparently someone thinks that the 1s pronoun root in proto-Austronesian may have been *’a(ŋ)kƏn rather than *aku; that seems to reflect at best some disagreement among similarly qualified experts!).
Relatedly, a language family may have more than one root for a pronoun for a particular person/number combination. Indo-European is a good example of this: one of the roots is *me, and this is the one that the author lists under the proto-pronouns that don't involve /n/ (but then uses this list to point out that a bunch involve /m/ and that /m/ is not far from /n/). But the other root, from which Latin and Greek ego, Germanic ich/ik/ek/jeg/etc. and English I are derived, is something like *éǵh; this is highly contested, and in fact some common form (like *éǵhóm) evolving into both *éǵh and *me seems to also have been proposed, but I think we can agree that at first blush, *éǵh appears to have no similarity to *me. (And the author even points out how our pronoun I doesn't reflect a root involving /n/, now choosing to ignore our object form me which does have a nasal that he's pointed out is not so far from /n/!) So, how many of the 1s pronoun roots listed may have existed alongside other unrelated-looking 1s pronoun roots? Once you acknowledge that a proto-language may have distinct, unrelated-looking roots for a particular person/number pronoun (and why shouldn't they? many modern languages do!), the waters have already been muddied quite a lot.
I also don't know what to make of all the discussion in the article about time scales and how slowly over centuries and millennia pronoun roots may have evolved compared to other types of roots, and what this might mean in terms of evidence of anything. Are the reconstructed roots listed even proposed to have been in use during the same millennia? This may be a case of my not having read the article carefully enough.
I notice that the author mentioned in one place the near-universality of certain consonants in roots for some kinship terms most likely arising from the sounds babies make first and mentioned in another place how pronouns may arise from kinship terms. (In fact, this is a huge phenomenon visible in the present: in many East Asian languages there is a blurring between pronouns and kinship terms.) So why not propose as a possible explanation for the prevalence of /n/ (and other nasals) in 1s pronoun roots that in prehistoric times they may have often arisen from parental kinship terms which in turn almost certainly were influenced by consonants prevalent in baby sounds? Think of the obvious origins of "mama" and then think of mothers talking to their babies who refer to themselves as "Mama" in place of using a 1s pronoun. It doesn't seem like an unreasonable hypothesis to me.
I hope this parent comment might inspire some people who are more knowledgeable and have more time for research (or more research behind them) to chime in and do a little picking apart of the article.
Yeah, that's absolutely true. Although the examples you gave included borrowing from closely related languages (I think the Old English 3p pronoun was hi, not also he, but still it was probably disfavored because of being easy to confuse with the 3s masculine pronoun he), but amazingly this can happen between completely unrelated languages in the same region. I think this is conjectured to have been the origin of Piraha's very few personal pronouns to suggest that at one time Piraha had no personal pronouns at all, although as with every conjecture relating to Piraha you have to take this with a grain of salt.
Existing pronouns in a single language can also switch from occupying one position on the standard arrays of pronouns to another. The 1p object pronoun in Italian is ci, but this is a relatively recent replacement of the expected pronoun based on n- (Latin/Spanish/Portuguese nos); while the etymology of ci is not entirely clear, it seems to have been a locative pronoun ("there") before spreading out to occupy the 1p obj. personal pronoun role while continuing to mean "there" in certain contexts. Also, I've seen it hypothesized that the Indo-European root *wey* from which our 1p pronoun we is descended originally had a 1p inclusive meaning ("you and I") and evolved into the 2p pronoun in some branches like Italic (Latin vos), although Wiktionary seems to disagree. The point is, all of these are things that can occur and have been proved to occur in certain cases.
Yikes, I mean I knew there was an insane number of variants for the 3p singular feminine pronoun "she" at some point in the Middle English period, but it looks like *all* (at least animate) 3p pronouns were a mess.
re Newspapers. US has just two parties, and is huge. so you can earn easily from polarised columns. any country with a multi party system will have more camps, so harder to capitalize.
the UK has badly two parties. papers are partly having a political identity. I think lots of entertainment is involved. do has durability maybe with the internet. in the UK the political commentary is part comedy IMHO
Appropos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGscoaUWW2M
"That’s it, I’m cancelling my planned vacation in North Dakota and will not be buying any of their products." #MeToo
On meditation-
I've meditated off and on for a bunch of years. I do think it makes you more calm, makes attention more controllable, etc, etc-that's all fine. My problem with meditation is something in my head I call the doormat problem: the more I meditated, the calmer I became, and there were a bunch of things I didn't solve which I would have otherwise solved if I had the adequate emotional impetus pushing me along. For instance, for anger/sadness, I'd just sort of meditate it away, which is not great.
In general, it felt like I was turning down the volume control knob on my emotions as a whole, which is not very pleasing to me, even if it gives me reduced despair/sadness/anxiety. YYMV, etc.
Yeah, when I was meditating regularly, I found that it altered some kludgy internal dynamics. I had been using intense emotion to motivate myself to do certain things, and I found it harder to do those things when I lowered the intensity of the emotions.
It's like someone who arrives places on time because they have an intense fear of being late. If the fear goes away (a change for the good), they may start being late to things more often (a change for the bad), because they never built up more healthy ways of being punctual. But then, sometimes it's more important to be somewhere on time, than it is to be calm and collected about it.
> 24: 200 Concrete Problems In AI Interpretability. “You can note which you're working on, and reach out to other people doing the same.”
Thanks for signal boosting my sequence! This is a link to the spreadsheet to track which problems you're working on, you can also see the actual sequence (with the problems, resources + tips, and a bunch more context) here https://www.alignmentforum.org/s/yivyHaCAmMJ3CqSyj/p/LbrPTJ4fmABEdEnLf
Good work here. Deserves more attention!
In answer to the question of whether it should feel okay for some position of privilege to be offered to "Jews only", I think the question you need to ask yourself is whether you'd be okay with someone else offering a similar set of benefits but advertising it as "No Jews".
If you're okay with this then I admire your consistency. If you're not then you should reconsider being okay with the first one.
But if you are okay with people spending money on themselves, leaving it to their families or descendants, or donating it to their alma mater -- it seems clearly inconsistent to forbid spending on members of their religious group.
I mean that sounds like an all-purpose pro-racism (etc) argument; it's intellectually consistent but I'm not sure it'll make the world a better place.
The point is merely that a line must be drawn somewhere. Complete consistency is not sensible. It's inconsistent to allow Jews Only but not No Jews, and it's similarly inconsistent to allow For My Alma Mater but not For My Religion. Given that, your argument falls flat, because there's nothing particularly wrong with drawing the line between Jews Only and Non Jews Only...merely the inevitable inconsistentcy that comes with drawing a line at all.
I'm always impressed with the large set of interesting links you are able to come up with.
29. Anything regarding Christian history is massively impacted by the belief status of the writer, particularly if they are Protestant, Catholic, or lately, secular. The writer’s institution is very relevant. The reason why you’ve heard so much from pro-Catholic side lately is because the internet has made it a lot easier to publicize and/or come across those opinions. English language liberal arts academia was an exclusively Protestant affair for a very long time.