Year-round Daylight Savings Time was a late 1973 response by Congress to the Energy Crisis. I recall Time Magazine editorializing in 1973 that it was completely obvious we needed year-round DST. But it was miserable in January 1974 and was repealed later that year. In later 1974, Time editorialized that it was an obviously idiotic thing to do. (My faith in the media has never recovered.)
Lots of people today have strong opinions about DST. Interestingly, it's one of the last non-partisan and non-regional issues. Last I checked a few years ago, the leading Senate proponents of getting rid of clock changes are a Republican senator from Florida and a Democratic senator from Washington. It's reminiscent of postwar politics, in which Senators took pride in their idiosyncratic stances on some issues. I suppose if Donald Trump ever took a stand on clock-changing, then everybody would line up pro or con him, but I don't think that has happened yet.
I believe the season for Daylight Savings Time was extended twice from its original 6 months. One reason you hear mostly bad opinions of the current system is that the advocates of clock changing have pretty much achieved their maximum agenda, with DST now running from early March to early November, which is about the maximum that would be reasonable. You used to hear some people say, "We need to get rid of DST" while others said "We need more DST." But now people who like changing clocks have won all their wishes, so they aren't an organized pressure group anymore, so they now might lose.
If we really want to get rid of clock-changing, we should probably go to 30 minutes of DST year-round. Unfortunately, that would put us off-sync with most major countries, although some big countries like India are not on the hour.
>if I’m understanding this right, the crowd compares two LLMs, rates which one is better, and then they use an equivalent of chess’ Elo system to give each of them a score.
Right. It's also blind—you don't know which model produced which output until after you vote.
I mean, who knows how useful this is as a way of measuring AI capabilities. A model winning a blind A/B test doesn't prove it's smarter or safer or anything we actually care about—surely this also selects for models that flatter the user by sycophantically agreeing with them, for example.
It also penalizes AIs that say "I don't know" vs AIs that write elaborate, convincing hallucinations. Not good—when an AI fails, we want that failure to be as obvious as possible.
But these sorts of leaderboards do capture some of the picture missing from standard benchmarks. There's an incredible difference between Gemini Ultra's reported benchmark scores and the experience of using Gemini Ultra in practice. (I mean that in a bad way.)
> the LinkedIn types, the school-renamers and statue-puller-downers, the e/accs, the r/fuckcars posters, the street-blocking-protest-havers, the people who want to ban everything except crime, the people who think there need to be five nightclubs per city block, Aaron Peskin
Damn, that's some outgroup homogenization you've got going on there...
> My guess is that learning Aristotle and Dante doesn’t necessarily directly make you a better person - but that interacting with the sort of teachers/kids/parents who would go to these schools, and being exposed to the sorts of rules/norms/teaching methods these schools would enforce, does make you a better person ...
The rules/norms/teaching methods, as conceived by the classical educators, include the belief that content is not entirely arbitrary. It seems likely that if the rules/norms/teaching methods are effective, then their content preferences are at least somewhat good and correlated with effectiveness. So I doubt the strong decoupling implied by your statement is correct.
24. That just sounds like the Texas sharpshooter, declaring whatever was hit to be the target all along. I think it would be more honest to adopt the "In a good cause, there are no failures" position. It would be cope, of course, but less shameful than pretending your humiliating defeat is a rare species of victory.
Regarding the alt right guy, all I can say is I don't get how someone can keep talking about the "JQ" and refer to the mass shooter in Charlestown as a "lunatic". I mean, he's doing what you're too much of a coward to do, right?
Re: #2 yes, there's also a pretty strong consensus among scientists and physicians who study sleep and circadian rhythms that DST is trash. We should just do permanent standard time.
I'm in SF right now its great. By temperament (let freedom ring) I am inclined to be incredibly YIMBY. But Scott's arguments over the years have more or less convinced me that, sans truly insane amounts of building, more housing wont lower local rent. SF is great. So maybe it makes sense to preserve it?
I quickly did a quick Ctrl+F of "Gamergate" on the Alt-Right post, thinking it'd be a quick way to suss out if he really knew what he was talking about and this quote is absolutely hilarious.
>The Gamergate movement of 2014 had spawned a series of Disney parodies called “/v/ the musical”, which were basically Walt Bismarck videos but about how video games shouldn’t have lesbians or fat women in them. I saw that this format had a ton of potential but was being criminally underutilized, so I stole the idea and made parodies about white nationalism instead. I was Elvis and Gamergate was black people.
It's appropriate considering that Gamergate faded into obscurity mostly because the Alt-Right and the Q conspiracies stole it's thunder and even took over their site.
Anyways, that musical was really fun and while it's mostly in-jokes of decade old gamer culture, There's a couple songs I recommend as a curious glimpse into the community that first conceptualized the at the time still nascent "twitter SJW" movement.
2) In my circles it’s conventional wisdom that everyone wants to end daylight savings time changes, but the government is too sclerotic to make it happen.
In general people don’t like the clock change, despite it being much easier these days as it’s mostly automatic; but we are an unhardy generation. However there’s no consensus on whether to choose permanent summer time or winter time.
It’s grim up north but DST makes sense in Northern Europe. Moving sunrise at 3:30am to an hour later gaining a day that’s only fully dark by 10 pm is clearly beneficial - however permanent summer time all year would see a 10am sunrise in Scotland and Ireland near the solstice, while sunset moves from about 4pm to 5pm benefitting few.
This is what was tried before and failed before (although I think it was +2 GMT in the summer, and +1 in the winter).
Keep the clock change but make winter time shorter.
Regarding 20, one could also point to Aquinas's quotation: "nihil est in intellectu quod non sit prius in sensu" -- "There is nothing in the intellect which was not first in sense". (And this was attributed to the Aristotelian tradition, though Aristotle himself did not have a quote quite like this.)
"the late Stephen Jay Gould, a leading evolutionist of the 20th century, acknowledged that acceptance of evolution spurred the rapid growth of racism" -- um, did they happen to provide a citation for that claim about Prof. Gould?
>31: List Of Long-Term Wikipedia Vandals. It’s most fun to read this as a grimoire of minor information demons, eg “Wikinger: Adds false information related to the Greek alphabet and to its related minor characters”, “Zhoban: Adds unreliable sources to Islamic terrorism articles, while acting in an uncivil manner”.
My favorites are the "Chipmunks vandal" (who is known for "Adding trivial details about covers by fictional bands, especially Alvin and the Chipmunks"), and "Catcreekcitycouncil" ("Prolific sockpuppeter with over 500 socks which inserts hoaxes about lions existing in Montana"), and "Caidin-Johnson" ("Obsessed with inflatable, bursting, popping, and bouncing objects.").
I wonder why so many of them relate to childrens' TV shows?
I want to end daylight savings time, but that doesn't mean setting the clocks ahead and leaving them there; that would make it worse! I want to end it by setting the clocks back and leaving them set back. Why doesn't that get tried, and why isn't it listed as an option when people discuss it?
19: Related: Andrew Sullivan speaks out against noise (eg people carrying around loud stereos with them in public places).
There’s been an increase in people not using headphones for their phones recently - some of this may be due to Apple (and I assume other manufacturers) not shipping with default pluggable headphones. You need to spend big on AirPods to be social on public transport.
"How The Alt-Right Won, by a alt-right veteran and tactician. Useful as a look into what strategies the alt-right thought they were using. I owe all the misinformation experts and antifa people and so on an apology - the way they thought the alt-right worked, even the paranoid-sounding bits, is exactly how the alt-right self-conceptualized themselves as working."
Could you please elaborate on this? Which paranoid-sounding bits that the misinformation experts and antifa people pointed out are in fact how the alt-right self-conceptualized themselves as working?
Just make sure to do your research if you're considering wearing hearing protection a lot, some audiologists, and some anecdotes I've heard of people wearing hearing protection constantly, said long term frequent use can make hyperacusis/noise sensitivity worse.
> with evidence suggesting there is no theoretical ceiling on what the price could climb to
That's true; there is no theoretical ceiling and we have plenty of evidence demonstrating that price growth beyond your wildest dreams is quite possible. I think you can still buy Zimbabwe currency as memorabilia.
The reddit thread about community is fascinating. My partner and I both have professionally worked in "community building" efforts and can confirm most of these issues: zoning/architecture barriers, divergent gendered interests, better online individuated entertainment at home, and people's inability to commit/compromise/show up on time/behave in a reasonable manner, etc.
But after many years of failure, I recently had an epiphany: I don't think there is actually a "lack of community." I think what's happened to communal life is exactly what's happened to everything, which is that the middle has fallen out. Communities have polarized into either a) exclusive spaces for well-connected and high-functioning people, or b) spaces with no barrier to entry for very dysfunctional people. It's the "median" spaces for average people that have really disappeared, not community in general.
My partner had a breakthrough success using Partiful, the app that essentially allows people to invite each other to events, but you have to "know someone who knows someone." If you invite a couple cool, connected people to a community event, then they and everyone else will show up. If you open the gates and say "everyone is invited!" then either no one will show up or only dysfunctional people will show up.
I can't believe the types of events that can attract a crowd if you have a tiny core group of cool people. I've seen hugely successful events thrown with less than 24 hours notice, with no food, in dirty public parks, in cold warehouses with literally no furniture, in random apartments where everyone had a cold and could barely talk.
All of that is to say, realizing that some amount of exclusivity is essential to forming healthy communities has been very depressing for us after spending the last decade in egalitarian movements. But now whenever I think to myself, "I'm lonely, there's no community here," I know to shut up and look for what the cool and interesting people are doing and talking about.
Anyway, that's (partly) how I found this substack.
Is it fair to define community as "the thing that you can spend time with if you don't have good friends to spend time with with"? Or, maybe: "the place that you go to meet people who can become your friends"?
It sort of feels that way to me but my experiences may be unusual.
Re: (31). I had a gay friend who would post false facts on Conservapedia, e.g., on the list of "statements equivalent to the Axiom of Choice", he would add, you know, statements not equivalent to the Axiom of Choice.
I have this site saved on my phone so I can pull it up any time Daylight Saving Time comes up in conversation: "Living on the Western Edge of a Time Zone Poses a Higher Health Risk"
I think if we re-framed this issue as "let's force everyone to be at work/school an hour earlier so we can all be done sooner and enjoy the rest of the day" very few people would be in favor of it. The clock changes have a lot of people confused, but DST is early bird tyranny, and it's having a measurable impact on our physical & mental health.
19. In center city and south Philadelphia, the worst offenders for noise tend to be vehicles-- loud motors/lack of mufflers, and sometimes amplified music as well. Do you get more people carrying loud stereos?
I've seen a couple of 2 year estimates until AI images become undetectable. I'm not sure whether it's undetectable by unaided humans or undetectable by computers, but that sounds pretty early to me.
#26: Considering that Western intellectual progress in the 2nd millennium largely took the shape of gradually escaping Aristotle's shadow, I don't know what teaching Aristotle in high school could mean as a rallying flag other than "Let's go back to the shadow, it's too sunny outside".
> Rav Kahana says: I heard that it is also forbidden to ask people out on dates at parties. Rabbi Abba said: I heard in a baraita: in the days of the Second Temple, someone asked a woman out on a date at a party. A journalist heard this and told the Romans, and they massacred 70,000 Torah scholars in retaliation. Therefore Rabbi Akiva decreed that it is forbidden to ask people out at parties.
15) I recently ran across James Clavell's "The Children's Story" in a bookstore. It was short and had a fair bit of depth.
17) I've run into this, in a couple of conversations with young "queer-coded" people. From what I can piece together, they view "man" and "woman" as tiny little restricted categories, and if they don't 100% agree with all stereotypes of that category, they reject the label. It seems bizarre on one level, but on another level it's refreshing, in that once the word games are put aside, it's a recognizable example of how roles are constantly being redefined as the generations shift. Since we're all good lefties, and think being cis and het is bad, what do we do if we realize we aren't trans and like the opposite sex? We redefine the all the words so that we're just like the cool queer kids! Now no one has to be cis and het! Or so I gather, anyway.
> the people who want to ban everything except crime
What a brilliant turn of phrase.
24) The main thing I got from that is that "shapeshift" might be a term used in the alt-right. I ran across it a while back in the comments here, and thought the person was just making up weird terminology on the fly to try to sound intellectually fecund. But maybe they were coming from a community that had developed their own lingo.
I'd also like to see a counterpoint from someone else from the alt-right. This piece sets off some of my "narcissistic self-promotion" alarm bells.
27) you seem to have overlooked the claim (made in passing therein) that HUMMING might fight colds/COVID in the same manner as spraying that stuff in your nose. Which seems like something that in a saner world somebody would have an incentive to run studies on. And yet.
> then it’s a question of which law-abiding people should take the pain, and I think the least unfair option is banning portable stereos.
If no one is enforcing a law, it becomes harder for it to become common knowledge. (Ex: how many times have you really heard of a law that may affect you from TV or reading a news report compared to talking with people, or hearing stories about someone getting punished for breaking it...)
> How The Alt-Right Won, by a alt-right veteran and tactician.
Obvious question is how far to trust this as an accurate retelling.
(And then there's that even if this is true, did people being paranoid about it actually have sufficient reason to be paranoid)
> The only exception is that this guy thought progressives who conflated ordinary Trumpists with the alt-right were serving alt-right interests (ie it was counterproductive for the progressives doing it).
This seemed like common knowledge to me as a failure point of a lot of modern politics, definitely not surprising.
Sadly, the term "Shadow Lord" does not really make sense, although there is a Shadow Lord Chancellor. "Shadow Minister" makes sense, as the category of opposition spokesmen who shadow government ministers, eg Shadow minister of defence, Shadow Minister of Education, etc . But "Shadow Lord" doesn't work as a category because the Lords are members of the upper house, including the opposition, so the opposition lords are real lords not shadow lords.
I was wondering why my comment on Lesbians Who Only Date Men was getting even more likes! Basically -- some chunk of this is true, but some chunk of it is mischievous responding, i.e. a decent subset of teenagers, when given a public health survey, will pick meme answers to troll the researchers. See findings like "gay kids are more likely to be teen parents" and "99% of teenagers who say on a public health survey that they're missing a limb actually have all of their limbs". It ties in with the lizardman phenomenon, but is less of a constant.
Wikipedia LTAs (long-term abusers) are...interesting. Some of them are very disturbed and tragic figures. I spent a while getting many-thousands-of-words rants emailed to me on a regular basis before turning off the ability of new users to email me through Wikipedia. Many of them are trapped in vicious cycles with overzealous antivandals (overzealous antivandals are a noticeable minority of editors, as I discuss in https://vaticidalprophet.substack.com/p/what-does-a-wikipedia-edit-represent). The aforementioned email guy mostly chases after people who chase after him, and if you decide you're the Defender of the Wiki going to banish him, you're on his shitlist forever. And he's been to prison before, so you probably don't want that.
Thanks for no 17: "Default Friend: Lesbians Who Only Date Men." The twists and turns of identity theory & identity theoriticians are fascinating from a social science point of view.
To the extent that these identity processes do not only take place in the minds of identity theory people, but also out there where people live and interact, the situation reminds me of a poem by the Norwegian poet Jan Erik Vold. It can serve as a leitmotif-poem for Gen Z, in their quest for an "identity". Tentative translation:
In the room between mirrors and mirrors/ things hurl against things/ the reverse are of what the first things were / and again in the next layer of mirrors/ and was and is and was/ things forever hasten split into the depths/ of the mirror's corridor and opposite/ corridor where no door is the final door / and everything happens at the same time/ in the room between mirrors and mirrors
Regarding the alt-right article, the surprising thing is that it's surprising. I mean, some of the tactics are quite advanced, like the idea of creating a chain of respectability where everyone is free to invite those with one more level of radicalism and ignore those above, but otherwise, this just reminds me of being a junior leftist and participating in countless chats, forums and other meetings where people, essentially, talked strategy; how should we spread our ideas, what sort of memes to create? A particular point was how to replicate the Finnish right's successful internet strategy, which at times seemed like it worked because it was spontaneous and individual-driven, but in hindsight probably involved similar planning by someone behind the scenes.
Like the Margaret Mead quote says: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." The problem with conspiracy theories isn't that conspiracies exist, conspiracy is almost the standard form of organization - it's the idea that conspiracies are always successful (they usually aren't), that their successes won't create unexpected backlash or aftereffects (consider, for instance the German Empire's plot to bring a minor radical called Lenin to Russian Empire to sow discord - successful beyond expectations, but ultimately surely not in ways leading to the German liking), or that the conspiracies are, by themselves, *bad*, though of course this alt-right organizatory effort was from my perspective; the world is full of cases where the malign conspiracy of traitors of one era becomes the "time when our brave patriots had to organize in secret to avoid the gaze of the oppressor" of the other.
It might surprise a lot of Americans or Europeans, but before yesterday, I never fully got what's wrong with gentrification. I mean, isn't it great when old slums get demolished and new, modern houses spring in their place? Since the REAL issue with this is well-known to pretty much anyone who is talking about it, nobody ever bother to explain it, which means outsides like me are left slightly baffled (but not enough to actually ask questions and find the truth). Well, I've been reading a "cozy fantasy" novel called "Cuppe Tea", which finally explained it to me, and made me realize WHY didn't I get it before.
Thing is, I live in Russia, and a lot of people actually own their apartment and homes here - post-Soviet privatization legacy. Which means if government decides your old commie block is going to get demolished to be replaced by a pricey high-rise, you're entitled to a compensation - a new apartment. In Soviet times, and in 90's, your new house could be located anywhere in your city, which often meant people got moved to the farthest outskirts, but these days there is a rule that you have to have an option to get a new home in the same district. Which means that even a poor person almost never gets left without a place to live! There is a growing number of people who rent apartments, who are more vulnerable, but this is still a small enough percentage that gentrification is simply not an issue in Russia (and we have less homeless, because laws do a lot to prevent you from losing the last place to live, even if you're destitute - I guess this policy is a result of climate where you simply freeze to death if you don't have a home).
But I guess there are a lot more renters in the West (it seems so from media, at least), which is why "landlord sells the house from under you to make space for a new high-rise, and you can't afford anything else in this city" is much more of a danger.
To be pedantic, while I'm thankful to this book for explaining the problem to me, I think it uses it as a plot device badly - gentrification requires a surplus of people willing to pay higher rent, which seems HIGHLY unlikely in a city on the farthest boundary of an empire, bordering on a magic disaster zone and flooded with refugees. So the main antagonist's evil plan to drive out refugees by buying up all property in the city and making it impossible for them to pay the rent should, by all logic, end with him losing lots of money without any hope to recover the costs, because he has no chance of finding a better class of renters.
#9 Last week in Turkiye a mayoral candidate whose party was considering withdrawing to support the best polling opposition candidate was offered 5 million dollars by the ruling party to stay in the race personally. He got 2.02% and the opposition candidate lost by 0.43%. See election results of that province here: https://secim.ntv.com.tr/hatay-secim-sonuclari
Not sure why others are skeptical, but I have fairly high priors on the IQ thing being valid (I bet most of my mana on it, but didn't have much mana to begin with).
If you asked me "if an dedicated, rational person tried all the proven / suggested techniques to improve IQ over two weeks how much increase would he get", I'd guess high single digits. George3d6's 13 points over two weeks feels at the high end of those margins. If he'd got an increase of 8 IQ points, this would feel barely news-worthy.
My thinking is, get someone under "average" conditions and put them in good conditions for an IQ test (better sleep, in a "relaxed but alert" state) and you'll probably get an instant 3-4 point boost. I'd be surprised if there were nothing on top of that to reliably push you up another 3-4 points.
I often think there's a bigger question here: is academic science bad at throwing a bunch of stuff together and seeing how it turns out? You see people criticising Brian Johnson's anti-aging approach as "unscientific", but what kind of controlled experiment is going to combine 100s of different interventions to achieve an ambitious goal?
>There’s an annoying troll argument against transgender...So far, the answer has been “nobody actually does this in real life, so it’s an annoying troll argument and not something we really need to think about”.
Are not thought experiments often hypothetical, yet still useful in examining ideas' implications?
"San Francisco’s utility is as a giant spiritual prison that keeps the sort of people who enjoy living in San Francisco - the LinkedIn types, the school-renamers and statue-puller-downers, the e/accs, the r/fuckcars posters, the street-blocking-protest-havers, the people who want to ban everything except crime, the people who think there need to be five nightclubs per city block, Aaron Peskin, - from bothering everyone else."
I did not write this, I swear, but I'm strongly inclined to go "I am the female Irish version of Oscar the Grouch and I endorse this message" 😊
"contracting/relaxing neck and face muscles"
Makes your IQ go up anywhere from 7 to 11 points. Uh-huh. Oh, look:
"The main point is that “the method” doesn’t matter so much, you can just google “intervention to increase IQ”, find 50 things, dig through the evidence, select 20, combine them, and assume 5 work"
So maybe you are not, in fact, increasing your IQ and the results are fudged, irreproducible, or otherwise dodgy. A less honest person would be packaging this up into Dr Prof PhD's Infallible IQ Boost Method, maybe a side-line of supplements to take as you practice The Method for best results, slap some ChatGPT-generated marketing babble on it, have your 'testimonials' about "I tried The Method and boosted my IQ by ten points! Now I've gotten two promotions, five pay raises, and have four supermodel girlfriends on the go at once! Thanks, Dr Prof PhD!"
Free business model there for you, gents.
Oh, look part deux: "specialist trainers who might cost up to several thousand dollars"
Yeah, looks like the, um, "business model" is on!
"My guess is that learning Aristotle and Dante doesn’t necessarily directly make you a better person"
Well, I'm not so hot on the Aristotle but the Dante? Yes, while it didn't make me a better person (which is not Dante's fault and besides I'm an auto-didact on this, and furthermore the Divine Comedy taught me more about the fundamentals of my faith than the post-Vatican II 70s/80s weaksauce 'Christian doctrine' classes I got in school), I am fully committed to slamming my fists on the desk and demanding "Vita Nuova now!" for all secondary school students. A course of the dolce stil novo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolce_Stil_Novo won't do the little brats any harm and who knows, it may give pleasure and joy to some of 'em.
EDIT: Though I do agree about the snobbery angle to some of the enthusiasm for the Classics Curriculum. And stick some greats of world culture in there besides the Europeans, that's no harm either.
>For me the funniest part of this is that in twenty years, we've gone from ACLU Defends Nazis' Right To Burn Down ACLU Headquarters to “ACLU Employee Who Complained About How ACLU Punishes Employees For Speaking Out Gets Punished For Speaking Out”.
In seriousness, the ACLU has undergone a radical shift over the decades, that greatly sped up in recent years and its primary characterization hasn't been "become more thin-skinned." Instead, this incident is a symptom of their actual shift which has been away from civil libertarianism towards Progressive advocacy which often has a different perspective, and sometimes has different conclusions, as it often promotes limiting individauls' liberties in the name of the Greater (usually racial) good.
Although there's an inherent tension between employers' rights (the right to demand particular behaviors from employees and / or fire them at will) and employees' rights (the right to avoid certain demands and / or keep your job even if your employer wants to fire you), this isn't the operative issue here in light of the the ACLU's decades long shift away from focus on individual liberties for the sake of Progressive racial goals, the relevant factor probably isn't "ACLU no longer tolerates criticism of ACLU," but "ACLU is ready to once again make any individual rights (in this case what they'd generally see as workers' rights) secondary to "Concerns of Racism."
In the late 1960s they condemnded "the exclusive recruitment of members of a minority group" as "no less evil than any other kind of discrimination, and is certainly just as contrary to the spirit of civil liberties." But by the early 1970s, they already supported racial quotas.
#10: and Eisenhower's daughter married Soviet physicist Roald Sagdeev, the former head of Russian Space Research Institute, and college roommate of Mikhail Gorbachev.
I had the pleasure of taking a 6 person seminar with him, he is very enthusiastic about physics and had a lot of stories.
> A fundamentalist Christian theme park in Kentucky plans to build a full-scale replica of the Tower of Babel.
From Genesis Ch 11
"And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city."
#17. Of course the status can be non biological, which is why there are intersex people with more biology in common with their identified gender than their non identified gender who still identify as transgender. Furthermore, nobody in the transgender community would deny someone or question why you identify as such. But here is the thing, being transgender is in great part about the experience of not feeling congruent in your body, and in great part about the transitioning itself. That's why a person may decide not to transition and yet still identify with their opposing biological gender, and it will be up to them to decided if they are trans or not. I believe that to be transgender is to experience the transition part. And yes, anyone could claim that without the experience. This is not unlike people who infiltrate grief groups, in spite not having experienced the type of grief the group is about. Or people who go to AA meetings in spite not having had that specific struggle. What you propose is akin to this, and like with those groups, nobody would kick you out our keep you from doing that, but it would be wrong because simply you don't belong, for you lack the experience.
> George H (formerly of Cerebralab, now of Epistem.ink) claims that Increasing IQ Is Trivial . . .
"Increasing IQ is trivial, also I can't share the method, because people might mess it up". Interesting definition of "trivial".
> Remember how a few years ago people talked about a “short squeeze” on Gamestop stock, Gamestop became a “meme stock” and went up a lot, and then later it went back down?
Gamestop stock, today, is still higher than it's been at any point outside two brief 3-month-long peaks in 2007 and 2014, and 10x higher than it was in August 2020. So I don't know if this is a fully accurate characterization. There has definitely been a decrease since 2021 - a sharp, drastic decrease, at that! - but "back down" implies a return to baseline that hasn't happened yet.
Re: #18: as someone who would 100% live in San Francisco if I could afford it and is spiritually, if not literally, an r/fuckcars poster, I will say that I have made this exact YIMBY argument, albeit with a different ideological valence - I try to convince my city-loving left/liberal friends that we need to build luxury high-rises as a way of warehousing and containing the rich so they don't contaminate other parts of the city. This argument never works. (Not because they're against the idea of this sort of warehousing; it's just that none of them ever accept any argument that ends in the conclusion that it's okay to build expensive housing.)
"everyone wants to end daylight savings time changes"
I love daylight savings time changes and want to keep them. I'd like to go back to the original schedule.
I really like seasonal change. It makes me feel connected to world around me in a way that is difficult to put into words. A Siberian fur trapper probably said it best: "It gives you a sense that a job is being done, even if you aren't the one doing it."
Daylight savings is part of that seasonal variation.
On George boosting his IQ and then saying "He says a replication attempt will take $300 worth of tech, specialist trainers who might cost up to several thousand dollars, and “3-4 hours of effort a day for two weeks”."
Why is he doing an experiment with 13 simultaneous treatments?
How is this "trivial"?
Is he profiting from this $300 worth or tech/thousands from specialist trainers? Is this a scam?
Somewhat against the thrust of Hume quoted in 20, I offer St. Augustine on memory, from Confessions, Book Ten, Chapter VIII:
Great is this power of memory, exceedingly great, O my God–a large and boundless inner hall! Who has plumbed the depths of it? Yet it is a power of my mind, and it belongs to my nature. But I do not myself grasp all that I am. Thus the mind is far too narrow to contain itself. But where can that part of it be which it does not contain? Is it outside and not in itself? How can it be, then, that the mind cannot grasp itself?
A great marvel rises in me; astonishment seizes me. Men go forth to marvel at the heights of mountains and the huge waves of the sea, the broad flow of the rivers, the vastness of the ocean, the orbits of the stars, and yet they neglect to marvel at themselves. Nor do they wonder how it is that, when I spoke of all these things, I was not looking at them with my eyes–and yet I could not have spoken about them had it not been that I was actually seeing within, in my memory, those mountains and waves and rivers and stars which I have seen, and that ocean which I believe in–and with the same vast spaces between them as when I saw them outside me. But when I saw them outside me, I did not take them into me by seeing them; and the things themselves are not inside me, but only their images. And yet I knew through which physical sense each experience had made an impression on me.
Regarding #22, when I see people say things like "just scientists being too cowardly to try interesting things," I know that they don't really understand the system.
Many scientists are mad keen to study interesting things, but there are large and powerful organisations whose sole job is to make it extremely awkward for them to do so.
The AI Pop sounds no worse or more nonsensical than most of what humans play on the radio these days.
In The Interests Of Science, I shall try playing these selections to some teenage humans and report back my findings. To be fair, I think you need an attractive, "quirky but relatable" singer if you really want to make it big, especially since for humans, music seems mostly to be a lifestyle accessory.
>So far, the answer has been “nobody actually does this in real life, so it’s an annoying troll argument and not something we really need to think about”.
I don't think it's a troll argument at all, even if few people actually did it and it was just something that people could potentially do.
There needs to be a decentralised Wikipedia. I don't like the idea of a single decision-making body making those decisions on behalf of everyone who uses Wikipedia (I.e. basically everyone).
Ian Clarke (the guy behind Freenet) had an idea for one based on his new project (which is confusingly now called "Freenet" while the old Freenet is now called "Hyphanet"). It was based on X's community notes.
#30 - "evidence suggesting there is no theoretical ceiling on what the price could climb to" - After witnessing two bubbles, Iowa farmland in the 1980s and the stock market bubble of 1987, I formulated the rule that if people in the market said "There is no fundamental limit to how high prices can go." then there's a bubble going on and you should be prepared to exit the market quickly. It predicted the Boston housing bubble of 1990 perfectly and has done well since then.
Isn't this the body that just had a bunch of seats replaced in an election, that led to the Chronicle decrying that SF was no longer a progressive city? I was under the impression (admittedly I don't follow this very closely) that many of these new members were pretty YIMBY. Was I wrong about their politics or wrong about it being the Board of Supervisors?
# 7 - This was a good discussion. I mostly sum my takeaway as "it's the remote work and isolated activity, stupid". Community manifests organically around shared activity in shared space. Interest in this topic has spiked since COVID, that's no coincidence. Contriving a community for community's sake is a non-starter.
I expect some overlap in terms of interest with a demographic that has failed to capitalize on prime relationship-building years in school, with extra-curriculars, and early career. I did as well, and incidentally, I was also spending leisure time mindlessly consuming things at the computer and being avoidant before it was cool. If I were now to think to myself "oh shit, I want a community", while working from home and having family obligations, I'd have an uphill battle. Hence the appeal of a fantasy non-committal "I want people to hang with nearby but only when I feel like it, and without the overhead of maintaining friendship, and I don't actually want to do anything taxing, and and..."
On #7, community: at a recent gathering at my house, a new guest turned to me and asked, “Do people…do this?”
Of course, we do, but much less often than we used to, for several reasons.
Most social life in the past among women and mixed-sex groups was driven by unemployed women, with servants, in their houses. Now, we have many fewer unemployed women, and women who don’t work generally have kids and feel they need to center their lives around the kids. There’s even an attitude out there that’s it’s wrong for mother to have too active a social life, because she shouldn’t drink or she shouldn’t take time and attention away from the kids.
Almost no one has household staff, which makes it a lot harder to clean and prepare and serve food. (I deal with this by serving snacks rather than dinner and relying on convenience foods instead of making my own hors d’oeuvres, but it’s still exhausting.) No servants also means that it’s harder to corral the kids in another room and have an adult-centered gathering.
Housing…is a problem for reasons you’re all familiar with. Either you have an apartment in the city that’s too small for hosting or you have a house in the suburbs and people have to travel 30-60 minutes to get to you.
People also really do not know the etiquette of socializing that was familiar to previous generations. Not RSVPing is the norm. And of the people on my invite list, maybe 1/6 have ever reciprocated. I’m not mad, I get it, but it adds to the burden on the host.
Not knowing the rules contributes to high levels of anxiety for both guests or hosts. You don’t know what to wear or when to show up or if you’re really welcome. Or you invite 20 people and get 4 responses. I think these factors push towards inviting only a few people you’re already close to, instead of taking the initiative to reach out to acquaintances or work friends and injecting new energy into the group.
So…it’s still worth having a social life if you can. I’m glad I overcame the social anxiety to start hosting, but I understand why people don’t.
#20 is just a tweet saying - "scientific materialism is true guys! Hume said so!"
Is there anyone at AI labs, or who has done serious thinking on the topic, about the implications for AI assuming non-materialist explanations for consciousness?
Scott wrote, with regard to Robert Whitaker's "Mad in America" organization: "I find MiA really deceptive...". I hope that Scott finds the time to write a full-blown post about MiA and why he thinks it's deceptive. I've been following Whitaker's work for years, and I find that it's consistent with my experience from having worked in the pharmaceutical industry, and it's also consistent with what I've observed of conventional psychiatric practices (two members of my family were harmed by their psychiatric care).
Tangentially, in my discussions with @Eremolalos about @Dan Elton's comment in Open Thread 323 — given that influenza and (especially) measles in addition to COVID have longer-term effects on cognitive health — I'm wondering if the Flynn Effect isn't just due to overall better health in human populations? Fewer viral infections = better cognitive health (and possibly the lowering of our body temps that we've been seeing. Just a wildass hypothesis. I'll leave it up to the student to analyze the data for correlations. ;-)
(1) Andrew Sullivan asks "When did we decide we didn’t give a fuck about anyone else in public anymore?"
(2) The sub-head from The New Yorker answers:
"The classical-education movement seeks to fundamentally reorient schooling in America. Its emphasis on morality and civics has also primed it for partisan takeover."
Morality and civics (like "don't blast your music in public") are very nice, but the problem is that, well, you know. Partisans. It's too much in the wheelhouse of Christians and conservatives. It would be racist and anti-LGBT to teach kids those kinds of things, and it would be anti-public schooling as well (we can't teach *that* in public schools, even if we can fight for the right of school libraries to have all kinds of works on their shelves, so it's these elite private schools and kooky Christian brainwashing centres who would teach it).
And that's why, Andy, nobody under the age of us old farts was taught to behave in public because the streets are not our living rooms.
#19, I think a bigger issue than big stereos is loud cars! I see it way more often, and it’ll wake you in the middle of the night. Mufflers should be required.
As an aside, my city (Philly) just elected a mayor who seems really serious about cracking down on these kinds of quality of life crimes.
#26, I don’t think reading the classics makes you a better person directly, but reading old shit and learning history generally make you realize that humans really haven’t changed that much. I think this makes you less neurotic, because you have a point of comparison for the problems of the modern world.
Is this a cultural difference thing (US vs EU)? Very rarely I see people going around blasting music, and bast majority of people around me think they're assholes. The only time they're semi-acceptable is on a bike where people won't hear you for long.
"Our culture has been inundated by false views of our origins, teaching that we evolved from ape-like ancestors. While most evolutionists are probably not racists, the philosophy they hold is inherently racist, implying that some people groups are more closely related to apes than others. For example, the late Stephen Jay Gould, a leading evolutionist of the 20th century, acknowledged that acceptance of evolution spurred the rapid growth of racism . . . Our goal in building a Babel attraction at the Ark Encounter is to proclaim mankind’s true history as described in God’s Word. In doing so, we will boldly confront racist and ethnocentric philosophies and practices."
This is a great opportunity for Christian apologists to remind me that I should look the other way at the irrationality of religion because it provides a bulwark against wokeness.
26. I liked Dante (in translation), not so much for Aristotle. Teaching Latin (or really any foreign language for that matter) strikes me as a massive waste of time. Yes, I know French literature is much better in the original language than in translation, but even in "good" schools the bulk of students haven't read a great deal of English literature and won't be reading French literature once they (don't) master the language. I suspect that much of the motivation is a reluctance to say too explicitly what they're against.
I'mma give that IQ thing a try - don't have Scott's email so consider this a pre-registration, happy to share the details once I confirm them with my group and George.
"Likely cause is de-policing making cities reluctant to enforce noise ordinances,"
I love how you just uncritically state that this was a real thing that happened. Which cities actually decreased their police forces, and when. Where is the evidence that cities have gotten significantly louder since? Surely some decibel meter s could at least answer that. Or is this all just based on centrist copsucker vibes?
"Invasion Literature was a type of proto-alternate-history, especially popular in the early 1900s, where the reader’s country was invaded by a superior foe."
Not just the early 1900s. In the 1970s, there was "The Third World War" by John Hackett, and 1980 had "Silent Night: The Defeat of NATO." Both were written by former British Army officers who were worried that NATO was vulnerable to Soviet attack. In Hackett's book, the Soviets were stopped after a limited strategic nuclear exchange (but only because NATO had increased spending and readiness in the years before his near-future war). In Joly's book, the Soviets won within a day thanks to complete surprise.
And there were a bunch in the 1980s - Tom Clancy and Harold Coyle come to mind.
Does anyone know a good way of getting stats such as "countries by number of CCTV cameras per area"? (I want to know how many the UK has; I've heard it's bad)
I suspect that what people really want is a community that aggressively screens out people who don’t belong on the same wavelength. If it’s a gym community you need someone to aggressively kick out anyone who skips 2 gym sessions in a row. If it’s a party community you want to immediately kick out anyone who does too many or too few lines of coke on a given night, etc.
"Classical education" is realistically just for filthy-rich members of the aristocracy whose children couldn't fail at life even if they tried, right? Like, this can't possibly be a useful way to structure education in the 21st century. Even when this sort of thing was contemporary, it was primarily for members of the aristocracy.
I was email bombed in 2021 after I wrote a piece about my bipolar medications, just a sudden avalanche of really nasty emails about how I'm a sheep letting Big Pharma wreck my body, and I'm about 90% sure it was organized on Mad in America's forums
> While most evolutionists are probably not racists, the philosophy they hold is inherently racist, implying that some people groups are more closely related to apes than others.
I'm using every brain cell in my body to try and interpret this statement charitably, but I really cannot come up with any explanation other than, "Whoever wrote this does not understand the theory of evolution."
"San Francisco’s utility is as a giant spiritual prison that keeps the sort of people who enjoy living in San Francisco [...] from bothering everyone else."
Huh, I once made exactly the same point about Los Angeles. I propose walling off California entirely.
The New Yorker article was surprisingly complimentary of Classical learning, given its lens.
(EDIT: the article itself is not very critical, but the New Yorker in general u expect to have a progressive lens.)
But having interacted with schools like this - they teach at a high level and offer a very interdisciplinary humanities education, rather than being stupid rote learning.
I'm really upset Diane Ravitch, whose book "Language Police" is brilliant , thinks it's so evil.
"The Tunnel Thru the Air, Or, Looking Back from 1940 is a science fiction novel written by market forecaster William Delbert Gann in 1927. In the Foreword, Gann hinted that this book is more than just a novel because it "contains a valuable secret, clothed in veiled language. Some will find it the first time they read it, others will see it in the second reading, but the greatest number will find the hidden secret when they read it the third time." Some traders believe Gann has encoded some techniques of financial astrology into this book."
Did anyone ever discover the valuable secret? Could we be the first to do it? How sure are we that there isn't a hidden society of expert traders who have all read the same obscure 1920s science fiction novel three times?
> Re #18: "...and growing consensus that building more houses has to be part of the solution..."
Where is this consensus that we need more housing coming from? San Francisco ranks among the top 10 major metro areas in the number of *surplus* housing units (per DeedClaim). Comparing the median price of 2 bdr condos (per Redfin), it doesn't look like the per capita availability of housing units affects pricing. The problem with SF is that there's a shortage of cheap housing. The only way you get that is if you build subsidized housing like the UK's council flats.
And if you think that building more units will significantly reduce prices... According to DeedClaim, SF has eighteen thousand surplus units. How many more surplus units would SF have to build to bring prices down to Chicago's levels? Twenty thousand more? Forty thousand more?
Rank, City - Population - surplus units - surplus per capita - median price
#1 New Yor - 8,336,000 - 66,755 - 0.008 - $1,650,000
#3 Los Angeles - ,822,000 - 18,514 - 0.005 - $1,190,000
#2 Chicago - 2,665,000 - 20,812 - 0.008 - $365,000
#8 San Francisco - 808,437 - 18,514 - 0.007 - $1,280,000
> conventional wisdom that everyone wants to end daylight savings time changes
Genuinely thought it was just Congressman Jonah Ryan who wanted it. And then he was removed from the ballot to be replaced by Ezra Kane and that was the end of that.
30. So I had a look at the Gamestop stock price chart (https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GME) and it shows that the price rose rapidly from $1 to $80 in 2021 January, and then slowly ramped down to around $10 today. What's the deal with that? It doesn't seem to make sense under the short squeeze hypothesis, but also not under the hypothesis that the original $1 price was rational.
The more conservative of my circle send their kids to one of them there classical academies; 3 boys and 2 girls.
Over a couple years, they failed to teach any of them to read at an age appropriate level (remediated by giving them books they were interested in reading) and catastrophically failed to teach them math ( can't multiply fractions / rely on memorizing tables for multiplication/ don't know what an exponent is, etc.)
They all stayed with the school for culture war reasons, of course.
I imagine the bad type of this school mainly exists as a kinda of liminal statue avatar 'don't want my kids corrupted by woke concepts like the differential'; and if there is a good type it is run by autists for autists.
A miserable gaping wound in existence where it's too built up to be the country and not built up enough to be a city; full of people who will take the final exist the very instant they run out of their off prescription opiates. A giant spiritual Chipotle(tm), completely devoid of anything of value which suckles on the tax money teat of the urb while crying and moaning about services.
tldr: Pick one! Live in the human ant hive or the woods; and quit trying to turn MY patch of woods into fucking tract homes so you can destroy anything worthwhile and then commute to the place you 'left' from.
The superstonk people are fascinating. They are hilariously wrong about almost everything. And I still don't get their weird hate boner for short sellers. If anything they generally will find frauds and if the company is not a fraud it provides a termporary chance to get in cheaper for long term investors. Oh and most hedge funds are long only, or mostly long only. Hating the shorts with this much passion or thinking they are some kind of proxy for the elites is completely irrational.
Keith Gill really played it perfectly too. Went long, stuck up for the longs, made a shit ton of money, then dissappeared of the scene completely probably cashing out near the top for multi million $. Accidently starting a cult/religion in the process.
If he would have stuck around, people would probably have turned on him.
#7 the sad thing about communities is that if they happen organically, we usually accept what we get and appreciate stoically that it could have been much worse, but if we try to create them on purpose, nothing feels good enough and the perfect becomes the enemy of good.
I notice it myself: when I interact with our neighbors or with parents of my kids' classmates, I am very happy that they are all generally highly intelligent and nice people. But when I imagine a "community" that I would like to have around me, my criteria become much stronger, I basically imagine a LW/ACX meetup, which unfortunately is unrealistic without moving to a different country. Even if, realistically, I would probably be much happier if I had more social interactions with the people who currently are around me.
Another thing is that community that exists explicitly for the purpose of being a generic community, is weird, and easily becomes a magnet for people with lower social skills. (It is not necessarily a problem with having a few of those; the problem is when they become a majority.) Basically, look at Mensa. There needs to be at least a pretext of "we meet in order to do X together", where X could perhaps be improving the neighborhood, or preparing some fun for the kids. And then it can evolve to 1 hour of doing X together followed by 3 hours of just relaxing and talking.
People sometimes ask if gay men can become Buddhist monks. My understanding is that the Vinaya, the monastic code, refers to actual behavior and not metaphysical inner essences when saying that monks are not allowed to have sex.
On the other hand, we have a western idea that a gay man is still gay even if they dont have sex with anyone.
And then the sociologists gave us "men who havre sex with men" .. without, necessarily, being gay.
it would seem only a short step from that to lesbians who only have sex with men,
Re. "How The Alt-Right Won", it sounds like the far "right" and the far "left" have identical strategies. Which of course we all should have known since about 1917, when the term "right wing" politics was first used. At that time it meant the moderate wing of the communist party, which wanted to make peace with Germany, and evolved into Leninism and Nazism. (The left wing was the communists who wanted to keep fighting WW1 but turn it into revolutionary war like Napoleon's.)
The left and right have always been basically the same thing IMHO. Both right and left want to unmake the Enlightenment changes that ended feudalism, which is why both always create feudalist states. Until lately I could distinguish between them by saying the right was based on racial hate and the left on class hate, but now both are based on racial hatred. Now I suppose the original distinction applies again: the left is that branch of radical revolutionaries who want to export the revolution internationally and build a world government, while the right is that branch which wants revolution only nationally.
How do any of you distinguish theoretically between left and right?
> 2. In my circles it’s conventional wisdom that everyone wants to end daylight savings time changes, but the government is too sclerotic to make it happen. So I was surprised to learn that ...
> 24: How The Alt-Right Won, by a alt-right veteran and tactician. ... I owe all the misinformation experts and antifa people and so on an apology - the way they thought the alt-right worked, even the paranoid-sounding bits, is exactly how the alt-right self-conceptualized themselves as working.
@Scott: In cases like these, where you realize that what you believed was incorrect, do you update your epistemology (ie: how you go about forming your beliefs)? If so, how? If not, why not? Perhaps your prior on the truthfulness of conventional wisdom within your circles might be too high...
Hume’s tweet lines up with both Catholic and Hindu theological arguments for a soul that goes beyond the material world. Catholics argued we have souls because we can perceive “universals” such as, the idea of a triangle, which applies to _all_ triangles rather than particular ones. Sadghuru (I’m guessing based on the Vedas) argues that our minds are just an accumulation of sense data, but that we can do things by means of our energy body that cannot be explained by mere accumulation of data. So both Catholics and Hindus independently came to the conclusion that humans do things which cannot be accomplished merely by accumulating a bunch of impressions.
Given LLM’s, these now seem to be testable claims! Try asking an LLM to refactor two code bases to extract our common methods, and you’ll see they are terrible at even very simple cases. I’ve also found ways to ask the LLM questions about situations which clearly involve triangles, but so long as I don’t use language line “points” and “lines”, the LLM’s whiff and make absurd claims about the geometry of right triangles.
> While most evolutionists are probably not racists, the philosophy they hold is inherently racist, implying that some people groups are more closely related to apes than others.
No, human generations are approximately thirty years long whether you're Amish or an excessively stuffy secular atheist. Being that Y-chromosomal Adam and Mitochondrial Eve both lived around 100-300kya, well after the hominids split off from the other apes, all groups are ~equally related to apes.
If your argument against permanent DST is about danger to kids walking to school, I have some news for you about how the 2020s differ from the 1970s.
Also: My high school started at 7:30, so for much of the year it was dark anyway when I got on the bus, and most days I had after school things that ran until 4 or 5, so in winter it was dark when I went home too.
I increased my IQ once, by 28 points, without too much effort. IQ is, by definition, ability to do IQ tests, and I did one from a book of IQ tests (Check Your Own IQ, by Hans Eysenck, to be precise). Two days later I did another test from the same book and, because i was familiar with the questions and had worked out strategies for getting the right answers, got a score 28 points higher.
I suspect most people could increase their IQs by doing lots of IQ tests.
GWAS will be consigned to the dustbin of science in the next few years, and we’ll all be slightly embarrassed we spent so much time talked about them.
GWAS are like trying to categorize books (genomes) based on statistics about word (SNP) usage. Makes sense if you can’t read, but we CAN read DNA. With the AI solution of protein folding, we have all the tools now to sequence whole genomes, identify impactful differences in DNA that result in altered protein expression/function, and predict consequences for enzyme pathways.
This kind of personalized genome “reading” will reveal the actual causes of diseases like schizophrenia. Instead of arguing about useless GWAS r-value correlations, we will have clinically-meaningful understanding about what is going wrong - and maybe how to treat it.
>I don’t know how else to make public places livable for people with noise sensitivity.
>I rarely go out any more without earplugs and headphones on,
Seems like you know one method?
I also have sensory sensitivities that make it hard to do a lot of things in public, and I would be happy to find people making reasonable accommodations of their own accord and am happy to publicize the need for them, but I wouldn't want the government forcing people to cater to me to such an extent.
> When our descendants ask why they’re stuck speaking 4,900 fractal hyper-languages, we’re going to have the most embarrassing possible explanation.
Maybe we should be more worried about the massive project to build a machine god by bringing together all human language in a nuclear powered datacenter.
Regarding 19, complaints about noise have unfortunately been subsumed into a larger culture war. The more likely criticism of Sullivan isn't that he's old, but that he's racist or bigoted. This 2022 Atlantic article is a great example of what I mean:
It's paywalled, but the author characterizes her neighborhood noise as part of the culture. In her framing, it's Andrew Sullivan is asking to gentrify her community by drastically changing the culture, which doesn't view loud noises as disrespectful. It'd be like a Finn going to Italy and complaining that no one respects his personal space. Sullivan quotes a few people saying that they believe others won't mind listening to a tinny bluetooth, but he doesn't seem to believe them. I don't think this is necessarily self-centeredness, but just two mutually-exclusive norms clashing.
Also, I don't think Sullivan really appreciates how racialized this conflict is in American discourse. A conflict over a boom box was a major plot point in Do The Right Thing. That Atlantic author would read Sullivan's complaint and accuse him of wanting to kill Radio Raheem.
For number 17, I think you’re missing what the “annoying troll argument” is actually about. The “so why can’t I (a woman) identify as a transwoman?” line isn’t an argument “against transgender”: it’s an argument against the people who have gone so far as to claim that *sex* (not gender) is socially constructed, that sex doesn’t actually matter *for anything*, that male people who identify as women are in fact female, that there are no differences between “trans women” and any other women (“just like there’s no difference between black women and women” is the standard line), that male people who ‘transitition’ become female and start getting periods, and that sex (not gender) is a meaningless thing that is “assigned at birth” for everyone.
If you haven’t tried to reason with such people, or at least provide some response so that the normies making actual decisions about policy can see how ridiculous this is, and if you haven’t ever had to explain to a child that someone writing a jokey line about “actually humans have four sexes” once in a scientific article doesn’t mean ‘science’ doesn’t agree that humans have two sexes nor does the existence of clownfish mean that the technology exists for humans to actually change sex, and you haven’t tried to explain who should get invites for cervical smears and who should get invites for prostate exams (and that our medical records should have some way of spotting which group you’re in), then you are missing the context of why someone would want to prompt people to acknowledge that there are differences between male and female bodies which remain (and we need to be able to refer to) despite how people identify.
Basically, it’s more to do with the mess around people identifying as intersex (while fewer and fewer people with disorders of sex development identify as intersex) than it is about trying to argue “against transgender”.
One of the Candidates for the upcoming London Mayoral election, one Count Binface, has included in his manifesto that he will replace the Night Czar with a Night Mayor and put their head quarters on Elm Street.
1. There's no such thing as a "Shadow Lord" in British politics. As the text at the link shows, it's Shadow Lord Chancellor, that is, the opposition spokesperson who shadows (speaks in response to) the Lord Chancellor. In any case Lord Chancellor is now an obsolete term; the person holding that formal title is now normally referred to as the Justice Secretary.
10. You didn't know that? I thought it was well-known. Nixon's daughter is called Julie Nixon EIsenhower; how do you think she got the Eisenhower part?
19. My minimal recent experience with public transit is that the playing of loud music has, if anything, gone down over the years.
Re the piece by Katherine Dee, people are getting quite explicit about it. From The Cut:
Waiting for a baby here mostly entails talking. “When I say we hope that the baby will be gay, I think maybe we’re all saying that we hope the baby will have an aesthetic life,” says Lily later as we curl up on the couch in their Brownstone Brooklyn living room
I would think hanging out with the kind of student who wants to focus on the classics makes you a worse person, not better. The classics held the role that they did for so long because we had zero to very minor progression in human knowledge during that time--they were the peak of knowledge! Now they no longer are. The kind of person who enjoyed studying Aristotle in 1300 would prefer advanced linear algebra and Derek Parfit today.
Speaking of Wikipedia vandalisation, I am surprised that this one was not enclosed in the list:
A Chinese housewife, has neither advanced degree, nor fluent in English or Russian, created >200 interconnected articles with intricate details about falsified aspects of medieval Russian history and was considered a domain expert in the community until busted.
The adverse selection of 'open communities' from the subreddit rings especially true. A single bad apple can genuinely ruin a social gathering. Like I think the ratio might be 20 'good apples' to 1 'bad apple' in terms of canceling them out.
Even a slightly higher prevalence of bad apples in open communities (and I bet it could be much higher) can be totally debilitating.
#26 link appears to be broken
Another recent/imminent thing in the news you might find interesting: Republicans trying to ban lab-grown meat.
Year-round Daylight Savings Time was a late 1973 response by Congress to the Energy Crisis. I recall Time Magazine editorializing in 1973 that it was completely obvious we needed year-round DST. But it was miserable in January 1974 and was repealed later that year. In later 1974, Time editorialized that it was an obviously idiotic thing to do. (My faith in the media has never recovered.)
Lots of people today have strong opinions about DST. Interestingly, it's one of the last non-partisan and non-regional issues. Last I checked a few years ago, the leading Senate proponents of getting rid of clock changes are a Republican senator from Florida and a Democratic senator from Washington. It's reminiscent of postwar politics, in which Senators took pride in their idiosyncratic stances on some issues. I suppose if Donald Trump ever took a stand on clock-changing, then everybody would line up pro or con him, but I don't think that has happened yet.
I believe the season for Daylight Savings Time was extended twice from its original 6 months. One reason you hear mostly bad opinions of the current system is that the advocates of clock changing have pretty much achieved their maximum agenda, with DST now running from early March to early November, which is about the maximum that would be reasonable. You used to hear some people say, "We need to get rid of DST" while others said "We need more DST." But now people who like changing clocks have won all their wishes, so they aren't an organized pressure group anymore, so they now might lose.
If we really want to get rid of clock-changing, we should probably go to 30 minutes of DST year-round. Unfortunately, that would put us off-sync with most major countries, although some big countries like India are not on the hour.
>if I’m understanding this right, the crowd compares two LLMs, rates which one is better, and then they use an equivalent of chess’ Elo system to give each of them a score.
Right. It's also blind—you don't know which model produced which output until after you vote.
I mean, who knows how useful this is as a way of measuring AI capabilities. A model winning a blind A/B test doesn't prove it's smarter or safer or anything we actually care about—surely this also selects for models that flatter the user by sycophantically agreeing with them, for example.
It also penalizes AIs that say "I don't know" vs AIs that write elaborate, convincing hallucinations. Not good—when an AI fails, we want that failure to be as obvious as possible.
But these sorts of leaderboards do capture some of the picture missing from standard benchmarks. There's an incredible difference between Gemini Ultra's reported benchmark scores and the experience of using Gemini Ultra in practice. (I mean that in a bad way.)
> the LinkedIn types, the school-renamers and statue-puller-downers, the e/accs, the r/fuckcars posters, the street-blocking-protest-havers, the people who want to ban everything except crime, the people who think there need to be five nightclubs per city block, Aaron Peskin
Damn, that's some outgroup homogenization you've got going on there...
> My guess is that learning Aristotle and Dante doesn’t necessarily directly make you a better person - but that interacting with the sort of teachers/kids/parents who would go to these schools, and being exposed to the sorts of rules/norms/teaching methods these schools would enforce, does make you a better person ...
The rules/norms/teaching methods, as conceived by the classical educators, include the belief that content is not entirely arbitrary. It seems likely that if the rules/norms/teaching methods are effective, then their content preferences are at least somewhat good and correlated with effectiveness. So I doubt the strong decoupling implied by your statement is correct.
"Eau de Binance" for all women except those residing in unsupported states: Texas, Hawaii, New York, Vermont...
About number 19: there’s a scene in Star Trek four that suggest this as well as the other negative San Francisco stereotypes were around in the 80s.
https://youtu.be/Zf5iwGZNY_Q?si=vyaUVKltWrSkPedS
24. That just sounds like the Texas sharpshooter, declaring whatever was hit to be the target all along. I think it would be more honest to adopt the "In a good cause, there are no failures" position. It would be cope, of course, but less shameful than pretending your humiliating defeat is a rare species of victory.
Regarding the alt right guy, all I can say is I don't get how someone can keep talking about the "JQ" and refer to the mass shooter in Charlestown as a "lunatic". I mean, he's doing what you're too much of a coward to do, right?
Re: #2 yes, there's also a pretty strong consensus among scientists and physicians who study sleep and circadian rhythms that DST is trash. We should just do permanent standard time.
https://savestandardtime.com/
I'm in SF right now its great. By temperament (let freedom ring) I am inclined to be incredibly YIMBY. But Scott's arguments over the years have more or less convinced me that, sans truly insane amounts of building, more housing wont lower local rent. SF is great. So maybe it makes sense to preserve it?
I quickly did a quick Ctrl+F of "Gamergate" on the Alt-Right post, thinking it'd be a quick way to suss out if he really knew what he was talking about and this quote is absolutely hilarious.
>The Gamergate movement of 2014 had spawned a series of Disney parodies called “/v/ the musical”, which were basically Walt Bismarck videos but about how video games shouldn’t have lesbians or fat women in them. I saw that this format had a ton of potential but was being criminally underutilized, so I stole the idea and made parodies about white nationalism instead. I was Elvis and Gamergate was black people.
It's appropriate considering that Gamergate faded into obscurity mostly because the Alt-Right and the Q conspiracies stole it's thunder and even took over their site.
Anyways, that musical was really fun and while it's mostly in-jokes of decade old gamer culture, There's a couple songs I recommend as a curious glimpse into the community that first conceptualized the at the time still nascent "twitter SJW" movement.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heIH9vfwKBM
2) In my circles it’s conventional wisdom that everyone wants to end daylight savings time changes, but the government is too sclerotic to make it happen.
In general people don’t like the clock change, despite it being much easier these days as it’s mostly automatic; but we are an unhardy generation. However there’s no consensus on whether to choose permanent summer time or winter time.
It’s grim up north but DST makes sense in Northern Europe. Moving sunrise at 3:30am to an hour later gaining a day that’s only fully dark by 10 pm is clearly beneficial - however permanent summer time all year would see a 10am sunrise in Scotland and Ireland near the solstice, while sunset moves from about 4pm to 5pm benefitting few.
This is what was tried before and failed before (although I think it was +2 GMT in the summer, and +1 in the winter).
Keep the clock change but make winter time shorter.
Regarding 20, one could also point to Aquinas's quotation: "nihil est in intellectu quod non sit prius in sensu" -- "There is nothing in the intellect which was not first in sense". (And this was attributed to the Aristotelian tradition, though Aristotle himself did not have a quote quite like this.)
"the late Stephen Jay Gould, a leading evolutionist of the 20th century, acknowledged that acceptance of evolution spurred the rapid growth of racism" -- um, did they happen to provide a citation for that claim about Prof. Gould?
>31: List Of Long-Term Wikipedia Vandals. It’s most fun to read this as a grimoire of minor information demons, eg “Wikinger: Adds false information related to the Greek alphabet and to its related minor characters”, “Zhoban: Adds unreliable sources to Islamic terrorism articles, while acting in an uncivil manner”.
My favorites are the "Chipmunks vandal" (who is known for "Adding trivial details about covers by fictional bands, especially Alvin and the Chipmunks"), and "Catcreekcitycouncil" ("Prolific sockpuppeter with over 500 socks which inserts hoaxes about lions existing in Montana"), and "Caidin-Johnson" ("Obsessed with inflatable, bursting, popping, and bouncing objects.").
I wonder why so many of them relate to childrens' TV shows?
I want to end daylight savings time, but that doesn't mean setting the clocks ahead and leaving them there; that would make it worse! I want to end it by setting the clocks back and leaving them set back. Why doesn't that get tried, and why isn't it listed as an option when people discuss it?
"Techno Genre Warrior from Greece" is my favorite name in the Wikipedia vandals list
19: Related: Andrew Sullivan speaks out against noise (eg people carrying around loud stereos with them in public places).
There’s been an increase in people not using headphones for their phones recently - some of this may be due to Apple (and I assume other manufacturers) not shipping with default pluggable headphones. You need to spend big on AirPods to be social on public transport.
Could someone summarize the alt-right thing? I tried reading it and my brain started to leak out of my ears.
"How The Alt-Right Won, by a alt-right veteran and tactician. Useful as a look into what strategies the alt-right thought they were using. I owe all the misinformation experts and antifa people and so on an apology - the way they thought the alt-right worked, even the paranoid-sounding bits, is exactly how the alt-right self-conceptualized themselves as working."
Could you please elaborate on this? Which paranoid-sounding bits that the misinformation experts and antifa people pointed out are in fact how the alt-right self-conceptualized themselves as working?
Just make sure to do your research if you're considering wearing hearing protection a lot, some audiologists, and some anecdotes I've heard of people wearing hearing protection constantly, said long term frequent use can make hyperacusis/noise sensitivity worse.
> with evidence suggesting there is no theoretical ceiling on what the price could climb to
That's true; there is no theoretical ceiling and we have plenty of evidence demonstrating that price growth beyond your wildest dreams is quite possible. I think you can still buy Zimbabwe currency as memorabilia.
Curious about what side effects you see from inhaling NO. Isn't it a mild vasodilator? How big of a dose are you using?
The reddit thread about community is fascinating. My partner and I both have professionally worked in "community building" efforts and can confirm most of these issues: zoning/architecture barriers, divergent gendered interests, better online individuated entertainment at home, and people's inability to commit/compromise/show up on time/behave in a reasonable manner, etc.
But after many years of failure, I recently had an epiphany: I don't think there is actually a "lack of community." I think what's happened to communal life is exactly what's happened to everything, which is that the middle has fallen out. Communities have polarized into either a) exclusive spaces for well-connected and high-functioning people, or b) spaces with no barrier to entry for very dysfunctional people. It's the "median" spaces for average people that have really disappeared, not community in general.
My partner had a breakthrough success using Partiful, the app that essentially allows people to invite each other to events, but you have to "know someone who knows someone." If you invite a couple cool, connected people to a community event, then they and everyone else will show up. If you open the gates and say "everyone is invited!" then either no one will show up or only dysfunctional people will show up.
I can't believe the types of events that can attract a crowd if you have a tiny core group of cool people. I've seen hugely successful events thrown with less than 24 hours notice, with no food, in dirty public parks, in cold warehouses with literally no furniture, in random apartments where everyone had a cold and could barely talk.
All of that is to say, realizing that some amount of exclusivity is essential to forming healthy communities has been very depressing for us after spending the last decade in egalitarian movements. But now whenever I think to myself, "I'm lonely, there's no community here," I know to shut up and look for what the cool and interesting people are doing and talking about.
Anyway, that's (partly) how I found this substack.
Is it fair to define community as "the thing that you can spend time with if you don't have good friends to spend time with with"? Or, maybe: "the place that you go to meet people who can become your friends"?
It sort of feels that way to me but my experiences may be unusual.
#30 wasn't the Gamestop short squeeze 3 years ago?
Re: (31). I had a gay friend who would post false facts on Conservapedia, e.g., on the list of "statements equivalent to the Axiom of Choice", he would add, you know, statements not equivalent to the Axiom of Choice.
I have this site saved on my phone so I can pull it up any time Daylight Saving Time comes up in conversation: "Living on the Western Edge of a Time Zone Poses a Higher Health Risk"
https://www.inverse.com/article/55596-time-zone-boundaries-two-groups-eastern-western-daylight-saving-time-health-problems
I think if we re-framed this issue as "let's force everyone to be at work/school an hour earlier so we can all be done sooner and enjoy the rest of the day" very few people would be in favor of it. The clock changes have a lot of people confused, but DST is early bird tyranny, and it's having a measurable impact on our physical & mental health.
19. In center city and south Philadelphia, the worst offenders for noise tend to be vehicles-- loud motors/lack of mufflers, and sometimes amplified music as well. Do you get more people carrying loud stereos?
I've seen a couple of 2 year estimates until AI images become undetectable. I'm not sure whether it's undetectable by unaided humans or undetectable by computers, but that sounds pretty early to me.
Thoughts?
#26: Considering that Western intellectual progress in the 2nd millennium largely took the shape of gradually escaping Aristotle's shadow, I don't know what teaching Aristotle in high school could mean as a rallying flag other than "Let's go back to the shadow, it's too sunny outside".
14) This is hilarious:
> Rav Kahana says: I heard that it is also forbidden to ask people out on dates at parties. Rabbi Abba said: I heard in a baraita: in the days of the Second Temple, someone asked a woman out on a date at a party. A journalist heard this and told the Romans, and they massacred 70,000 Torah scholars in retaliation. Therefore Rabbi Akiva decreed that it is forbidden to ask people out at parties.
15) I recently ran across James Clavell's "The Children's Story" in a bookstore. It was short and had a fair bit of depth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Children%27s_Story
17) I've run into this, in a couple of conversations with young "queer-coded" people. From what I can piece together, they view "man" and "woman" as tiny little restricted categories, and if they don't 100% agree with all stereotypes of that category, they reject the label. It seems bizarre on one level, but on another level it's refreshing, in that once the word games are put aside, it's a recognizable example of how roles are constantly being redefined as the generations shift. Since we're all good lefties, and think being cis and het is bad, what do we do if we realize we aren't trans and like the opposite sex? We redefine the all the words so that we're just like the cool queer kids! Now no one has to be cis and het! Or so I gather, anyway.
> the people who want to ban everything except crime
What a brilliant turn of phrase.
24) The main thing I got from that is that "shapeshift" might be a term used in the alt-right. I ran across it a while back in the comments here, and thought the person was just making up weird terminology on the fly to try to sound intellectually fecund. But maybe they were coming from a community that had developed their own lingo.
I'd also like to see a counterpoint from someone else from the alt-right. This piece sets off some of my "narcissistic self-promotion" alarm bells.
27) you seem to have overlooked the claim (made in passing therein) that HUMMING might fight colds/COVID in the same manner as spraying that stuff in your nose. Which seems like something that in a saner world somebody would have an incentive to run studies on. And yet.
> then it’s a question of which law-abiding people should take the pain, and I think the least unfair option is banning portable stereos.
If no one is enforcing a law, it becomes harder for it to become common knowledge. (Ex: how many times have you really heard of a law that may affect you from TV or reading a news report compared to talking with people, or hearing stories about someone getting punished for breaking it...)
> How The Alt-Right Won, by a alt-right veteran and tactician.
Obvious question is how far to trust this as an accurate retelling.
(And then there's that even if this is true, did people being paranoid about it actually have sufficient reason to be paranoid)
> The only exception is that this guy thought progressives who conflated ordinary Trumpists with the alt-right were serving alt-right interests (ie it was counterproductive for the progressives doing it).
This seemed like common knowledge to me as a failure point of a lot of modern politics, definitely not surprising.
Sadly, the term "Shadow Lord" does not really make sense, although there is a Shadow Lord Chancellor. "Shadow Minister" makes sense, as the category of opposition spokesmen who shadow government ministers, eg Shadow minister of defence, Shadow Minister of Education, etc . But "Shadow Lord" doesn't work as a category because the Lords are members of the upper house, including the opposition, so the opposition lords are real lords not shadow lords.
The Gamestop thing was in 2021, not last year.
This may spoil the fun, but while you can be a "Shadow Lord Chancellor" or "Shadow Lord Privy Seal" or whatever, you cannot simply be a "Shadow Lord".
I was wondering why my comment on Lesbians Who Only Date Men was getting even more likes! Basically -- some chunk of this is true, but some chunk of it is mischievous responding, i.e. a decent subset of teenagers, when given a public health survey, will pick meme answers to troll the researchers. See findings like "gay kids are more likely to be teen parents" and "99% of teenagers who say on a public health survey that they're missing a limb actually have all of their limbs". It ties in with the lizardman phenomenon, but is less of a constant.
Wikipedia LTAs (long-term abusers) are...interesting. Some of them are very disturbed and tragic figures. I spent a while getting many-thousands-of-words rants emailed to me on a regular basis before turning off the ability of new users to email me through Wikipedia. Many of them are trapped in vicious cycles with overzealous antivandals (overzealous antivandals are a noticeable minority of editors, as I discuss in https://vaticidalprophet.substack.com/p/what-does-a-wikipedia-edit-represent). The aforementioned email guy mostly chases after people who chase after him, and if you decide you're the Defender of the Wiki going to banish him, you're on his shitlist forever. And he's been to prison before, so you probably don't want that.
Thanks for no 17: "Default Friend: Lesbians Who Only Date Men." The twists and turns of identity theory & identity theoriticians are fascinating from a social science point of view.
To the extent that these identity processes do not only take place in the minds of identity theory people, but also out there where people live and interact, the situation reminds me of a poem by the Norwegian poet Jan Erik Vold. It can serve as a leitmotif-poem for Gen Z, in their quest for an "identity". Tentative translation:
In the room between mirrors and mirrors/ things hurl against things/ the reverse are of what the first things were / and again in the next layer of mirrors/ and was and is and was/ things forever hasten split into the depths/ of the mirror's corridor and opposite/ corridor where no door is the final door / and everything happens at the same time/ in the room between mirrors and mirrors
Having *creationists* pull the "my opponents are racists" move is frickin' hilarious.
>There’s an annoying troll argument against transgender
Doesn't strike me as a troll argument at all.
Very nice Talmud excerpts.
I couldn't resist the urge to try my best to translate some of them into Babylonian aramaic, and add some rashi and tosfos:
(putting in a link since substack won't let me post an image)
https://substack.com/profile/53122660-stronghand14/note/c-53155946
The song with the cactus person actually fucking slaps.
The full, amazing insanity of Gamestop conspiracy theories investigated here (Folding Ideas, you may have seen his NFT takedown as well):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pYeoZaoWrA
Regarding the alt-right article, the surprising thing is that it's surprising. I mean, some of the tactics are quite advanced, like the idea of creating a chain of respectability where everyone is free to invite those with one more level of radicalism and ignore those above, but otherwise, this just reminds me of being a junior leftist and participating in countless chats, forums and other meetings where people, essentially, talked strategy; how should we spread our ideas, what sort of memes to create? A particular point was how to replicate the Finnish right's successful internet strategy, which at times seemed like it worked because it was spontaneous and individual-driven, but in hindsight probably involved similar planning by someone behind the scenes.
Like the Margaret Mead quote says: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." The problem with conspiracy theories isn't that conspiracies exist, conspiracy is almost the standard form of organization - it's the idea that conspiracies are always successful (they usually aren't), that their successes won't create unexpected backlash or aftereffects (consider, for instance the German Empire's plot to bring a minor radical called Lenin to Russian Empire to sow discord - successful beyond expectations, but ultimately surely not in ways leading to the German liking), or that the conspiracies are, by themselves, *bad*, though of course this alt-right organizatory effort was from my perspective; the world is full of cases where the malign conspiracy of traitors of one era becomes the "time when our brave patriots had to organize in secret to avoid the gaze of the oppressor" of the other.
It might surprise a lot of Americans or Europeans, but before yesterday, I never fully got what's wrong with gentrification. I mean, isn't it great when old slums get demolished and new, modern houses spring in their place? Since the REAL issue with this is well-known to pretty much anyone who is talking about it, nobody ever bother to explain it, which means outsides like me are left slightly baffled (but not enough to actually ask questions and find the truth). Well, I've been reading a "cozy fantasy" novel called "Cuppe Tea", which finally explained it to me, and made me realize WHY didn't I get it before.
Thing is, I live in Russia, and a lot of people actually own their apartment and homes here - post-Soviet privatization legacy. Which means if government decides your old commie block is going to get demolished to be replaced by a pricey high-rise, you're entitled to a compensation - a new apartment. In Soviet times, and in 90's, your new house could be located anywhere in your city, which often meant people got moved to the farthest outskirts, but these days there is a rule that you have to have an option to get a new home in the same district. Which means that even a poor person almost never gets left without a place to live! There is a growing number of people who rent apartments, who are more vulnerable, but this is still a small enough percentage that gentrification is simply not an issue in Russia (and we have less homeless, because laws do a lot to prevent you from losing the last place to live, even if you're destitute - I guess this policy is a result of climate where you simply freeze to death if you don't have a home).
But I guess there are a lot more renters in the West (it seems so from media, at least), which is why "landlord sells the house from under you to make space for a new high-rise, and you can't afford anything else in this city" is much more of a danger.
To be pedantic, while I'm thankful to this book for explaining the problem to me, I think it uses it as a plot device badly - gentrification requires a surplus of people willing to pay higher rent, which seems HIGHLY unlikely in a city on the farthest boundary of an empire, bordering on a magic disaster zone and flooded with refugees. So the main antagonist's evil plan to drive out refugees by buying up all property in the city and making it impossible for them to pay the rent should, by all logic, end with him losing lots of money without any hope to recover the costs, because he has no chance of finding a better class of renters.
#9 Last week in Turkiye a mayoral candidate whose party was considering withdrawing to support the best polling opposition candidate was offered 5 million dollars by the ruling party to stay in the race personally. He got 2.02% and the opposition candidate lost by 0.43%. See election results of that province here: https://secim.ntv.com.tr/hatay-secim-sonuclari
This is the opposite of #9, but still curious.
Not sure why others are skeptical, but I have fairly high priors on the IQ thing being valid (I bet most of my mana on it, but didn't have much mana to begin with).
If you asked me "if an dedicated, rational person tried all the proven / suggested techniques to improve IQ over two weeks how much increase would he get", I'd guess high single digits. George3d6's 13 points over two weeks feels at the high end of those margins. If he'd got an increase of 8 IQ points, this would feel barely news-worthy.
My thinking is, get someone under "average" conditions and put them in good conditions for an IQ test (better sleep, in a "relaxed but alert" state) and you'll probably get an instant 3-4 point boost. I'd be surprised if there were nothing on top of that to reliably push you up another 3-4 points.
I often think there's a bigger question here: is academic science bad at throwing a bunch of stuff together and seeing how it turns out? You see people criticising Brian Johnson's anti-aging approach as "unscientific", but what kind of controlled experiment is going to combine 100s of different interventions to achieve an ambitious goal?
#1 And one of them seems to have been the "The Lord Falconer of Thoroton" (that's his real name).
#17
>There’s an annoying troll argument against transgender...So far, the answer has been “nobody actually does this in real life, so it’s an annoying troll argument and not something we really need to think about”.
Are not thought experiments often hypothetical, yet still useful in examining ideas' implications?
"San Francisco’s utility is as a giant spiritual prison that keeps the sort of people who enjoy living in San Francisco - the LinkedIn types, the school-renamers and statue-puller-downers, the e/accs, the r/fuckcars posters, the street-blocking-protest-havers, the people who want to ban everything except crime, the people who think there need to be five nightclubs per city block, Aaron Peskin, - from bothering everyone else."
I did not write this, I swear, but I'm strongly inclined to go "I am the female Irish version of Oscar the Grouch and I endorse this message" 😊
"contracting/relaxing neck and face muscles"
Makes your IQ go up anywhere from 7 to 11 points. Uh-huh. Oh, look:
"The main point is that “the method” doesn’t matter so much, you can just google “intervention to increase IQ”, find 50 things, dig through the evidence, select 20, combine them, and assume 5 work"
So maybe you are not, in fact, increasing your IQ and the results are fudged, irreproducible, or otherwise dodgy. A less honest person would be packaging this up into Dr Prof PhD's Infallible IQ Boost Method, maybe a side-line of supplements to take as you practice The Method for best results, slap some ChatGPT-generated marketing babble on it, have your 'testimonials' about "I tried The Method and boosted my IQ by ten points! Now I've gotten two promotions, five pay raises, and have four supermodel girlfriends on the go at once! Thanks, Dr Prof PhD!"
Free business model there for you, gents.
Oh, look part deux: "specialist trainers who might cost up to several thousand dollars"
Yeah, looks like the, um, "business model" is on!
"My guess is that learning Aristotle and Dante doesn’t necessarily directly make you a better person"
Well, I'm not so hot on the Aristotle but the Dante? Yes, while it didn't make me a better person (which is not Dante's fault and besides I'm an auto-didact on this, and furthermore the Divine Comedy taught me more about the fundamentals of my faith than the post-Vatican II 70s/80s weaksauce 'Christian doctrine' classes I got in school), I am fully committed to slamming my fists on the desk and demanding "Vita Nuova now!" for all secondary school students. A course of the dolce stil novo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolce_Stil_Novo won't do the little brats any harm and who knows, it may give pleasure and joy to some of 'em.
EDIT: Though I do agree about the snobbery angle to some of the enthusiasm for the Classics Curriculum. And stick some greats of world culture in there besides the Europeans, that's no harm either.
#8
>For me the funniest part of this is that in twenty years, we've gone from ACLU Defends Nazis' Right To Burn Down ACLU Headquarters to “ACLU Employee Who Complained About How ACLU Punishes Employees For Speaking Out Gets Punished For Speaking Out”.
In seriousness, the ACLU has undergone a radical shift over the decades, that greatly sped up in recent years and its primary characterization hasn't been "become more thin-skinned." Instead, this incident is a symptom of their actual shift which has been away from civil libertarianism towards Progressive advocacy which often has a different perspective, and sometimes has different conclusions, as it often promotes limiting individauls' liberties in the name of the Greater (usually racial) good.
Although there's an inherent tension between employers' rights (the right to demand particular behaviors from employees and / or fire them at will) and employees' rights (the right to avoid certain demands and / or keep your job even if your employer wants to fire you), this isn't the operative issue here in light of the the ACLU's decades long shift away from focus on individual liberties for the sake of Progressive racial goals, the relevant factor probably isn't "ACLU no longer tolerates criticism of ACLU," but "ACLU is ready to once again make any individual rights (in this case what they'd generally see as workers' rights) secondary to "Concerns of Racism."
In the late 1960s they condemnded "the exclusive recruitment of members of a minority group" as "no less evil than any other kind of discrimination, and is certainly just as contrary to the spirit of civil liberties." But by the early 1970s, they already supported racial quotas.
In recent years, they've moved towards weak support of or even opposition towards offensive speech, backtracking on defendants' rights, when the defendants are unpopular, and reversed themselves on other issues, where their prior stances are no longer popular among Progressives. See e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html, https://reason.com/2020/12/20/would-the-aclu-still-defend-nazis-right-to-march-in-skokie/, https://www.city-journal.org/article/progressives-against-transparency.
I really enjoyed the LW album, and I want a plushie of the album cover.
Fortunate Son by CCR is about that marriage btwn Nixon and Ike’s kid right
#10: and Eisenhower's daughter married Soviet physicist Roald Sagdeev, the former head of Russian Space Research Institute, and college roommate of Mikhail Gorbachev.
I had the pleasure of taking a 6 person seminar with him, he is very enthusiastic about physics and had a lot of stories.
#20 I would say that the author of Ecclesiastes nailed it somewhat earlier, about 450-180 BC (although the sentiment is somewhat more expansive):
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.
> A fundamentalist Christian theme park in Kentucky plans to build a full-scale replica of the Tower of Babel.
From Genesis Ch 11
"And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city."
I've been on IT projects like that! :-P
#26: “My guess is that learning Aristotle and Dante doesn’t necessarily directly make you a better person”
Define “better”. By my definition, I’d disagree with this claim.
#17. Of course the status can be non biological, which is why there are intersex people with more biology in common with their identified gender than their non identified gender who still identify as transgender. Furthermore, nobody in the transgender community would deny someone or question why you identify as such. But here is the thing, being transgender is in great part about the experience of not feeling congruent in your body, and in great part about the transitioning itself. That's why a person may decide not to transition and yet still identify with their opposing biological gender, and it will be up to them to decided if they are trans or not. I believe that to be transgender is to experience the transition part. And yes, anyone could claim that without the experience. This is not unlike people who infiltrate grief groups, in spite not having experienced the type of grief the group is about. Or people who go to AA meetings in spite not having had that specific struggle. What you propose is akin to this, and like with those groups, nobody would kick you out our keep you from doing that, but it would be wrong because simply you don't belong, for you lack the experience.
> George H (formerly of Cerebralab, now of Epistem.ink) claims that Increasing IQ Is Trivial . . .
"Increasing IQ is trivial, also I can't share the method, because people might mess it up". Interesting definition of "trivial".
> Remember how a few years ago people talked about a “short squeeze” on Gamestop stock, Gamestop became a “meme stock” and went up a lot, and then later it went back down?
Gamestop stock, today, is still higher than it's been at any point outside two brief 3-month-long peaks in 2007 and 2014, and 10x higher than it was in August 2020. So I don't know if this is a fully accurate characterization. There has definitely been a decrease since 2021 - a sharp, drastic decrease, at that! - but "back down" implies a return to baseline that hasn't happened yet.
Re: #18: as someone who would 100% live in San Francisco if I could afford it and is spiritually, if not literally, an r/fuckcars poster, I will say that I have made this exact YIMBY argument, albeit with a different ideological valence - I try to convince my city-loving left/liberal friends that we need to build luxury high-rises as a way of warehousing and containing the rich so they don't contaminate other parts of the city. This argument never works. (Not because they're against the idea of this sort of warehousing; it's just that none of them ever accept any argument that ends in the conclusion that it's okay to build expensive housing.)
"everyone wants to end daylight savings time changes"
I love daylight savings time changes and want to keep them. I'd like to go back to the original schedule.
I really like seasonal change. It makes me feel connected to world around me in a way that is difficult to put into words. A Siberian fur trapper probably said it best: "It gives you a sense that a job is being done, even if you aren't the one doing it."
Daylight savings is part of that seasonal variation.
I thought 10 was pretty much common knowledge.
On George boosting his IQ and then saying "He says a replication attempt will take $300 worth of tech, specialist trainers who might cost up to several thousand dollars, and “3-4 hours of effort a day for two weeks”."
Why is he doing an experiment with 13 simultaneous treatments?
How is this "trivial"?
Is he profiting from this $300 worth or tech/thousands from specialist trainers? Is this a scam?
Somewhat against the thrust of Hume quoted in 20, I offer St. Augustine on memory, from Confessions, Book Ten, Chapter VIII:
Great is this power of memory, exceedingly great, O my God–a large and boundless inner hall! Who has plumbed the depths of it? Yet it is a power of my mind, and it belongs to my nature. But I do not myself grasp all that I am. Thus the mind is far too narrow to contain itself. But where can that part of it be which it does not contain? Is it outside and not in itself? How can it be, then, that the mind cannot grasp itself?
A great marvel rises in me; astonishment seizes me. Men go forth to marvel at the heights of mountains and the huge waves of the sea, the broad flow of the rivers, the vastness of the ocean, the orbits of the stars, and yet they neglect to marvel at themselves. Nor do they wonder how it is that, when I spoke of all these things, I was not looking at them with my eyes–and yet I could not have spoken about them had it not been that I was actually seeing within, in my memory, those mountains and waves and rivers and stars which I have seen, and that ocean which I believe in–and with the same vast spaces between them as when I saw them outside me. But when I saw them outside me, I did not take them into me by seeing them; and the things themselves are not inside me, but only their images. And yet I knew through which physical sense each experience had made an impression on me.
Regarding #22, when I see people say things like "just scientists being too cowardly to try interesting things," I know that they don't really understand the system.
Many scientists are mad keen to study interesting things, but there are large and powerful organisations whose sole job is to make it extremely awkward for them to do so.
See, for example : https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/
The AI Pop sounds no worse or more nonsensical than most of what humans play on the radio these days.
In The Interests Of Science, I shall try playing these selections to some teenage humans and report back my findings. To be fair, I think you need an attractive, "quirky but relatable" singer if you really want to make it big, especially since for humans, music seems mostly to be a lifestyle accessory.
Any volunteers?
>So far, the answer has been “nobody actually does this in real life, so it’s an annoying troll argument and not something we really need to think about”.
I don't think it's a troll argument at all, even if few people actually did it and it was just something that people could potentially do.
Same for "trans-racial".
>31...
There needs to be a decentralised Wikipedia. I don't like the idea of a single decision-making body making those decisions on behalf of everyone who uses Wikipedia (I.e. basically everyone).
Ian Clarke (the guy behind Freenet) had an idea for one based on his new project (which is confusingly now called "Freenet" while the old Freenet is now called "Hyphanet"). It was based on X's community notes.
#30 - "evidence suggesting there is no theoretical ceiling on what the price could climb to" - After witnessing two bubbles, Iowa farmland in the 1980s and the stock market bubble of 1987, I formulated the rule that if people in the market said "There is no fundamental limit to how high prices can go." then there's a bubble going on and you should be prepared to exit the market quickly. It predicted the Boston housing bubble of 1990 perfectly and has done well since then.
>18. Board of Supervisors overturns veto...
Isn't this the body that just had a bunch of seats replaced in an election, that led to the Chronicle decrying that SF was no longer a progressive city? I was under the impression (admittedly I don't follow this very closely) that many of these new members were pretty YIMBY. Was I wrong about their politics or wrong about it being the Board of Supervisors?
# 7 - This was a good discussion. I mostly sum my takeaway as "it's the remote work and isolated activity, stupid". Community manifests organically around shared activity in shared space. Interest in this topic has spiked since COVID, that's no coincidence. Contriving a community for community's sake is a non-starter.
I expect some overlap in terms of interest with a demographic that has failed to capitalize on prime relationship-building years in school, with extra-curriculars, and early career. I did as well, and incidentally, I was also spending leisure time mindlessly consuming things at the computer and being avoidant before it was cool. If I were now to think to myself "oh shit, I want a community", while working from home and having family obligations, I'd have an uphill battle. Hence the appeal of a fantasy non-committal "I want people to hang with nearby but only when I feel like it, and without the overhead of maintaining friendship, and I don't actually want to do anything taxing, and and..."
On #7, community: at a recent gathering at my house, a new guest turned to me and asked, “Do people…do this?”
Of course, we do, but much less often than we used to, for several reasons.
Most social life in the past among women and mixed-sex groups was driven by unemployed women, with servants, in their houses. Now, we have many fewer unemployed women, and women who don’t work generally have kids and feel they need to center their lives around the kids. There’s even an attitude out there that’s it’s wrong for mother to have too active a social life, because she shouldn’t drink or she shouldn’t take time and attention away from the kids.
Almost no one has household staff, which makes it a lot harder to clean and prepare and serve food. (I deal with this by serving snacks rather than dinner and relying on convenience foods instead of making my own hors d’oeuvres, but it’s still exhausting.) No servants also means that it’s harder to corral the kids in another room and have an adult-centered gathering.
Housing…is a problem for reasons you’re all familiar with. Either you have an apartment in the city that’s too small for hosting or you have a house in the suburbs and people have to travel 30-60 minutes to get to you.
People also really do not know the etiquette of socializing that was familiar to previous generations. Not RSVPing is the norm. And of the people on my invite list, maybe 1/6 have ever reciprocated. I’m not mad, I get it, but it adds to the burden on the host.
Not knowing the rules contributes to high levels of anxiety for both guests or hosts. You don’t know what to wear or when to show up or if you’re really welcome. Or you invite 20 people and get 4 responses. I think these factors push towards inviting only a few people you’re already close to, instead of taking the initiative to reach out to acquaintances or work friends and injecting new energy into the group.
So…it’s still worth having a social life if you can. I’m glad I overcame the social anxiety to start hosting, but I understand why people don’t.
#20 is just a tweet saying - "scientific materialism is true guys! Hume said so!"
Is there anyone at AI labs, or who has done serious thinking on the topic, about the implications for AI assuming non-materialist explanations for consciousness?
Youtuber Dan Olson made an amazing two-hours documentary about the post-Gamestop meme-stock thing, This Is Financial Advice. I highly recommend it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pYeoZaoWrA
Scott wrote, with regard to Robert Whitaker's "Mad in America" organization: "I find MiA really deceptive...". I hope that Scott finds the time to write a full-blown post about MiA and why he thinks it's deceptive. I've been following Whitaker's work for years, and I find that it's consistent with my experience from having worked in the pharmaceutical industry, and it's also consistent with what I've observed of conventional psychiatric practices (two members of my family were harmed by their psychiatric care).
> Re 22 & IQ
Tangentially, in my discussions with @Eremolalos about @Dan Elton's comment in Open Thread 323 — given that influenza and (especially) measles in addition to COVID have longer-term effects on cognitive health — I'm wondering if the Flynn Effect isn't just due to overall better health in human populations? Fewer viral infections = better cognitive health (and possibly the lowering of our body temps that we've been seeing. Just a wildass hypothesis. I'll leave it up to the student to analyze the data for correlations. ;-)
(1) Andrew Sullivan asks "When did we decide we didn’t give a fuck about anyone else in public anymore?"
(2) The sub-head from The New Yorker answers:
"The classical-education movement seeks to fundamentally reorient schooling in America. Its emphasis on morality and civics has also primed it for partisan takeover."
Morality and civics (like "don't blast your music in public") are very nice, but the problem is that, well, you know. Partisans. It's too much in the wheelhouse of Christians and conservatives. It would be racist and anti-LGBT to teach kids those kinds of things, and it would be anti-public schooling as well (we can't teach *that* in public schools, even if we can fight for the right of school libraries to have all kinds of works on their shelves, so it's these elite private schools and kooky Christian brainwashing centres who would teach it).
And that's why, Andy, nobody under the age of us old farts was taught to behave in public because the streets are not our living rooms.
#19, I think a bigger issue than big stereos is loud cars! I see it way more often, and it’ll wake you in the middle of the night. Mufflers should be required.
As an aside, my city (Philly) just elected a mayor who seems really serious about cracking down on these kinds of quality of life crimes.
#26, I don’t think reading the classics makes you a better person directly, but reading old shit and learning history generally make you realize that humans really haven’t changed that much. I think this makes you less neurotic, because you have a point of comparison for the problems of the modern world.
> 19. Andrew Sullivan speaks out against noise
Is this a cultural difference thing (US vs EU)? Very rarely I see people going around blasting music, and bast majority of people around me think they're assholes. The only time they're semi-acceptable is on a bike where people won't hear you for long.
Do you still plan to have a conversation with the CEO of the far out initiative?
"Our culture has been inundated by false views of our origins, teaching that we evolved from ape-like ancestors. While most evolutionists are probably not racists, the philosophy they hold is inherently racist, implying that some people groups are more closely related to apes than others. For example, the late Stephen Jay Gould, a leading evolutionist of the 20th century, acknowledged that acceptance of evolution spurred the rapid growth of racism . . . Our goal in building a Babel attraction at the Ark Encounter is to proclaim mankind’s true history as described in God’s Word. In doing so, we will boldly confront racist and ethnocentric philosophies and practices."
This is a great opportunity for Christian apologists to remind me that I should look the other way at the irrationality of religion because it provides a bulwark against wokeness.
26. I liked Dante (in translation), not so much for Aristotle. Teaching Latin (or really any foreign language for that matter) strikes me as a massive waste of time. Yes, I know French literature is much better in the original language than in translation, but even in "good" schools the bulk of students haven't read a great deal of English literature and won't be reading French literature once they (don't) master the language. I suspect that much of the motivation is a reluctance to say too explicitly what they're against.
I'mma give that IQ thing a try - don't have Scott's email so consider this a pre-registration, happy to share the details once I confirm them with my group and George.
"Likely cause is de-policing making cities reluctant to enforce noise ordinances,"
I love how you just uncritically state that this was a real thing that happened. Which cities actually decreased their police forces, and when. Where is the evidence that cities have gotten significantly louder since? Surely some decibel meter s could at least answer that. Or is this all just based on centrist copsucker vibes?
"Invasion Literature was a type of proto-alternate-history, especially popular in the early 1900s, where the reader’s country was invaded by a superior foe."
Not just the early 1900s. In the 1970s, there was "The Third World War" by John Hackett, and 1980 had "Silent Night: The Defeat of NATO." Both were written by former British Army officers who were worried that NATO was vulnerable to Soviet attack. In Hackett's book, the Soviets were stopped after a limited strategic nuclear exchange (but only because NATO had increased spending and readiness in the years before his near-future war). In Joly's book, the Soviets won within a day thanks to complete surprise.
And there were a bunch in the 1980s - Tom Clancy and Harold Coyle come to mind.
There were threads about Walt Bismarck on DSL:
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,11268
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,11282.0.html
Does anyone know a good way of getting stats such as "countries by number of CCTV cameras per area"? (I want to know how many the UK has; I've heard it's bad)
Re: #7
I suspect that what people really want is a community that aggressively screens out people who don’t belong on the same wavelength. If it’s a gym community you need someone to aggressively kick out anyone who skips 2 gym sessions in a row. If it’s a party community you want to immediately kick out anyone who does too many or too few lines of coke on a given night, etc.
"Classical education" is realistically just for filthy-rich members of the aristocracy whose children couldn't fail at life even if they tried, right? Like, this can't possibly be a useful way to structure education in the 21st century. Even when this sort of thing was contemporary, it was primarily for members of the aristocracy.
I was email bombed in 2021 after I wrote a piece about my bipolar medications, just a sudden avalanche of really nasty emails about how I'm a sheep letting Big Pharma wreck my body, and I'm about 90% sure it was organized on Mad in America's forums
> While most evolutionists are probably not racists, the philosophy they hold is inherently racist, implying that some people groups are more closely related to apes than others.
I'm using every brain cell in my body to try and interpret this statement charitably, but I really cannot come up with any explanation other than, "Whoever wrote this does not understand the theory of evolution."
re: superstonk
Folding Ideas has a great video about this: This is Financial Advice 💎🙌
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pYeoZaoWrA&ab_channel=FoldingIdeas
Wiki + Babel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pieter_Bruegel_the_Elder_-_The_Tower_of_Babel_(Vienna)_-_Google_Art_Project_-_edited.jpg
terrific open thread this one , thanks 🙏🏻
"San Francisco’s utility is as a giant spiritual prison that keeps the sort of people who enjoy living in San Francisco [...] from bothering everyone else."
Huh, I once made exactly the same point about Los Angeles. I propose walling off California entirely.
The New Yorker article was surprisingly complimentary of Classical learning, given its lens.
(EDIT: the article itself is not very critical, but the New Yorker in general u expect to have a progressive lens.)
But having interacted with schools like this - they teach at a high level and offer a very interdisciplinary humanities education, rather than being stupid rote learning.
I'm really upset Diane Ravitch, whose book "Language Police" is brilliant , thinks it's so evil.
From Wikipedia's list of invasion literature:
"The Tunnel Thru the Air, Or, Looking Back from 1940 is a science fiction novel written by market forecaster William Delbert Gann in 1927. In the Foreword, Gann hinted that this book is more than just a novel because it "contains a valuable secret, clothed in veiled language. Some will find it the first time they read it, others will see it in the second reading, but the greatest number will find the hidden secret when they read it the third time." Some traders believe Gann has encoded some techniques of financial astrology into this book."
Did anyone ever discover the valuable secret? Could we be the first to do it? How sure are we that there isn't a hidden society of expert traders who have all read the same obscure 1920s science fiction novel three times?
Somewhat related to #25, this is a really thought-provoking essay about the replication crisis:
https://goodscience.substack.com/p/hot-dogs-cancer-cells-replication
(free to read, I think)
> Re #18: "...and growing consensus that building more houses has to be part of the solution..."
Where is this consensus that we need more housing coming from? San Francisco ranks among the top 10 major metro areas in the number of *surplus* housing units (per DeedClaim). Comparing the median price of 2 bdr condos (per Redfin), it doesn't look like the per capita availability of housing units affects pricing. The problem with SF is that there's a shortage of cheap housing. The only way you get that is if you build subsidized housing like the UK's council flats.
And if you think that building more units will significantly reduce prices... According to DeedClaim, SF has eighteen thousand surplus units. How many more surplus units would SF have to build to bring prices down to Chicago's levels? Twenty thousand more? Forty thousand more?
Rank, City - Population - surplus units - surplus per capita - median price
#1 New Yor - 8,336,000 - 66,755 - 0.008 - $1,650,000
#3 Los Angeles - ,822,000 - 18,514 - 0.005 - $1,190,000
#2 Chicago - 2,665,000 - 20,812 - 0.008 - $365,000
#8 San Francisco - 808,437 - 18,514 - 0.007 - $1,280,000
https://www.deedclaim.com/housing-shortages/#:~:text=The%20U.S.%20Cities%20with%20the%20Biggest%20Housing%20Surpluses&text=On%20the%20other%20side%20of,positive%20sign%20for%20the%20state.
> conventional wisdom that everyone wants to end daylight savings time changes
Genuinely thought it was just Congressman Jonah Ryan who wanted it. And then he was removed from the ballot to be replaced by Ezra Kane and that was the end of that.
30. So I had a look at the Gamestop stock price chart (https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GME) and it shows that the price rose rapidly from $1 to $80 in 2021 January, and then slowly ramped down to around $10 today. What's the deal with that? It doesn't seem to make sense under the short squeeze hypothesis, but also not under the hypothesis that the original $1 price was rational.
Sample size of 5 so grain of salt:
The more conservative of my circle send their kids to one of them there classical academies; 3 boys and 2 girls.
Over a couple years, they failed to teach any of them to read at an age appropriate level (remediated by giving them books they were interested in reading) and catastrophically failed to teach them math ( can't multiply fractions / rely on memorizing tables for multiplication/ don't know what an exponent is, etc.)
They all stayed with the school for culture war reasons, of course.
I imagine the bad type of this school mainly exists as a kinda of liminal statue avatar 'don't want my kids corrupted by woke concepts like the differential'; and if there is a good type it is run by autists for autists.
Also oof on suburbs.
A miserable gaping wound in existence where it's too built up to be the country and not built up enough to be a city; full of people who will take the final exist the very instant they run out of their off prescription opiates. A giant spiritual Chipotle(tm), completely devoid of anything of value which suckles on the tax money teat of the urb while crying and moaning about services.
tldr: Pick one! Live in the human ant hive or the woods; and quit trying to turn MY patch of woods into fucking tract homes so you can destroy anything worthwhile and then commute to the place you 'left' from.
The superstonk people are fascinating. They are hilariously wrong about almost everything. And I still don't get their weird hate boner for short sellers. If anything they generally will find frauds and if the company is not a fraud it provides a termporary chance to get in cheaper for long term investors. Oh and most hedge funds are long only, or mostly long only. Hating the shorts with this much passion or thinking they are some kind of proxy for the elites is completely irrational.
Keith Gill really played it perfectly too. Went long, stuck up for the longs, made a shit ton of money, then dissappeared of the scene completely probably cashing out near the top for multi million $. Accidently starting a cult/religion in the process.
If he would have stuck around, people would probably have turned on him.
#7 the sad thing about communities is that if they happen organically, we usually accept what we get and appreciate stoically that it could have been much worse, but if we try to create them on purpose, nothing feels good enough and the perfect becomes the enemy of good.
I notice it myself: when I interact with our neighbors or with parents of my kids' classmates, I am very happy that they are all generally highly intelligent and nice people. But when I imagine a "community" that I would like to have around me, my criteria become much stronger, I basically imagine a LW/ACX meetup, which unfortunately is unrealistic without moving to a different country. Even if, realistically, I would probably be much happier if I had more social interactions with the people who currently are around me.
Another thing is that community that exists explicitly for the purpose of being a generic community, is weird, and easily becomes a magnet for people with lower social skills. (It is not necessarily a problem with having a few of those; the problem is when they become a majority.) Basically, look at Mensa. There needs to be at least a pretext of "we meet in order to do X together", where X could perhaps be improving the neighborhood, or preparing some fun for the kids. And then it can evolve to 1 hour of doing X together followed by 3 hours of just relaxing and talking.
People sometimes ask if gay men can become Buddhist monks. My understanding is that the Vinaya, the monastic code, refers to actual behavior and not metaphysical inner essences when saying that monks are not allowed to have sex.
On the other hand, we have a western idea that a gay man is still gay even if they dont have sex with anyone.
And then the sociologists gave us "men who havre sex with men" .. without, necessarily, being gay.
it would seem only a short step from that to lesbians who only have sex with men,
Re. "How The Alt-Right Won", it sounds like the far "right" and the far "left" have identical strategies. Which of course we all should have known since about 1917, when the term "right wing" politics was first used. At that time it meant the moderate wing of the communist party, which wanted to make peace with Germany, and evolved into Leninism and Nazism. (The left wing was the communists who wanted to keep fighting WW1 but turn it into revolutionary war like Napoleon's.)
The left and right have always been basically the same thing IMHO. Both right and left want to unmake the Enlightenment changes that ended feudalism, which is why both always create feudalist states. Until lately I could distinguish between them by saying the right was based on racial hate and the left on class hate, but now both are based on racial hatred. Now I suppose the original distinction applies again: the left is that branch of radical revolutionaries who want to export the revolution internationally and build a world government, while the right is that branch which wants revolution only nationally.
How do any of you distinguish theoretically between left and right?
> 2. In my circles it’s conventional wisdom that everyone wants to end daylight savings time changes, but the government is too sclerotic to make it happen. So I was surprised to learn that ...
> 24: How The Alt-Right Won, by a alt-right veteran and tactician. ... I owe all the misinformation experts and antifa people and so on an apology - the way they thought the alt-right worked, even the paranoid-sounding bits, is exactly how the alt-right self-conceptualized themselves as working.
@Scott: In cases like these, where you realize that what you believed was incorrect, do you update your epistemology (ie: how you go about forming your beliefs)? If so, how? If not, why not? Perhaps your prior on the truthfulness of conventional wisdom within your circles might be too high...
Hume’s tweet lines up with both Catholic and Hindu theological arguments for a soul that goes beyond the material world. Catholics argued we have souls because we can perceive “universals” such as, the idea of a triangle, which applies to _all_ triangles rather than particular ones. Sadghuru (I’m guessing based on the Vedas) argues that our minds are just an accumulation of sense data, but that we can do things by means of our energy body that cannot be explained by mere accumulation of data. So both Catholics and Hindus independently came to the conclusion that humans do things which cannot be accomplished merely by accumulating a bunch of impressions.
Given LLM’s, these now seem to be testable claims! Try asking an LLM to refactor two code bases to extract our common methods, and you’ll see they are terrible at even very simple cases. I’ve also found ways to ask the LLM questions about situations which clearly involve triangles, but so long as I don’t use language line “points” and “lines”, the LLM’s whiff and make absurd claims about the geometry of right triangles.
Universal Love is kind of a banger.
> While most evolutionists are probably not racists, the philosophy they hold is inherently racist, implying that some people groups are more closely related to apes than others.
No, human generations are approximately thirty years long whether you're Amish or an excessively stuffy secular atheist. Being that Y-chromosomal Adam and Mitochondrial Eve both lived around 100-300kya, well after the hominids split off from the other apes, all groups are ~equally related to apes.
If your argument against permanent DST is about danger to kids walking to school, I have some news for you about how the 2020s differ from the 1970s.
Also: My high school started at 7:30, so for much of the year it was dark anyway when I got on the bus, and most days I had after school things that ran until 4 or 5, so in winter it was dark when I went home too.
Where should I go to watch the eclipse? Coming from Georgia.
PS, Substack is still annoyingly slow
3: Angujim lifna, hemimq zfrojan!
I increased my IQ once, by 28 points, without too much effort. IQ is, by definition, ability to do IQ tests, and I did one from a book of IQ tests (Check Your Own IQ, by Hans Eysenck, to be precise). Two days later I did another test from the same book and, because i was familiar with the questions and had worked out strategies for getting the right answers, got a score 28 points higher.
I suspect most people could increase their IQs by doing lots of IQ tests.
I finally got around to listening to the LessWrong team's album and "The Litany of Tarrrrrski" is beautiful:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ8SiN3CnAk
"Beliefs should stem from reality, yo ho!
From what actually is, me lads,
Not from what's convenient!"
Nihil Supernum goes really hard too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNkJmAWWu9s
(Sorry for the highly unnecessary comment, I was just delighted by this!)
> 23: Did you know: the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs struck Earth in the spring.
I did in fact know this! (Proof, just for shits and giggles: https://www.schlaugh.com/~/yAgxOcZ)
I'm sure this is zero percent surprising to you. <3 "Oh, Neike knows dinosaur trivia" is, after all, a totally shocking revelation. :)
#10 Uh, yes, it was on the evening news. (Your youth is showing, Scott!)
GWAS will be consigned to the dustbin of science in the next few years, and we’ll all be slightly embarrassed we spent so much time talked about them.
GWAS are like trying to categorize books (genomes) based on statistics about word (SNP) usage. Makes sense if you can’t read, but we CAN read DNA. With the AI solution of protein folding, we have all the tools now to sequence whole genomes, identify impactful differences in DNA that result in altered protein expression/function, and predict consequences for enzyme pathways.
This kind of personalized genome “reading” will reveal the actual causes of diseases like schizophrenia. Instead of arguing about useless GWAS r-value correlations, we will have clinically-meaningful understanding about what is going wrong - and maybe how to treat it.
>I don’t know how else to make public places livable for people with noise sensitivity.
>I rarely go out any more without earplugs and headphones on,
Seems like you know one method?
I also have sensory sensitivities that make it hard to do a lot of things in public, and I would be happy to find people making reasonable accommodations of their own accord and am happy to publicize the need for them, but I wouldn't want the government forcing people to cater to me to such an extent.
>r/superstonk (FAQ here) is the subreddit for people who believe that the true Gamestop short squeeze is still coming,
To me, [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pYeoZaoWrA) is the definitive video essay on the topic.
> When our descendants ask why they’re stuck speaking 4,900 fractal hyper-languages, we’re going to have the most embarrassing possible explanation.
Maybe we should be more worried about the massive project to build a machine god by bringing together all human language in a nuclear powered datacenter.
Regarding 19, complaints about noise have unfortunately been subsumed into a larger culture war. The more likely criticism of Sullivan isn't that he's old, but that he's racist or bigoted. This 2022 Atlantic article is a great example of what I mean:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/09/let-brooklyn-be-loud/670600/
It's paywalled, but the author characterizes her neighborhood noise as part of the culture. In her framing, it's Andrew Sullivan is asking to gentrify her community by drastically changing the culture, which doesn't view loud noises as disrespectful. It'd be like a Finn going to Italy and complaining that no one respects his personal space. Sullivan quotes a few people saying that they believe others won't mind listening to a tinny bluetooth, but he doesn't seem to believe them. I don't think this is necessarily self-centeredness, but just two mutually-exclusive norms clashing.
Also, I don't think Sullivan really appreciates how racialized this conflict is in American discourse. A conflict over a boom box was a major plot point in Do The Right Thing. That Atlantic author would read Sullivan's complaint and accuse him of wanting to kill Radio Raheem.
For number 17, I think you’re missing what the “annoying troll argument” is actually about. The “so why can’t I (a woman) identify as a transwoman?” line isn’t an argument “against transgender”: it’s an argument against the people who have gone so far as to claim that *sex* (not gender) is socially constructed, that sex doesn’t actually matter *for anything*, that male people who identify as women are in fact female, that there are no differences between “trans women” and any other women (“just like there’s no difference between black women and women” is the standard line), that male people who ‘transitition’ become female and start getting periods, and that sex (not gender) is a meaningless thing that is “assigned at birth” for everyone.
If you haven’t tried to reason with such people, or at least provide some response so that the normies making actual decisions about policy can see how ridiculous this is, and if you haven’t ever had to explain to a child that someone writing a jokey line about “actually humans have four sexes” once in a scientific article doesn’t mean ‘science’ doesn’t agree that humans have two sexes nor does the existence of clownfish mean that the technology exists for humans to actually change sex, and you haven’t tried to explain who should get invites for cervical smears and who should get invites for prostate exams (and that our medical records should have some way of spotting which group you’re in), then you are missing the context of why someone would want to prompt people to acknowledge that there are differences between male and female bodies which remain (and we need to be able to refer to) despite how people identify.
Basically, it’s more to do with the mess around people identifying as intersex (while fewer and fewer people with disorders of sex development identify as intersex) than it is about trying to argue “against transgender”.
Re: the Night Czar
One of the Candidates for the upcoming London Mayoral election, one Count Binface, has included in his manifesto that he will replace the Night Czar with a Night Mayor and put their head quarters on Elm Street.
https://www.countbinface.com/2024-manifesto
1. There's no such thing as a "Shadow Lord" in British politics. As the text at the link shows, it's Shadow Lord Chancellor, that is, the opposition spokesperson who shadows (speaks in response to) the Lord Chancellor. In any case Lord Chancellor is now an obsolete term; the person holding that formal title is now normally referred to as the Justice Secretary.
10. You didn't know that? I thought it was well-known. Nixon's daughter is called Julie Nixon EIsenhower; how do you think she got the Eisenhower part?
19. My minimal recent experience with public transit is that the playing of loud music has, if anything, gone down over the years.
Re the piece by Katherine Dee, people are getting quite explicit about it. From The Cut:
Waiting for a baby here mostly entails talking. “When I say we hope that the baby will be gay, I think maybe we’re all saying that we hope the baby will have an aesthetic life,” says Lily later as we curl up on the couch in their Brownstone Brooklyn living room
https://www.thecut.com/article/daniel-lavery-grace-lavery-lily-woodruff-brooklyn-interview.html?utm_campaign=thecut&utm_medium=s1&utm_source=insta
I would think hanging out with the kind of student who wants to focus on the classics makes you a worse person, not better. The classics held the role that they did for so long because we had zero to very minor progression in human knowledge during that time--they were the peak of knowledge! Now they no longer are. The kind of person who enjoyed studying Aristotle in 1300 would prefer advanced linear algebra and Derek Parfit today.
Speaking of Wikipedia vandalisation, I am surprised that this one was not enclosed in the list:
A Chinese housewife, has neither advanced degree, nor fluent in English or Russian, created >200 interconnected articles with intricate details about falsified aspects of medieval Russian history and was considered a domain expert in the community until busted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhemao_hoaxes
The adverse selection of 'open communities' from the subreddit rings especially true. A single bad apple can genuinely ruin a social gathering. Like I think the ratio might be 20 'good apples' to 1 'bad apple' in terms of canceling them out.
Even a slightly higher prevalence of bad apples in open communities (and I bet it could be much higher) can be totally debilitating.