Compare slipping off a balcony and falling toward a hard surface from the 50th vs the 10th floor. Would you similarly prefer falling from the 50th floor (extremely high chance of dying) to falling from the 10th floor (small chance of surviving, crippled)? I would prefer the 10th-floor fall, and also living through the nuclear war - not that it matters what I would prefer.
Does being crippled sound like an individual-scale metaphor for the aftermath of a full-scale nuclear war? If not, is there a better one?
It's a fairly funny skit on Biblical criticism and the much-beloved Q document which is hypothesised to have existed, even though there is no evidence it did:
And of course the search for the Historical as against the Cosmic etc. personage, with some Mythicists claiming they never existed but were made up out of existing traditions and legends 😀
Maybe it was just an ugly set of scribbled notes, and all the important bits got copied into Matthew and Luke? Maybe it got dropped down the back of the couch, or caught fire? It's not that hard to imagine how a document could go missing.
Maybe Q wasn't actually a document, but a person (you could call him Q-anon), an old man who remembered a bunch of things that Jesus said, and got interviewed by both Matthew and Luke.
Well the latter is what I suspect, given oral tradition at the time. Although it may not have been one man. As to the document Q, why not copy that rather than write your own? Or why didn't it get multiple copies if it had at least 4.
Lots of important documents got lost between ancient times and now. Not for any particular reason; just, things get lost or destroyed. The Gospels are huge outliers in terms of the number of copies that got made.
Also Richard Whately's "Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Buonaparte", which was written a few years earlier as a satirical rebuttal to Hume's essay on miracles.
I think the main argument of #25 is simply that it's not a *civilization-ending* event. The author would likely agree that diabetics dying would happen, and would be significant and bad. But it doesn't really bear all that much on the topic under discussion. It would be a tremendous tragedy, but I don't think the survival of diabetics will be the make-or-break for whether humanity continues to exist in the wake of nuclear war, so I can understand their omitting it.
(edit) to put it another way: if you think that people would be alive to worry about increased cancer rates, then you agree with the main point of #25's argument.
I also think #25 is poorly thought through. If we look at just the impact that COVID + Ever Given has had global logistics I can't image what the impact of a nuclear strike on a major US or European port would be. Heck a single strike on northern NJ that takes out NYSE data centers could probably create a complete break down of the worlds financial system. The author is too sure of their conclusions. The unknown unknowns are much too great.
Not to mention that a nuclear strike could be not so bad, but is obviously EXTREMELY bad for whoever is at the target at the time. The economic miracle of the 1950s in the US is a amazing but I don't think you can look at it and say "WW2 wasn't so bad".
The author's conclusion is essentially that we get set back about a century. That'd be bad, especially as we had a pretty strong century, but we'd recover by 2150 or 2200. In other worlds, no x risk.
However I am not convinced by his axiom that a nuclear exchange will revolve around strategic infrastructure. I see a nuclear exchange as a prelude to an extended struggle at a lower level of technology, and as such the best option would be countervalue strikes targeting population structures and civilian infrastructure to maximally set back the adversary state.
The "lower level of technology" is really a lower level of *industrialization*. We'd lose a very little off the top in terms of things we could theoretically build, e.g. the nanometer chip fabs would be gone beyond near-term reconstruction, but there would still be places that could make small batches of 80486s or whatever.
But low level of industrialization means your "extended struggle" is inherently local, because nobody has the logistics for serious global power projection. Yes, the Russians will probably still be trying to crush Ukraine when all they have are stone knives and bear cavalry, but they won't be able to march on Berlin (or vice versa) for quite some time. There may be a Russo-Chinese war, but it will be a border conflict in mostly-uninhabitable Siberia. And nobody will be invading the United States.
What happens to the technology when the generation which was educated before WW3 is dead? There's a lot of tacit knowledge that will be gone/have to be reconstructed, and people won't necessarily have the time to learn even the overt knowledge.
Why? If we get in a shooting war with Russia, is anyone planning to nuke Taiwan? If not, it's hard to see how the ability to make chips goes away. The US may not be able to make them, or afford them, any more, but the rest of the world should motor on well enough. The biggest catastrophe for the world for a big nuclear exchange is almost certainly economic -- in that the largest consumer economy in the world (that of the US) will go offline for significant period of time.
But I hardly see how India, Indonesia, Brazil, or Chile -- all very civilized and technologically sophisticated places these days -- will be wrecked by a conflict that doesn't come anywhere near their territory and doesn't involve destruction of their people and assets. They'll certainly be impacted, economically, but I don't see it as any worse for them than a serious worldwide recession.
If we get into a shooting war with Russia, China is going to conquer Taiwan and Taiwan is going to get broken in the process.
If we somehow imagine that Taiwan survives unscathed, Taiwan is not an autarky that grows 5-nm wafers from naught but local sand, and its chip fabs will go idle when the container ships stop coming. Since the container ships won't *completely* stop coming, any surviving chip fabs won't go *completely* idle, but they will be massively scaled back.
Also, China almost certainly gets nuked if only because Russia knows that nuked Russia + intact China = Russia as China's bitch and the top priority of the Putin regime is making sure Russia isn't anybody's bitch.
This is a bit paradoxical, isn't it? After this whole thing goes down, you don't really need to care about Russian economy because Russians will have way bigger problems to deal with than invading your American ass. In fact, I expect both the Russian Federation and the USA to stop existing in a single day, being replaced by some combination of small makeshift nation-states and warlord territories where said states cannot project power.
There is an existing organization in the United States that is quite well suited to that role, capable of dealing with massively-FUBARed logistics and outcompeting any other wannabe warlord. That organization is the United States Military, and it is burned into its institutional soul that the United States of America will be one nation-state, not many.
That's possible, but there's only so much negligence a region can suffer from the central authority before it secedes. I'd imagine negligence will be the default attitude given the overwhelming demand for, and meager supply of: critical supplies, order, capacity for force projection.
I did actually look at cancer rates. If my math is wrong, please show me and I'll correct it. As for other things, I think that was covered when I said "a humanitarian catastrophe unprecedented in human history, as the global economy breaks down and regions are pushed back on their own resources". Obviously it would be very bad, but my argument didn't hinge on exactly how bad.
>I don’t know about the nuclear winter question except that I’m not sure oil well fires are a good proxy for multiple multiple nukes.
Chosen as a case where the other side preregistered their hypothesis. They claim it's different in current papers, but I'm working on a longer deconstruction of that one which isn't done yet, and the threshold for "this time it's different" is always right above what we've actually had to deal with.
Note that in the classic nuclear-winter literature, the claim is less "nuclear explosions will kick up dust that will blot out the sun" and mostly "nuclear explosions will start fires that will generate vast plumes of soot that will blot out the sun". With oil fires being a huge part of that, on account of their propensity for fine soot.
So the biggest oil fire you've got, is the best model validation you can get. Anyone who is serious and honest about this, is going to validate their models against the Kuwait oil fires, not volcanoes. And if your models overpredict stratospheric soot and cooling from those fires, you adjust the risk of nuclear winter *down*, at least until you can explain why.
I've read most of the same papers bean has, and my review is archived at SSC. This is really bad science, in the same league as what we'd get if the whole "global warming" debate was turned over to three prestigious scientists who work for Exxon. The bias isn't financial this time (I think), but it's just as strong.
"The radiation [Excess Relative Risk] decreased significantly with...time since exposure (27% per decade; P = 0.001)"
That is, even for people who were most definitely exposed to significant doses of radiation, the odds of this exposure resulting in a cancer *decrease* significantly over time. So where would a long-term increase come from?
Then perhaps you need to express yourself more carefully. What you wrote suggests the ERR increases permanently, or at least over a long time, and that is not at all what the data suggest. What the data suggest is that exposure to radiation jumps up the ERR at the time of the exposure, and then it slowly fades with time.
Sure, the ERR is *detectable* 60 years out -- provided you do very careful research on 100,000 people, like they did here. Does that mean it's a Very Big Deal? Not by itself. Indeed, one thing you'll notice is that in order to dig out the ERR from radiation they had to build a careful accurate model of the ERR for smoking, since the effects of smoking are around the same order of magnitude as being nuked. That alone tells you it isn't an existential-level risk to civilization -- basically, it suggests most of the long-term survivors of a nuclear war (i.e. those that were not killed by immediate effects) would experience the same increased level of cancer risk as if they all took up smoking. Definitely serious, but not civilization-ending by a long shot.
I assume you expected to survive a global thermonuclear war without a netflix outage and with amazon packages arriving on time?
Yes, if you're dependent on a specific, hard to manufacture product you are fucked. You may stochastically get cancer, sucks but hopefully you managed to raise a kid or two in the meantime. For the rest of us, knowing that if you manage to avoid directly getting hit the world will be survivable is really important, and changes the calculus from "guess I'll die lol" to a possibility of you and your family getting through it, if you plan correctly and get lucky.
2: The left-leaning blogosphere (purple) seems tiny compared to the right (orange, yellow). Am I missing something? Does this reflect bifurcation where the left is captured by traditional media and the right embraces "alternative" media like blogs?
17: There are two important Turing tests plant-based meat has to pass: one where it's indistinguishable to my taste buds, and another where it's indistinguishable to my wallet. We shall see if both are achievable...
The left is smaller generally, yes, and certainly at the present moment; but not by enough to explain the marked difference here. It looks like an 80/20 or higher difference in the blog map, while the right/left split in America based on opinion polls is more like 55/45, if that. See e.g. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/generic-ballot/ for an idea of what I'm referring to.
I don't think the 40% of people who choose Democrats on a generic ballot read blogs like Instapundit, ChicagoBoyz, or Powerline. So... where on this chart do they live? What blogs do they read? My current speculation is that they just don't read blogs, they just read and listen to media produced by NYT, WaPo, NPR, and the like.
So my definition of the left is more leftist than America's definition, meaning when I told the OP that the left is a smaller group globally, they replied by misinterpreting my definition of left. I then said that it would be impossible to have this conversation if they were an American, because that would mean our definitions are vastly different and they are casting a wider net than they should be. Since then they turned it into a useless conversation about a No True Scotsman fallacy, the kind you'd see in an elementary school debate.
Meanwhile, the point is still rock solid: the blogosphere has less leftists because they are a smaller group. The OP let their American definition of the left confuse them into not understanding why the blogosphere would have less blogs that identify as left, see here:
"It looks like an 80/20 or higher difference in the blog map, while the right/left split in America based on opinion polls is more like 55/45"
... they are falsely assuming the purple blogosphere represents the one half of the partisan split in American politics, when in reality they represent a smaller group, quite possibly only 20% like the OP thought seemed ridiculous.
Correct. Lizard is making a claim about false Scotsmen, not true Scotsmen. He's claiming that Scotsmen ID test (the notorious ScID Test!) is generating an abnormally high rate of false positives for Scotsmen.
Of course, Lizard is not defining what a true Scotsman is. If kilts were considered the defining test of Scotsmandicity, Lizard would be only saying that the perceived number of men wearing kilts is larger than number of actual Scotsmen wearing kilts. Of course this begs the question of how you define a kilt. If we define a kilt as "a knee-length skirt of pleated tartan cloth" than any ballerina in a tartan tutu would be a Scotsman. And if Lizard had said "No true scotsmen would wear a tartan tutu," that would be a No True Scotsmanism — because Scotsmen have been spotted wearing tartan tutus at the Glasgow's Gay Pride Parade.
But having said that, Lefties can be notoriously parsimonious about who they define as a Lefty. And Righties are downright expansive (dare I say liberal?) in their definition of Lefties.
If you define 'left' to be a smaller group, and then clarify that actually the left is a smaller group, when the person you are responding to was defining the left as a larger group, then you have created the confusion in the post that supposedly clarifies it. The two reasonable definitions are the one that every American knows, and the one that would correspond to the French assembly in the late eighteenth century, i.e. the useful one and the original one. If you have an alternate one, ensure you are not arguing a category argument as a factual argument. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
I've heard two clusters of people earnestly arguing for a narrow definition of "left". Not sure which (if either) Lizard Man is arguing from.
One is people from countries where something like Social Democratic policies and parties are roughly the center of the Overton Window, or by extension, Americans who look at those countries and think they have the right idea. From this perspective, mainstream Democratic Party positions appear to be center-right, mainstream Republican Party positions appear far right, and positions that most Americans would call far right appear to be off the charts. This framework is valid from the perspective of the country the speaker is norming off of, but relatively unhelpful when analyzing American politics: it deviates confusingly from standard usage in that context, and it simultaneously ignores position relative to the status quo, position relative to the Overton Window, and the alignment of typical political battle lines.
The other cluster is people involved or otherwise interested in factional divisions towards the leftward side of the to usual political spectrum, and who wish to draw a general distinction between (if I understand correctly) various Revolutionary Left groups (Soviet-style Communists, Maoists, Trotskyites, Left-Anarchists, etc) and the Democratic Left (mainstream center-left groups, social democrats, progressives, what used to be called Second Internationalists, etc). People in this cluster generally seem to advocate "leftist" for the former and "liberal" for the latter. This is a useful distinction (e.g. it's extremely useful to have terms that distinguish between LBJ and Bernadine Dorhn), and the liberal vs leftist terminology seems like it's be a convenient shorthand in a context where the terms are unambiguously understood in that sense.
The correct definition of "the left" is the one used to categorize the blogosphere map! Any property, regardless of what you call it, that applies to 50% of the population but 20% of the blogosphere requires an explanation
Well, but even if we agree that purpleness should be called "liberalism" or "centrism", we still have that its blogosphere is strangely smaller than the orange and yellow blogospheres!
Academics are well known to be much more left-leaning than the total population. Academics also seem like the sort of people who would be really into blogs.
On 2, yes, both tiny and much less constellation-y. Even Krugman is findable, yet fairly small and peripheral. I think this is more about cross-linking behavior than audience size though, Glenn Greenwald is tiny and I'm not sure where Andrew Sullivan even is, and I'm pretty sure they're bigger than ACT. Also, can anyone help with the distinctions between orange/yellow and teal/red?
Use one of the other two "grouping algorithms" under "settings", I think it makes much more sense when you do so. A clear "right-leaning" cluster, a clear "left-leaning" cluster, a clear "econ" cluster, a clear "rationalist" cluster, and some architecture blogs hanging off to the side.
Yeah this is better. And I like that the algorithm is smart enough to break off the architecture blogs before it tries to split hairs within the conservative & economics clusters.
Greenwald has pretty consistently identified himself as on the left, but he seems to talk about that less and less. His articles are becoming significantly anti-Democrat, even if he's also anti-Republican (probably more anti-Republican, but he doesn't talk about it much). The Republicans disagree with him and move on, but Democrats have gone after him wholesale, and he's reacting negatively on a grand scale.
Following the timeline, he turned against the left when they refused to let him cover a real news story (Hunter Biden). That's still his single biggest pet peeve, but there are a lot of other hypocrisies that get him riled about about the left.
The US has undergone something of a political realignment the last 5-10 years, where divides like populist vs elitist, globalist vs nationalist, orthodox vs heterodox, institutional outsiders vs insiders, et al have become more salient than the old left vs right conflict, at least for some people. Quillette had an article earlier this week about a new politics/punditry mag called Compact, which is apparently run by two conservative Catholics, a Marxist, and a British Feminist philosopher:
It's a brave new world we're livin' in. GG's career is a perfect example of this. I think he remains a principled civil libertarian, a faction which used to be part of the left's big tent (to their credit!), but sadly civil libertarian attitudes have fallen very much out of favor on seemingly both the left and right except in a few contexts over the last ten years or so. Thus a guy like GG becomes politically somewhat homeless, and occasionally does some couch-surfing these days with people on the right.
I like the article on compact. I also think it does a good job of showing the disconnect between how people label themselves vs. their actual written output.
GG is no longer a principled civil libertarian. Again, couch surfing with people who applaud the banning of books means that your principles are somewhat fluid.
Civil libertarianism, in the non-Except-The-Outgroup sense, implies that applauding the banning of books is a thing you should be allowed to do.
I am not seeing whence you derive the implicit premise that being principled implies you can't conduct business with people who don't share your principles (as long as you're not directly helping them to violate your principles). Ostracism for crimethink is implied by some principles, but not all - and *particularly* not civil libertarianism.
Fair enough, but his ex-pals on the left don't seem to have any problem banning books, either. Not to mention tweets, youtube vids, public speakers, or pretty much any other form of communication. Like I said, civil libertarianism is dead.
Absolutely not. I could believe that, say, John Mearsheimer or some of the US national conservatives are useful idiots, with hard emphasis on the "idiot" part. Greenwald is different beast.
I have to think there's a corollary here to the finding that US conservatives are generally more dissatisfied with the GOP than progressives are with the Democrats. Likewise, conservatives (especially youngish 120+ IQ conservatives, which are probably the core audience for blogs) are more dissatisfied with Fox News and its like than progressives are with the MSM.
Conservative media is generally lowbrow, aimed at Boomers and the white working class, which is tough to sit through if you're a young highbrow rightist. White/Asian Democrats are generally college-educated and media aimed at them is more highbrow. You also have black media and Hispanic media targeted at those demographics.
Dissatisfaction with Fox and its ilk rings true to me. With that said, virtually all of the 120+ IQ liberals I know are similarly deeply dissatisfied with the Democrats, so I don't know what breaks the symmetry... (edit to add: if you have any sources for the finding that conservatives are more alienated than liberals, I'd love to take a peek.)
68% of self-identified Republicans polled had a favorable opinion of the Republican Party, vs. 86% of Democrats for the Democratic Party. It only shows a few years there, and you can see that it briefly shot up for Republicans in early 2015 but otherwise was lower.
I'll also observe that most of the time in Presidential elections, right-populist + libertarian third-party candidates outperform the third-party leftist candidates, which is probably a signal of major-party dissatisfaction. Nader's run in the 2000 election was a notorious exception, and 2004-2008 were basically even with a minimal third-party presence, but my rule held true for 1992-96, and 2012-20.
I'd have guessed the left was more operating on social media like Twitter than writing "traditional" blogs? But that might be more "leftists", whereas you're wondering where all the generic milquetoast American left-wing people are also? A hypothesis there is that non-leftist left-wing Americans don't really generate discourse because their brand and ideology do not filter for the kind of people with a burning need to get their essays out there even if they have little power to implement it. But that may be too pat?
There’s probably at least some truth to the point that if you’re a generic leftist (and not a neo-Trotskyite or something) you can still satisfy much of your demand for leftist discourse from generic social media. Maybe you’re a fan of Star Wars and want to discuss it from a leftist perspective or read others doing so. Just go to r/starwars or whatever. Rightists always get chased out of such places unless they stay in the closet.
If you want to discuss Marvel with rightists, you will need to find a dedicated niche rightist community in which to do it.
That's a good point! (I don't read enough non SSC/ACX blogs to tell: are many of the right-wing blogs on the Blogosphere Chart "general blogs that happen to be by rightists and not shy about that fact"? I was sort of assuming they were actively political blogs at least as much as SSC/ACX.)
I guess I don’t think of this as an actively political blog. But a lot of blogging is reacting to current events. Science news, TV/movies, sports, etc. Or it can be doing a deep dive on topics of intellectual interest like history.
For example Instapundit is a big circle on there and it discusses a lot of topics of general interest.
It's not the most political of blogs, but it's got a regular "philosophy of government" feature in the form of the Dictator Book Club and Scott more generally talks about economy and the government a lot. It's a much more political blog than, I dunno, an opera review blog.
Regarding plant-based meat, my bet on that prediction depends heavily on the precise resolution criteria. Can plant-based meat be indistinguishable form a McDonalds patty? it's basically already there. Can it be indistinguishable from a good steak? I doubt we'll get there in decades.
you think a plant based steak that will be indistinguishable from a "good steak" will take decades? That's longer than most people's AGI prediction lmfao. 0 iq comment
your comment on 17 is something people would look back at in 300 years and view as completely asinine. I'm sorry the life of an animal is not worth a small difference in your tastebuds or a few dollars. Or you could just eat one of the millions of delicious plant dishes like curry.
I never watched Kony 2012 because I was already really annoyed by liberals slacktivism (I was ahead of the curve!).
BUT - from a purely marketing/tagline standpoint I could never understand why they wanted to ELECT this bad guy, Kony, in 2012. Wouldn't deposing/arresting him be preferrable? STOP KONY 2012. Was printing those extra four letters on red t-shirts really that much more expensive?
Look, in hindsight Obama vs. Romney was pretty good set of guys to choose from considering everything that's happened since, but some of us felt it was time for genuinely radical change.
HA! I"m sure the gentleman running KONY 2012 offered to fly Kony over from Uganda and that's what finally got him MK'ultra'd. "These two guys just dont' have what America needs. We need more barbarism, jungle living, and sexual assault! I mean one of these suits is a mormon! blech! America needs you Kony!"
"Rather than attacking Museveni’s army, Kony’s forces mainly attacked civilians, kidnapping children and training them to rob, maim, and kill people they believed supported Museveni. How could this possibly advance any rational goal?
What Lewis, along with the filmmakers behind the Kony 2012 video, fail to point out is that Museveni’s forces also seemed to behave irrationally. They were strong enough to defeat Kony but delayed doing so for decades. According to one of Museveni’s commanders, Kony surrendered in 1992, but then Museveni ordered his release. ...
Museveni shrewdly suppressed Kony’s pamphlets and speeches, and asserted, both to his own people and to Uganda’s foreign aid donors and diplomats, that Kony was simply crazy....
As Kony continued to wreak havoc, Museveni bolstered his own image as a champion of peace and stability. Sympathetic donors poured ever more foreign aid into his coffers, even though he and his henchmen were stealing much of it with impunity and his forces were also inflicting terror."
I'm sure someone will chime in with more correct info - but it's my understanding he was/(is?) the leader of a militia that liked to murder and rape people for fun (especially kids i think) - and that he started out in Uganda but then hung out in some nearby countries.
I mean what where the child soilders for? To be sent into the villages to find more people to rape and murder presumably. But yeah, I'm ok with these memories being intentionally vague.
The Kony story is less about the person of Kony (who is still alive but not actually very influential any more) and more about the documentary being just a vehicle for the filmmakers to make money/get attention. By the time the movies came out Kony had been pushed out of Uganda many years before so the whole point of the money (Kony is a terrible war lord) was pointless.
I think we're all relatively aware of that, hence referring to the KONY movie as slacktivism. And I think a common criticism way back in 2012 was that while Kony was still a problem he was now a problem in countries neighboring Uganda, but wasn't in Uganda itself anymore. I agree with the Twitter OP about Kony 2012 being a pivot point in politics - but from my limited vantage point I think all it did was further calcify and create cynicism for anyone who wasn't a SJW - and yes I know SJW wasn't a term in 2012.
Also read about it today just for giggles - and it's not clear if he's currently dead or not. But the general consensus I found was 'lean toward dead'.
The idea pitched in the video was that after this flashmob-like operation, "everyone would know his name," and then once people were curious, word would get out about who he was and why he had to be stopped through traditional news media. The election-like branding was just a gimmick. But I do think the idea that using ironic marketing to convey a message to huge swathes of the American public deserves ridicule.
Oh no doubt! Even though I fully understand their very convoluted idea "make him famous" as if making someone famous stops them - as if the world is as obsessed with faux fame as US teenagers are/were........... - Even though I understand that I still can't get past the fact that KONY 2012 sounds like an election slogan, and just adding the word STOP to the front solves the problem and makes the whole idea much more clear.
19. Are you worried that by posting the explanation of the Zhou Enlai quote you weaken society's ability to be circumspect about predicting the future?
But seriously, thank you for doing this every time I see it referenced earnestly I feel motivated to write an annoying pedantic email.
I think the French Revolution never really did end, and has been going in one form or another ever since. Reganaism looks to me like another incarnation of the Thermidorian reaction.
the french revolution was characterized by political instability on the macroscale, with microscale staiblity coming only when groups would temporarily hold power. What ended up happening was nobody was ever satisfied with the status quo; there were always conservatives who wanted to bring back the monarchy and people who wanted to take things more to 'the left' which lined up more or less with american notions of left/right today, as long as you translate for 250~ years ago.
So you might see the response to wokism among mainstream progressives as being akin to something like the thermidorian reaction, as analogized by a WSJ journalist:
Even without knowing the context, that quote always struck me as a translation failure. "It's too early to say" seems like the sort of thing you would say if you only half understood the question, but wanted to look like you understood it and had something profound to say.
It seems that Scott's summary of the article is maybe simplifying the thesis a little too much. What was more important to Rome during the critical struggles of the Middle Republic wasn't citizenship per se so much as the successful incorporation of the socii into a loyal and reliable confederation that was willing to shoulder much of the burden of empire, even when things were looking bad.
By the time of the Social War, when they were actually awarded citizenship, Rome didn't have a serious rival anywhere near the Mediterranean Basin.
This is one of those things where I have no idea why people trust the underlying data. I get about 6 hours of sleep a night. If you asked me if it was enough, I’d tell you definitely. Ideal, actually. I get to relax at night with my wife after putting the kids to bed, watch some tv, and still get up early enough in the morning to go for a run while still being able to make the kids breakfast. Perfect!
Then one night I’ll turn it at 8 PM and sleep until 6 and OH MY GOD IS THAT GREAT I HAD NO IDEA.
Basically I have no bead at all on what works best for me. I don’t see how Alexey and Natalia would.
I sometimes wonder whether the people advocating 7-8 hours of sleep are some kind of mutant. I couldn't sleep for 7 hours even if I tried, unless I was recently sleep deprived. If I try to go to bed early, I won't be able to sleep, and even if I do, I'll just wake up earlier. The only time I ever go to bed at 8pm is when I'm jet-lagged and extremely sleep deprived.
I'm 48 years old, I weigh about the 140 pounds -- more or less the same I weighed in college -- and I sometimes wonder if fat people actually exist. I eat what I want, exercise irregularly, and my weight never changes! All the available evidence suggests it is literally impossible to be overweight.
Yeah, there are all kinds of people who are hard to believe in. I'm moderately fat. I pretty much eat what I please.
I don't become extremely fat. I don't understand people who have to struggle to eat enough to keep their weight high enough. (These are people who have access to food. They burn it off really fast.)
I don't understand people who like hard exercise. And so on.
I consider it a valuable and somewhat difficult to keep a grasp on people having experiences which are very different from mine. How about people who spend a lot of time on hatred? Not only why do they like it, but where do they find the energy?
And there are also people who like beer. I don't understand that.
Like I said, people are wired differently. My father was that type, once he had enough sleep he couldn't stay in bed. Others of us would stay in bed as long as we were allowed.
It does seem to me, as I get older, that I do sleep less than when I was younger. Some mornings I will wake up early and get up as it's pointless staying in bed, I won't sleep. So there is that as well.
Yes, people are wired differently. It's almost as though there is a statistical distribution of outcomes. And sometimes I almost get the sense that people who live in the tails of those distributions love to post personal anecdata on message boards while claiming to simply not understand what all the fuss is about.
Meanwhile I wonder how anyone manages with less than 9 hours of sleep. I can just scrape by on 8, but notice that I'm more lethargic on it. I can also weather a single night of 5 hours, but I can absolutely not sustain that, and it messes me up badly on the day after (my sleep deprivation lags for some reason). :) But my primary is more like you; he can't sleep very long! (To be fair, he is also perpetually exhausted and miserable, which makes me wonder if he needs more sleep. But it doesn't change that he just can't and doesn't want to.) It's remarkable how different people are about sleep.
Meanwhile, if I got 7 hours of sleep every night for two weeks, I'd be straight-up depressed by the end the second week. If on a given mon-fri I slept 6 hours each night, I'll consistently sleep for 13 uninterrupted hours on Sat+Sun. I'm a young healthy person, I just need (and have always needed) a lot of sleep!
I have similar experiences with random fluctuating amounts of sleep. I might sleep for as little as four hours on some nights, and feel oddly fine. Other nights I might get 8-9+ and still feel a bit tired. When I first tracked my sleep as a teenager, I would naturally sleep 10 full hours, and was very tired if I only got 8. I probably average under 7 hours a night now and feel perfectly fine most days, though I sometimes have nights where I go to bed very early and wake up more refreshed than I would have thought I needed.
I'll talk to people who routinely get less than six hours (or worse, can't sleep more than that no matter how much time they have available) who seem fine. I also know people who get nine or more hours about every night and struggle to get up. I'm convinced that people have different needs when it comes to sleep, and that those needs can fluctuate long term and short term.
I think different people do have different sleep needs. I'll sleep as much as I can get; if I have to, I can get up early after a short amount of sleep, but more sleep is better.
Some people can only sleep six hours a night and if you force them to stay in bed, they'll just lie awake and toss and turn and be miserable.
Isn't there something to the REM cycle? Or whatever the mechanism, I know that usually when I wake up with 6 hours of sleep, I feel fine. But often with 7 hours, I feel much more tired. Basically there seems to be certain intervals in which waking up is ideal. Also a big difference between waking myself up vs. getting woken up by something external (besides maybe sunlight).
I think there is – for me anyways. I used to use an iPhone app as my wakeup alarm and it would listen to you as you sleep and time its alarm for the 'best' point in your sleep cycle (within 30 minutes or so of when you _had_ to be up at the latest). That seemed to work great (for me)!
(But I had to keep my phone plugged in all night and, because of the power draw of the app, and probably where I had my phone stored when I slept, I went thru several phone batteries – they all swelled. I _wish_ there was a standalone alarm clock like that.)
Sleep quality seems to matter a lot and be hard to control for. Anecdotally: for various reasons, I would usually get ~6.5 hours of sleep during the week, and be functional but tired. On the weekend I’d sleep 8-10.
But the last couple weeks I’ve started sleeping with earplugs, and suddenly 6.5 hours is exactly enough. I feel better during the week and now on the weekend I can’t / don’t feel like “sleeping in” at all.
It had long historical impact, but I think you have to tie yourself into odd rhetorical knots to claim that Napoleon's rule reflected the French Revolution's ideals.
The French revolution itself didn't reflect its own ideals: the assembly greeted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of with great acclaim. After some parliamentary debate a more length and full declaration was written ( in 1793). There were prints and stone tablets and paintings made of it, which were put on display in many places.
One thing though: the protections granted by the declarations were never put in force. The assembly and the government elected by it considered that to implement the declaration, it was first necessary to maintain a strict policy of ever increasing terror to root out the enemies of the republic.
"Once the enemies of the revolution have been rooted out, the state will wither away, and the paradise will be realized." Hmmm, where else have I heard that? Thanks for the context.
I think that it makes more sense to use the term "Revolution" to refer to the initial period of rapid changes to the systems of power, not for the new system that establishes itself afterwards.
Two things. Firstly I don't think a flat line of a prediction about the the probability of something at a particular time says anything about Moore's law type effects.
Secondly it's called Moo-re's law in the plant meat space.
#12 This call for missile defence is very dangerous. The blog's argument is as follows.
* NATO has not been able to intervene in the war to the extent we would like because of Russia's nuclear weapons
* we should build missile defences so that Russia's retaliation threat is not sufficient to deter NATO involvement
The blogpost is literally saying that we should build up these defences so that we can credibly threaten to go to war with Russia without the risk of nuclear response being overwhelming. Given that large residual risk will still be there (as these systems are impressive but highly imperfect), this is inviting strategic error on an X-risk scale.
MAD is a crazy paradigm, but it's going to take a lot to convince me that we know that another alternative is safer especially one that attempts to neuter a nuclear adversary.
Also, Russia has already built nuclear missiles that can evade theoretical missile defenses that are far better than anything we can actually build right now.
Like what? The newest Russian missile is the RS-28 Sarmat, and aside from the relatively trifling aspect of having a shorter boost phase -- and current US strategy does not even contemplate boost-phase interception -- I can't find anything it does that would offer a more serious challenge to terminal and glide phase interception than prior generations of Russian (and indeed Soviet) launchers[1].
So far as I know, the major challenge to strategic missile defense is simply the sheer cost of the number of assets needed. You just need a heck of a lot more interceptors than we currently have, and they are expensive. Not to mention the rapid-response communication, cooperation, and command system linking together all the components would be very expensive indeed.
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[1] I'm of course aware of Russian boasting to the contrary, but the Ukrainians have been busily demonstrating the worth of Russian boasts for several weeks now, to those who were unduly credulous before.
Hypersonics are overrated. They are useful for avoiding defenses narrowly tailored against ballistic missiles, but there is a ton of hype around them. (Discussion thread on DSL about this recently with links to a couple of articles.)
I guess the question is: does the US military have weapons that can shoot/intercept one of these reentry vehicles?
Also this is probably a dumb question, but I've wondered for years: could one not use a nuclear bomb to intercept an enemy missile? Close only counting in horseshoes, hand grenades and half megaton reactions?
It's not entirely clear how well current US weapons would work against Russian hypersonic vehicles. I'm generally positive, but it's the sort of thing we can't know for sure.
A lot of the early ABM systems were nuclear-tipped. They worked OK, but had side-effects.
To be fair, everything we currently have fielded is pretty “narrowly tailored against ballistic missiles” in that sense, so a true boost glide weapon would be a challenge (as opposed to a ballistic missile with a bit of re-entry maneuverability, which is all the “hypersonic missile” that Russia huffed and puffed about launching in Ukraine is). Truly hypersonic scramjet cruise missiles also don’t have a direct counter, but practical scramjet tech seems farther away.
But it’s a technical problem and probably solvable, not some sort of unstoppable magic bullet like the hype makes it out to be.
Boost glide weapons are a trade off like anything else - harder to intercept in a traditional ballistic way, but the weapon’s glide phase is a legitimate guidance and control challenge much more likely to result in a mission failure than a dumb warhead that just lets Newton and Kepler do the driving. If half your warheads tumble out of control or miss their targets, that’s no better than getting intercepted. You also sacrifice the ability to use traditional decoys, since anything that can replicate a boost glide vehicle is going to be as complicated as another boost glide vehicle.
Meh. Warheads *already* re-enter at Mach 25, which is far above what even the most optimistic hypersonic glide vehicles might achieve, so I'm not especially impressed by the sheer speed. Plus you're making a much bigger (and powered) vehicle, so your payload is significantly reduced *and* made more fragile -- pretty much *any* damage, the slightest bend in a fin, to a Mach 6 vehicle in powered flight is going to result in aerodynamic catastrophe.
Hypersonics are clever if what you're trying to do is evade detection for a few vehicles, some kind of targeted strike, by flying low and fast. But if you're launching 1,500 vehicles and you trade down from 3,500 ballistic warheads to 2,000 more fragile hypersonics I'm not necessarily seeing that as a win. It kind of reminds me of the early hype about partial orbit delivery systems, which gave a similar kind of lessened predictability about where they were going to land -- but everybody abandoned those early on, since the tradeoff in reduced payload and accuracy was totally not worth it.
I don't think we can or should try to neuter them. I'm in favor of missile defense because it would reduce the humanitarian catastrophe of nuclear war. I don't think it's actually feasible to take out all of the missiles, but I also think Russia being less sure about our non-involvement in Ukraine would be a good thing for Ukraine.
If missile defense occurred in a vacuum absolutely. But in practice it changes the strategic calculations on both sides. NATO would inevitably have a lower bar to intervene against Russia and Russia would have strong incentives to subvert the missile defenses and find ways to continue to signal a credible threat. If everyone calculates correctly, then the new equilibrium is preferable. But we have a lot of years of learning to calculate under the old equilibrium and none in the new one. The early years of the old system had near misses (i.e. Cuban missile crisis), and it's plausible that the learning curve for a new equilibrium might come with similar near misses or actual disaster.
In terms of X-risk, I certainly agree that the most likely outcome of a full nuclear exchange is not human extinction. On the other hand, nuclear exchange might lead to the collapse of the current international order and whatever comes next might well increase X-risks.
I think you're overthinking this. Nuclear strategy just isn't as complicated as it's normally made out to be. Nuclear weapons are very destructive, and we should try to avoid using them. Missile defense isn't going to make us hugely more likely to start throwing huge amounts of weight around. It does give us options when dealing with a crazy person, and reduces the casualties if things do go badly wrong. There's no massive change in equilibrium unless we posit an extremely effective missile defense system springs up overnight, which isn't going to happen.
BMD was widely considered destabilizing during the early Cold War, and that was one of the reasons for the ABM treaty[1], because a reasonable response to the existence of a leaky BMD by your opponent is to (1) accelerate your production of vehicles and warheads, so as to overwhelm by sheer numbers, and (2) consider more seriously a first strike during a crisis, since you could hope the element of surprise would reduce ABM effectiveness.
Of course, later there were many strategists and some politicians (e.g. RR) who disagreed, and that's how we got SDI.
I think the modern difficulty is that we are less sure what form a confrontation might take, and also that the intentions and other capabilities of plausible opponents (Russia and China) are less clear than they used to be. Russia, especially, has fallen from among the first rank of economies, or conventional military powers, and the behavior of *formerly* great powers with nukes is a novelty. The Chinese are also baffling because we don't really understand their geopolitical aims -- and I even wonder whether *they* do.
But without understanding the nature of the likely confrontations, and aims of the potential belligerents, I think whether a BMD is stabilizing or not is a fraught question, without obvious answers.
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[1] The other reason more cynical being that it became rapidly clear a continental BMD, thousands of Nike sites, would be extremely expensive, and why bother if MAD would keep the peace?
I don't think it was as wide as it looks in retrospect. A lot of it was that the Kennedy-McNamara camp had really good PR, and managed to get a lot of their strategic concepts enshrined as conventional wisdom, even though they're absolute garbage. This is the strategy that mismanaged Vietnam into what it became, so empirically it doesn't work well. And that was deeply tied to a lot of their positions, including on BMD.
A leaky BMD might encourage production of warheads, in which case I say let Russia build them, and we can build more interceptors. The economic case isn't what it was in the 1960s. As for pushing a first strike, I doubt it. The point of a leaky missile defense is that it preserves the deterrent effect while saving lives. Is America really less deterred today facing 1500 warheads than it was in the 80s facing 40,000? Because we've managed the equivalent of an extremely effective BMD, and it hasn't stopped us being deterred. For that matter, nobody talks about how we can be more free with China than with Russia because China has fewer nukes. It just doesn't come up, which is strongly suggestive of how at least American psychology works on this.
Even ignoring the strategy effects (which I still think are serious) a leaky BMD only saves lives if the system reduces the total number of nukes that go through. If we were facing 40,000 or even 10,000 warheads with a leaky BMD, I am not at all convinced we would be hit with a lower number than 1,500 with minimal BMD. As of a few years ago, the success rates in tests of large scale missile defense were only about 55%. Strategists sometimes claim you can get 90% efficacy just by firing three missiles at the incoming one, but this assumes independence of probabilities and it looks like a lot of failures are systematic (e.g. atmospheric conditions, positioning etc) so the hit rates are correlated for a given target.
Maybe these numbers are higher now and you could certainly increase that just by adding more systems, but I'd need to see a lot more evidence that we're anywhere near a BMD that could seriously reduce the number of nukes that get through. Even if the figure reached the sometimes claimed 80% number, if the Russians increase their ICBMs to 7,500 that eliminates all of the gains from BMD.
On the strategy side, more ICBMs is not the only possible response. Russia could also invest more in SLBMs and give its submarine commanders more autonomy on firing decisions so that we can't decapitate their command and control. That's creating more risk.
I would actually have said the other way around, that the belief that it was destabilizing appeared more widespread in the 80s than it does now, in hindsight. Anyway, generally I agree BMD is a very worthwhile endeavour (and I also thought so in the 80s fwiw), but I admit the calculus is...complex. It's really hard to predict what The Other Side is going to do and how it's going to shake out.
The problem with your argument is that you are assuming the crazy person you need to protect yourself from will always be on the other side of your defense system. No defense system can protect you from the destabilizing attempts of your own country's desire to provoke or escalate war, or from the incompetence of your own strategists who may overestimate their ability to control an escalatory spiral they've provoked themselves. Our situation today is the product of the massive change in equilibrium that has happened since the 1990s -- if NATO was even stronger, it would be even more aggressive in its expansion that it already is, and nuclear war would be far more likely.
I strongly disagree. Much that I've read (and reinforced by the occasional conversations with Russians themselves over the decades) leads me to believe that a sizeable number of Russians feel that the sole overriding concern of every country in the world except Russia is to destroy Russia.
I'd call it paranoia, but I'm beginning to lean toward believing that for such Russians the only thing worse than the entire world conspiring to bring Russia low would be for the entire world not to care about Russia at all.
That's weirdly schizophrenic. "We" can't build a system that protects "us" against "our" own evil? The meaning of the pronouns "we" and "our" and "you" in your paragraph is shifting wildly from sentence to sentence. It would be much easier to parse if you were more precise about who you mean each time.
In response to the idea that missile defense systems are needed to protect Americans from "crazy" or "irrational" actors, I am pointing out that
1), no system cannot entirely insulate American civilians from the consequences of irrational and emotionally-driven decisions made by their own leadership;
AND,
2), The current situation the world finds itself in today is largely a product of the growing power imbalance between NATO and Russia, enabling NATO's eastward expansion as well as its decision to arm anti-Russian forces right on its border.
--
Here's a guide to the pronouns I used in my previous comment:
"You" = bean, but other American and "Western' civilians by extension
"Our" = American civilians + the rest of everybody on this shared planet
It also reduces odds of Russia from resorting to nuclear weapons as there is a serious risk they are wiped out before any of their missiles get through our missile defence system.
I think credible missile defense also reduces the risk of accidental nuclear war due to a rogue actor or a glitchy missile detector. Imagine Stanislav Petrov had a third option besides “launch massive retaliatory strike” and “do nothing and hope you’re right about it being a glitch”.
The idea does strike me as dangerous, but to be fair, I don't read the post as arguing that we should build up missile defense for the sake of enabling NATO to enter a hot war with Russia. Rather, the argument seems to be that Putin is both threatening nuclear strikes and also possibly not entirely rational, so we should as a matter of course invest in missile defense to make ourselves safer against bad actors. The post then kind of hand waves away the likely Russian response and the danger of us engaging in reckless behavior ourselves if we believe we have an effective shield.
So I was basing that reading off the second sentence of the paragraph that talks about missile defenses which reads: "Putin has successfully deterred NATO from intervening largely because he possesses nuclear weapons, but some of his actions with them have given observers reason to question his sanity.". I read that as at least strongly hinting that it would be good if Russia's deterrence capability was lower (if not for this conflict then in some other cases). If that's not Bean's intent, then fair enough, but that was where I got that reading.
But as you say, regardless, of whether that's the explicit goal, the effect will be that greater protection will make it harder for NATO leaders to argue for non-intervention in future interactions with Russia.
Your reading is plausible, no question. I just think the weight of the paragraph is much more focused on the basic issue that (potentially) crazy actors such as Putin and Kim Jong-Un have nukes and we would be safer if we protected ourselves from them, consequences be damned.
But it is telling that the implicit nod to the license this would give NATO in the Ukraine conflict shows just how destabilizing this move could be *even short of causing a nuclear war.*
This is more or less what I was trying to get at, yes.
>he post then kind of hand waves away the likely Russian response and the danger of us engaging in reckless behavior ourselves if we believe we have an effective shield.
What likely Russian response? I don't think it will ever be in Russia's interest to initiate a nuclear war over a plausible missile defense, and I doubt any near-term missile defense will be good enough to make our politicians that stupid. It will reduce the damage if things go badly.
In my opinion we are engaging in reckless behavior by tiptoeing around while possibly 10,000+ people starve in Mariupol. A credible missile defence system wouldn't shift us all the way over the middle ground but rather let us get there in the first place
The Russians have claimed to open humanitarian corridors and then failed multiple times. I understand that they want to seal the city and reduce their casualties even if it costs 10 citizen's lives per soldier saved
What we should do is figure out a simple weapons delivery that the Russians would like less than opening a humanitarian corridor and start shipping it, pausing half the shipment indefinitely if they do a good job of letting people out and supplies in. I would think 20 anti ship missiles
Are you suggesting that more weapons delivered to the conflict zone will lead to fewer civilian deaths? On what basis? What is preventing Russia from escalating further in response, as they've clearly and formally indicated they will?
I think "winning" the proxy war and preventing civilian suffering are two distinct aims requiring us to prioritize distinct actions. If preventing civilian deaths is your priority, the only honorable thing to do is negotiate some kind of settlement (which would include banning the Azov Battalion, and Russian-language media and schools to operate again). If humiliating Russia or recovering some kind of moral legitimacy for the US (after Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya) is the priority, then more weapons are probably the best solution.
Lets say it is accurate that Russia prioritizes the life of one soldier over ten civilians in Mariupol. In an equilibrium environment this would mean that the threat of weapons capable of killing one Russian soldier would be able to change their behavior to the extent of saving ten Ukrainian citizens. If 20 anti ship missiles can kill 2000 Russian sailors they would allow 10,000 people in Mariupol to be saved through opening a humanitarian corridor to prevent 10 of those missiles from being delivered
There is the risk of an escalation cascade to be sure, but the fact is they are already escalating the situation towards mass starvation in Mariupol. This is not a scenario NATO countries believed the Russians capable of when they were determining what weapons they would not send
To prevent a knee-jerk Russian response it would be smart or even necessary to link a "do this or else" weapons shipment announcement with certain concessions from Ukraine. Tell the Ukrainians that the shipment threat will be put into motion if they announce that they will support a vote in the Donbass regions determining the creation of new puppet government zones there. So the threat puts some pressure on both sides, with the potential to de-escalate the whole situation
I'm all in favor of destroying Russian conventional military capacity, which is happening at a rapid rate, slaughtering all the young Russians who are enthusiastic or dumb enough to go to Ukraine and kill people, and shining a bright spotlight on the weaknesses of the Russian military machine. So, lots more weapons makes sense to me.
I consider the question of balancing these useful goals against civilian deaths something the Ukrainians decide for themselves. As long as they consider the tradeoff worth it, and keep saying to us "More guns! More bullets! We have more orcs to kill...!" we can keep going. I'm pretty comfortable that the US even by itself has the industrial capacity to supply 10 Javelins for every single piece of Russian armor, and 5000 bullets for every Russian man under age 25, without even breathing hard.
On the other hand, if the Ukrainians consider the tradeoff not worth it they can sue for peace themselves, and then of course we won't be sending them weapons any more. But it's not my problem to decide which they should choose, or when.
MAD only works when everyone has rational leadership.
This was always a very dangerous (and frankly, stupid) assumption to make.
Putin's decision to invade Ukraine was NOT rational, so MAD dies on the spot. Not to mention the fact that people like Kim Jong Un exist. There's zero guarantee that any leader of Russia, China, or North Korea is sane. Pakistan and India are both potentially under threat of such as well in the medium term. Israel is an apartheid ethno-religious state as well, and while probably not a threat to the US, are potentially problematic in other ways.
The heir to a nuclear state is not always going to be sane, and indeed, many nuclear states have been led by unstable leaders. We were fortunate that Stalin and Mao did not cause more problems than they did, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was overseen by RATIONAL actors, STILL almost lead to World War III.
As such, having a missile defense shield is pretty necessary.
It would also remove the leverage of people trying to build nuclear bombs, which would have other advantages. The present situation where Russia or China can potentially attack non-aligned states is not a good one and is exactly the sort of thing that is likely to encourage nuclear proliferation, because no one can trust those countries, and nuclear proliferation will greatly increase the odds of an unstable leader with nuclear weapons (or a country failing to secure them properly, which is a risk unto itself).
The US actually has worked on developing a defense shield before, and we actually very likely have one already; how effective it is is not known.
But yeah, it's really questionable to assume that MAD has actually worked. Even with rational actors, the Cuban Missile Crisis still nearly led to World War III, and Castro - who might have been able to seize control of Soviet missiles - was definitely NOT a rational actor, which was a miscalculation by Soviet leadership. There were also a few near-brushes with people thinking a launch was going to be coming. Stalin and Mao also were not rational actors, and Putin's invasion of Ukraine has shown that he isn't one, either.
There is very little evidence to suggest that Putin is not rational, and even less to suggest that the decision to invade Ukraine was not rational. It was obviously a massive strategic blunder, but that is not at all the same thing as being irrational.
Putin has been making clear his thoughts and intentions about Ukraine and NATO for literally decades, including a 2014 invasion that went swimmingly for him. Again, all very rational.
First off, if you make an egregious enough blunder, and greatly overplay your hand, that's precisely the sort of thing that can cause a Big Boy War.
Secondly, it's very obvious from the way that Russia was behaving that they were flat-out delusional about the power imbalance between Russia and Ukraine. They assumed that they would easily be able to conquer everything, and there's evidence that Putin is so lacking in empathy - the ability to understand other people - that he actually bought his own bullshit about how he would be greeted as a liberator.
Thirdly, he was making the assumption that no one would learn anything from 2014, which IS irrational - assuming your opposition never learns anything and never changes their plans is irrational.
Fourth, the genocide in Ukraine is irrational - committing genocide is precisely the sort of thing that might make NATO countries feel like they HAVE to get involved. At which point he is completely screwed and has nothing but nukes, as his military is a bad joke. He can't even establish control of the skies over Ukraine, his military has been forced out of most of Ukraine, and he has pissed off the Ukrainians to the point where they might well invade Crimea and retake it.
He has put himself in a situation where he is constantly terrified of being assassinated, because that's the environment he has created for himself.
Indeed, the notion that invading Ukraine to try and conquer it wouldn't immediately make Finland at least want to join NATO was really quite farcical. And that was highly predictable.
He doesn't seem to have a good grasp of the consequences of his own actions, which is exactly what undermines someone's rationality.
Saying someone is a rational actor is more than just saying they're not crazy - they actually have to be responding to reality, not some made up alternate universe. He doesn't seem to really be doing that.
All of his actions have basically put him in a place where he is widely loathed by his neighbors, badly undermining the national security of Russia.
His actions are only sensible if you assume that only the best possible case scenario would occur - and that ISN'T rational.
Moreover, that's incredibly dangerous, because if you have nukes, and you assume that you can get away with anything, then that is precisely the sort of way that you blunder yourself into a war with the United States.
No, sorry. I know you are going to want to keep listing out things that prove Putin is irrational, but he's not, at least not in the sense that you are hoping for to do the work of proving that we should chuck MAD in the bin.
The war in Iraq was immensely stupid, but that doesn't mean that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are "irrational." They are just bad at foreign policy.
So, first off: your underlying premise is wrong, therefore nothing else you build on top of that premise follows.
Agreed. It isn't irrational for Russia to object to the West arming Ukraine, or to aim at its "de-militarization". And there clearly are Neo-Nazis operating in Ukraine, as even a cursory look at older NYT articles will reveal.
Is it really Putin who is "living in a made-up universe" here and assuming only "the best-possible scenario will occur"? Do you really think the US leadership that thinks it is worth risking global famine and nuclear war just to deny Russia these fairly limited aims is being "rational" here?
The entire thing is irrational. The only reason why Ukraine is hostile to begin with is because of Russian aggression.
Russia had massively better relations with the countries to the west of it in the 1990s. It is because it is trying to subjugate its neighbors and attack them and steal their land that everyone has become so hostile towards it.
The whole "But muh neo-nazis" thing is nonsense. There's a tiny, tiny number of neo-Nazis. Russia funds neo-Nazis in the US. So the whole thing is just a farce. Russia itself is a fascist state which employs and supports white nationalists.
Russia needed to be dismantled in the wake of World War II. Sadly, that didn't happen, and we continue to pay the price of that mistake to this day.
It's simply not safe for authoritarian states like Russia to have nukes. Putin is a narcissist, which is very obvious if you look at the propaganda about him and his behavior. He's not a rational actor.
The War in Iraq wasn't "immensely stupid", actually. While I think that it was the wrong move in terms of investment of resources, calling it stupid means you probably don't understand what actually happened.
The result of the War in Iraq is that the US flipped a hostile state to a friendly one and created an Arab democracy. This has led to significant pressure on other despotic states, with popular uprisings and protests against their authoritarian rule.
This was, in fact, the entire point of the endeavor, and it has, in fact, worked. Iraq is much better off than it was prior to the war as well.
Now, that's not to say that everything went perfectly; the whole ISIS debacle was the result of people trying to pull out too soon, as this is a multi-decade investment.
But yeah. It wasn't actually irrational, it was about advancing the macro US strategy (everyone should become a liberal democracy) in the Middle East.
Rational/irrational isn't a binary. Invading Ukraine was a fairly irrational choice, though people generally didn't expect it to work out as badly for Russia as it has.
Starting WW3 is more irrational than invading Ukraine, but how much more irrational?
Eh...I don't think you can credibly argue the decision to invade Ukraine was not rational. It was *wrong*, to be sure, as events have proven in spades, but wrong != irrational. Based on what Putin knew at the time, his expectation that a quick decapitation was quite possible isn't unreasonable at all -- the most obvious evidence being that *nearly everybody* was surprised by the strength of the Ukrainian resistance, which means Putin's expectation were widely shared by analysts from many different viewpoints. That's pretty robust evidence that he wasn't thinking bizarre thoughts at the time.
And "irrational" is a pretty high bar to clear. The fact that you or I might have come to different conclusions, or that his conclusions were a wee bit optimistic, or based on flawed understandings, does not make his reasoning *irrational*. We can't equate "rational" to "perfect reasoning" any more than we can equate it to "correct in hindsight." "Irrational" means "listens to voices inside his head" or "believes he'll win the war if it starts while the moon is in Aquarious" -- and we have no evidence that this is what was going on.
The thing is, I was aware of how strong Russia's military was. Or rather, how weak it was.
And I'm just a rando. I knew because I read up on the subject matter.
It's been obvious for a very long time that the Russian military was decrepit and incompetent. They were taking small areas from weak countries that were running the same sort of Soviet-era armies as they were, but smaller.
The problem is that after these actions, his neighbors have changed what they are doing. Ukraine's military is not up to NATO standards, but it is pushing in that direction, while the Russian military is dependent on... what, exactly? Tanks? Outdated jets that they can't afford to replace? An aircraft carrier that isn't combat ready, or even seaworthy? A sub fleet that is aging and can't afford proper upkeep?
The US stomped Iraq flat in the first and second Gulf Wars in a comically lopsided fashion. And while Iraq isn't Russia, it isn't wholly dissimilar, either, and the Iraqis used a bunch of Russian equipment.
Russia has no chance against a NATO-level modern military. All it has is nukes, and if it goes to nukes, Russia STILL loses and might well cease to exist as a nation state.
That's been the case for a long time.
And while some pundits are morons, people who actually had a realistic assessment of Russian forces knew how much they sucked.
Putin is in charge of his country. He should know how strong his military is, and he clearly didn't.
Believing you are strong when you are weak is irrational and is exactly the sort of thing that can cause wars, as you act like a Big Man when you are, in fact, someone who should be trying to avoid drawing the aggression and ire of the actual powerful players.
Likewise, the genocide in Ukraine is irrational. It's exactly the sort of thing that might make NATO nations feel morally compelled to actually intervene in Ukraine, which is GG, as the Russian military has zero chance if NATO intervenes. It would just be Iraq all over again - air superiority would be established by NATO and they'd proceed to bomb the crap out of whatever they felt like and send flying robot assassins out to take out targets freely, and the only thing Russia could do is launch nukes, at which point Russia is annihilated. Even if NATO doesn't directly intervene, NATO arming Ukrainian troops with more offensive weapons is a likely response - and that is exactly what happened in real life, which opens up the possibility of Ukraine retaking its territory.
What happens if the Ukrainians retake Crimea? Is that even a survivable situation for Putin?
Even if he managed to take over Ukraine, he'd just end up with endless rebellions against him that he can't really afford to deal with, doubly so with the crushing sanctions.
Hell, look at the deployment of Russian troops to Chernobyl.
Nothing he has done smacks of someone who lives in reality.
"The genocide in Ukraine is irrational. It is exactly the sort of thing that might make NATO nations feel morally compelled to actually intervene in Ukraine..."
Don't you think a similar argument can be made (and has been made, by everyone from Kissinger to Maersheimer) about the likely consequences of the US arming Ukrainian nationalists and expanding NATO to Russia's boundaries? Does that imply that that Obama, Trump, and Biden don't "live in reality", because they seemed to genuinely believe it was possible to arm Ukraine without provoking war? Or is there something seriously wrong with the narrative that would have us believe a war supported by the majority of Russia's population is the product of one man's paranoia?
Nope. Russia could have chosen to ally itself with the west but instead Putin decided to be Stalin 2: Electric Boogaloo. The entire conflict and New Cold War is stupid and unnecessary. The biggest theoretical security threat to Russia is from the East - China. Western countries simply don't invade their neighbors to conquer territory anymore. Who was going to attack them? Finland? Norway? Neither has any interest in conquering Russian territory. Meanwhile countries like Ukraine have no ability to usefully invade Russia.
The reality is that it had already been decided that Russia doesn't get to rule those states when the Soviet Union collapsed; it was made very clear at that point that Russia no longer had the ability to control those states, and indeed, Russia is a decrepit state which is not capable of actually controlling these countries anymore, which is precisely why the USSR collapsed in the first place. As such, Russia needed to take a new more multilateral approach that made these states more friendly to them so as to avoid issues with them, and to understand that it really doesn't have the ability to project power usefully anymore.
It instead chose the opposite approach, which is precisely why they all want to join NATO.
The entire notion of "security" is nonsense. NATO has zero interest in invading Russia inherently; it doesn't stand to gain from it at all. Russia is an aggressive hostile state with a history of genocide, and their neighbors were not willing to allow it to control them anymore. It needed to move away from that and into more modern ways of exerting influence, but it instead decided to go with the tanks again.
The reality is that this is driven by narcissism and greed rather than any sort of actual security interests Russia might have; Russia was more secure on its western flank in the 1990s when it had much better relations with the West.
The "security situation" it has is entirely of its own making. NATO was friendly with Russia and was engaging in cooperative efforts with Russia for many years.
> Or is there something seriously wrong with the narrative that would have us believe a war supported by the majority of Russia's population is the product of one man's paranoia?
The war fever is the product of propaganda from state run media from Putin. So, yeah, it actually is the product of him and his.
I don't think I am going to convince you to revaluate your priors. I agree that the world is facing hunger and the threat of nuclear war now because of of narcissism and greed, rather than any actual security interests. We just disagree on the question of whose narcissism and greed is responsible for getting us to this point.
OK, as I said, you or I may reach different conclusions than Putin did, but that does not make his reasoning "irrational." If you want to say he was wrong, that's fine, and if you want to say he was wrong in a surprisingly easy way, OK, although as I said the fact that *many* people thought he was going to succeed -- may yet succeed -- makes that a pretty iffy proposition, one for which you'd have to present a pretty credible argument that does *not* proceed from hindsight.
But to argue he was *irrational* in the way that a leader would need to be to start a nuclear war for completely stupid reasons, or completely heedless of the consequences, this doesn't cut it -- not by a long shot. You'd need much greater evidence of much higher levels of delusional thinking.
That's an interesting point about rationality. There's acting rationally on the information you've got, but knowing when you need more information is another level.
I don't think so. Being rational necessarily includes understanding the limits of your information. Thinking there are no limits to your information is a particular *type* of irrationality, but it's still irrational.
It may be that we are using different definitions of "rational" of course. You may be using it in a more restricted sense than I, in the sense that you're saying "reasoning logically from given premises and data" so that it allows for the possibility of GIGO (reaching stupid conclusions because your assumptions and data input are obviously fucked).
I'm using it in the far broader sense of "not being irrational" followed by a long list of irrational things, that include not thinking about the limitations of your data, not being aware of the influence of your assumptions on your reasoning, not understanding that others may think differently than you, not being aware of the fact that you have a viewpoint, being unaware of the possibility of your reasoning backwards from desired conclusion to pseudo-rational argument for same, et cetera -- in *addition* to the core errors of logic involved in saying 2 + 2 = 5.
Terms like "rational" should apply to systems and not just to leaders. You can imagine a form of "chinese room" experiment in which a perfectly rational decision-maker is presented with false information, and therefore makes a rational decision that would appear irrational to someone who had the facts.
Apply this to nuclear war: a perfectly rational leader could become wrongly convinced that a nuclear exchange is winnable (perhaps even necessary for survival) and the next thing you know, the logic of MAD doesn't work.
I don't think so. An essential element of rationality -- the reason we distinguish it from mere OCD logic-chopping -- is that it recognizes the limits of its information, takes into account the possibility of faulty assumptions or bad data, and hedges its bets accordingly.
Human rationality is on a much higher plane than just following an algorithm without mistake. That's why strong AI isn't a thing, at least yet.
"Irrational" is the wrong word here, and too many people are off chasing it and the flock of wild geese it is running with. Putin's decision to *invade* Ukraine, was based on mistakes of fact, and was probably rational given those mistaken beliefs.
What Putin is, is *desperate*. If he doesn't come out of this with something he can sell to his people as a win, he risks leaving office the way Beria did, or worse. And he can't win anything like the sort of victory he was originally planning on. That makes it *rational* for him to think about options like limited nuclear war. That may be safer for him and the things he cares about, that conventional defeat.
Desperate is just as dangerous as irrational. More predictable, but the predictions are pretty dire.
It was clear to people who actually understood the strength of Russia's military that Russia was not capable of conquering Ukraine; that is why many of the people who actually understood how weak Russia's military truly is thought that the massing of troops was a bluff, because it was obvious to them that Russia couldn't actually win the war with Ukraine that they were posturing for.
Putin has shown considerable signs of narcissism, and narcissists are not rational actors.
Almost all the analysis I read prior to the invasion did not predict the performance of the Russian army, which indicates to me that it was not clear to many, many experts.
Given the thousands of factors that go into overall effectiveness of an army, I think any claim as to Russian army's effectiveness would have to have a large amount of uncertainty to be considered even slightly credible.
Everyone correctly predicts things after they happened, the trick is to have written up some place ahead of time what was going to happen before it did!
The same category of analysts thought that the first Gulf War was going to be a super tough fight against the Iraqi military and their elite Republican Guard.
I don't think so. It takes more than desperation. Let us say Putin concludes that he himself, personally, will not survive defeat in the Ukraine. He'll be hauled off to the Lubyanka and get the traditional bullet.
Does it then follow that to avoid this possibility he will throw his entire country and heritage into the nuclear furnace? No, not unless he is *irrational* as well as desperate. He *values* his country and his heritage -- you can't listen to him 10 minutes without becoming aware of that. He prefers to lead the country rather than get rich and buy fabulous yachts like many equally talented (in the political/social sense) of his countrymen. Certainly there are plenty of paths he could have taken, and could yet take, that maximize his personal welfare at the cost of Russian culture and national welfare, or pride, and he doesn't take them. It's clear whatever his conception of Russian culture and pride are, they take precedence over almost everything else in his life. That doesn't sound like someone who would willing sacrifice Russia itself for his own life -- not unless he is also *irrational* about calculating the odds of that outcome.
Putin may believe that the Russian heritage *he* values, is more likely to survive a global thermonuclear war than a humiliating defeat in Ukraine. He may believe that the Russian heritage he values, can only be preserved if he or one of his inner circle rules it during this critical period.
And he may not be wrong about that. It's not the existence of a hundred and forty not-quite-suicidally-depressed Russian citizens that he values, or the purchasing power parity of their per capita GDP. An increase or decrease in their numbers, wealth, or happiness is a secondary concern at best, possibly tertiary.
Yes, indeed Putin *may* believe that Russian heritage (as he defines it) may be best served by being nuked. But that would be *irrational*, you see, and that closes the circle. As I said, he has to not only be in personal despair, he has to be *irrational* -- e.g., he has to believe that the interests of Russia the country and Russia the culture would *actually* be best served by losing a thermonuclear war over the Ukraine -- which is a deeply irrational, delusional, and perhaps clinically insane belief
A terminal value cannot be irrational, by definition. There are things real people hold as terminal values, which would likely endure nuclear war, and therefore "that would lead to nuclear war, which would destroy what you value, thus be irrational", is false.
NATO probably does not want to intervene much more than it already has, and particularly does not want to send its armies to fight in Ukraine. The list of countries NATO will fight to defend is quite explicit, and Ukraine isn't on it. And the bit where NATO will also bomb small impotent countries to punish their evil dictators for being evil dictators, doesn't apply to anyone who can shoot back. NATO wants to do about what it is doing, supporting from a safe distance, and is slightly modulating that to manage escalation risk.
But, what NATO is doing *already* has a >10% chance of leading to at least limited nuclear war, and >1% of global thermonuclear war. We pretty much knew that going in, and here we are. Because once the Ukrainians put up a serious fight on day one, there was really no way to avoid that.
We offer enough material assistance that Russia can't win a conventional victory in Ukraine, and when they are faced with the sort of humiliating retreat that would endanger the Putin regime on the domestic front, ~20% Putin tries to see if he can win a limited nuclear war. And ~10% that escalates out of control.
We offer no or trivial assistance so that Russia wins a decisive conventional victory over Ukraine, and ~50% chance they try the same thing in the Baltic states or Finland in a few years. Which places us right where we are now, but with at least double the risk of escalation because they're attacking NATO from the start.
A subvariant of Plan A where as soon as Russia uses tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine we back off and say "gosh, we had no idea it was that important to you!", which negates most of the escalation risk this time but again sets up a high probability that they'll try again.
Another subvariant where when they invade the Baltics or whatever we cut them loose rather than risk nuclear escalation, which again negates the immediate risk but now Russia knows it can attack NATO and win and we're looking at Poland next time.
Probably the minimum risk of nuclear war comes from the scenario where we give Ukraine *almost* enough assistance to win, ultimately letting Russia prevail but at cost of burning their army to the point where Baltic adventures are implausible for many years to come. Of course, they'll vent their frustration about that on conquered Ukrainians to a nigh-genocidal degree. But, A: that's a knife-edge balance between too much assistance and too little, and B: Western governments aren't going to cynically condemn forty million Ukrainians to night unto genocide when there's a 98% chance we can stop it at little (to us) cost.
So, every plausible path leads to a ~2% chance of global thermonuclear war either this year or a few years down the road. This isn't a foolhardy thing that we could do and need to be dissuaded from doing by our deliberate vulnerability, this is an inevitability we cannot avoid, made so the moment Vladimir Putin decided to invade and Volodymr Zelenskyy decided to ask for ammunition rather than a ride. Really, it was inevitable from 2014 at the latest, maybe 2008.
And, per #25, this wouldn't be literally the end of the world, but it would be the greatest catastrophe in human history. So if there's a thing that we can do that would reduce the damage and the death toll by say 80%, it would probably be a good idea to do that.
And, yeah, as an additional benefit, it would make it easier to do the right thing when we're looking at decisions between "2% nuclear war here and now" and "1% nuclear war here, 50% genocide over there".
It's interesting that without reading the actual article behind the link I thought primary about short-range missile/rocket-propelled artillery defense. Because this is the primary method Russian military uses to lay waste on Ukrainian cities causing a lot of damage to civilian infrastructure and people themselves. And this is the reason why last year Hamas launched several thousands missiles on Israel yet inflicted very limited damage and very few casualties.
I think it increases deterrence against a dictator who just wants not to lose.
I can see someone like Putin launching in the knowledge that it likely means the destruction of his own country: he might not win but at least his enemies will suffer too. Good missile defence changes that calculus.
2. Is there a way to find particular blogs in the graph?
Blog rolls strike me as a very approximate measure, though probably better than nothing. My impression is that people don't keep track of their blog rolls.
Thank you. I was looking for metafilter.com (an old, respected, possibly medium-sized left-wing blog) on the assumption it would be included, and when it didn't show up, I assumed "find" didn't work.
It is in the link I provided, but not in the "processed" list of sites. I think that means it was in 1 blogroll but not 2. I think of it as a platform, not a blog. Of the 50 posts on front page, 40 are by unique authors and only 1 author has more than 2 posts. People put Krugman in their blogrolls, not NYT.
For 8, doing it per capita based on current population makes no sense. The prizes should be divided by average births over the relevant time period, or something. This unduly favors historically large and currently less large states, and handicaps historically small but currently large states.
13. Nazarbayev is by most accounts the real power in Kazakhstan. He is, despite being an awful person, also one of the saner dictators. He tortures and murders people. But usually for rational, if immensely selfish and monstrous, reasons. He's also done a lot of institution building. The rumor is he basically wants to make Kazakhstan into Singapore and he's been making moves in the direction of at least a semi-democracy since 2010 or so. This doesn't seem like a notable break from that trend.
18. They were also common under Communism. There's a lot more attention to how Communist states controlled women's reproduction because that included abortion which is a modern hot button issue. But the Communist state wanted to control everyone's really. Some other dodges: get betrothed to a woman and then break it off. Marry a someone just as they're dying to immediately become a widow(er). In societies with the relevant exemption take minor orders and play at debating becoming a priest...
19. Another famous Chinese misquote. "To get rich is glorious." Deng Xiaopeng never said that. What he said was, "We have to let some people get rich first." It was a reference to Marxist theory not some general statement China was selling out to Mammon.
25. Yes. The issue will be the scale of the cleanup and the loss of key industrial capacity hampering that effort. The idea it will destroy all life is an exaggeration by anti-nuclear activists who tend to spill over into criticizing even peaceful uses. There's a lot of people very invested in making nuclear energy look scary for what I think are bad reasons. Of course, strategically nuclear war would still be so destructive as to be worth it only in the direst circumstances. But you'd end up with something more like post-WW2 Europe and less like Fallout. To be clear, post-WW2 Europe was REALLY BAD.
30. China already does this. Fines are deducted directly from bank accounts as a matter of "convenience." So in Shanghai if a camera sees you outside they just auto-fine you. The thing is that digitization of finance is coming and we as a society have to decide how, not if, we're going to do it. The option of remaining in the past not only hobbles us but won't really work for long. Alas, all the political discussion about finance is dominated by a combination of conservative outrage over corporate liberalism and progressive desires for mostly pretty bad regulatory proposals. This is one thing where the dictatorships have an advantage. There's an easy answer as to who this digitization should serve. The center.
9: I don't blame the thread author for omitting such a complex topic in their brief overview, but I would be interested to hear their thoughts on the status of the "Q source". Last I checked, there was active debate among scholars whether it's (1) a genuine source carrying the tradition forward from M; (2) just that subset of M with the most messianic character; or (3) a spurious invention by detractors of the Trumpist tradition, created to tar the tradition by association with absurd eschatological claims.
Not that I have the latest theological journals hot off the presses, but my vague impression was that there was a slight tilt to the "Q who?" side.
But these things go in cycles of challenges existing orthodoxy -> popularly accepted -> challenged in its turn, I'm sure in a couple of years there will be a resurgence in the "Q is true!" side.
I'm more concerned about this bit of a text from the link of [26]:
> Adult males are flower visitors, while females do not feed at all.
How does the females 'not feeding at all' work? They seem way too big to have an extremely short lifespan. Or do they just feed enough as larvae to both transform into adults and then survive just long enough until they can reproduce?
The Wikipedia article on the family of that fly _does_ state:
> They [adults] are infrequently encountered as the adult lifespan can be quite short.
There's a number of insects who only feed as larva, including many moths, crane flies, and the obvious mayfly, who has a 24-hour adult lifespan. Crane flies are also pretty big (although obviously not nearly as big), so the "only feed as larva" seems quite plausible.
Am I wrong or does the Vitamin D study actually demonstrate the lack of effect of sending people Vitamin D supplements in the mail? Will the full paper maybe describe the follow up finger prick testing to see if serum level actually changed in the supplement groups? Also, were the positive tests for ARIs or Covid random with respect to serum level change or was there a relationship there?
I would suggest that the only people likely to conduct a study are the marketing departments of fake meat companies, and that as such the file drawer effect will be extremely strong. Given the small sample sizes and mediocre p values needed I think it would be reasonably easy to repeat the study (maybe using different combinations of real and fake meat products) until you got the desired result.
14: "Most neuroimaging studies have samples in the the 2-3 digits, but would need to be in the 4-5 digits to have enough power to detect real effects." This is misleading. The linked article is about neuroimaging studies seeking associations with disorders like schizophrenia and autism. Some neuroimaging effects can be large and highly reliable: you can distinguish the functional neuroimaging responses of left-hand vs. right-hand motor activation with your eyes in real-time, with a single subject and 20 seconds of data. The need for 4-5 digit sample sizes may have a little bit to do with neuroimaging and its acquisition and sampling properties, but it is mostly about the statistical nightmare of identifying group differences in brains associated with heterogeneous or ill-defined psychiatric disorders.
Agreed. The big problem with the Nature paper was not it's specific topic, the 'Brain Wide Association Study', but how it was so quickly and predictably misunderstood by science journalists and the wider public.
Yeah I was going to say. That areas around the Black Sea have roots going back to the Hellenistic world doesn't seem like it needs much explanation other than ancient history. There's a bunch of towns with "Alexander" in their name for the same reason.
Of the 17 cities visible on the map of the Black Sea in the wikipedia article on it, none of the ones on the north coast use their ancient names. Several on the south coast do. Batumi in Georgia seems to have an ancient Greek name. Trabzon and Samsun in Turkey are derived from ancient Greek. Istanbul, Turkey is medieval Greek, as is Constanța, Romania. Burgas, Bulgaria is controversial, could be anything, more likely medieval Greek than ancient. Odessa stole its name from the ancient Greek city now known as Varna, Bulgaria.
Huh, I always wrote the second person imperative of "salir" as "sale".
People take this as a criticism of Spanish but it's great to have a language that actually has rules that can be applied to deduce the ways words are written or spoken.
"sal+le" is like an order "(you) exit towards it". But there's a rule that says "LL" maps to what is the english equivalent of *"sh as in shop" and Spanish is so commited to keeping written phonetics consistent so you get this situation.
* not really, depending on the dialact it might be "sh as in shop", "j as in jam" or "ee as in eel" BUT it's consistent for all phonetics inside that dialact. Like, "LL" always sounds like sh in Argentina.
Fun fact, Argentina (and Uruguay and a couple other places that use "voseo") form imperatives differently and "salLe" here is "salíle".
If you're wondering when "salíle" is used, it's very common in football as a command to goalkeepers to leave the post and face attackers quick before they can shoot.
6: I think the start of the thread is broadly good, but then it goes off the rails.
The poster includes some factual inaccuracies, especially here (https://twitter.com/ctbeiser/status/1500257579145916418). Jason Russel did have a mental break, but he was never jacking off. It was a one off line in some gawker shit and it caught on. Russel denies jacking off, he isn't jacking off in the film, and the police never claimed he was nor was he charged as such.
The claim that Russel was drugged is also pretty crazy (just apriori), but especially because he did an interview on Oprah (https://youtu.be/Q7MCh19igW4) where he talked about the whole thing and his explanation is total reasonable. His pet project blew up beyond all imagining, and he was doing back-to-back interviews and running on fragments of sleep, while being hounded by random journalists and internet people.
I gave up on the thread very quickly when I realized it seemed to be heading into cuckoo-crazy land, so thank you for doing the research to confirm my suspicion.
Ditto on that: I think a lot of people who have more-justified gripes with activist causes try to project their grudge onto every case, even ones that actually did have good intentions.
> A possible causal pathway is “some unknown cause X led Rome to prosper economically, which in turn led Rome to military success, which in turn caused Roman culture to spread” And one excellent candidate for X is Rome’s location.
I notice a pattern in history: most pre-industrial civilizations put traders as the lowest status class. Some where official about this (eg China) while in other places it was unofficial. Places that didn't do this, and instead treated traders at least somewhat fairly all seem to have ended very wealthy for the pre-industrial period.
I think the Roman Republic was another case. They treated traders fairly and because of that the traders generated wealth for the republic.
I never understood why traders were almost universally “low class” across the globe until I read a Brett Deveroux article about it and realized that nobody in the ancient world had any framework for understanding the societal good that traders produce. In other words, nobody had discovered and popularized the laws of supply and demand. For just about everyone the fact that a trader bought wheat from farmers at one price and sold it to city dwellers at a higher price meant that someone had been cheated: either the trader gave the farmer too little or took too much from the city dweller. Because, after all, it’s the same grain: surely it has the same value regardless of location!
“ As far as elites were concerned, merchants didn’t seem to produce anything (the theory of comparative advantage which explains how merchants produce value without producing things by moving things to where they are most valued would have to wait until 1776 to be mentioned and the early 1800s to be properly explained) and so the only explanation for their wealth was that they made it by deception and trickery, distorting the ‘real’ value of things “
In the modern world we take the law of supply and demand for granted: we forget how recent a discovery it was.
>A bachelor tax existed in Argentina around 1900. Men who could prove that they had asked a woman to marry them and had been rebuffed were exempt from the tax. In 1900, this gave rise to the phenomenon of "professional lady rejectors", women who for a fee would swear to the authorities that a man had proposed to them and they had refused.”
That's a bit like the "professional co-respondent of mid twentieth century UK. Divorce was not easily attainable except in cases of adultery, so couples who merely hated each other would arrange fake adultery with a third party , the professional co-repondent and a private detective who would spring out of a wardrobe or other hiding place to.provide photographic evidence.
Professional co-respondents wore a special kind of shoe.
It's not that they wore this shoe, but rather the style of shoe was considered flamboyant, even tasteless; not the kind of thing a gentleman would wear but a cad certainly would:
Co-respondent shoes, or more staidly named spectator shoes:
11: I thought we knew this already. No? Same for the Zhou Enlai quote.
26. As long as it doesn't bite.
32: I don't know if I'm in the minority, but losing weight was fairly easy when I was a kid. I had to do so for sports-related reasons on a couple different occasions, and it seemed like calories in/calories out really was the operative dynamic. That all changed when I hit....26, maybe? It got steadily harder afterward, eventually becoming nigh on impossible. Point being that shaming might work on kids, but probably not anyone else. Also, if you're looking to solve our global obesity problems, maybe try to figure out what changes in people's metabolism/endocrine systems between say 16-26.
I think the dumb, simple answer there is kids are growing, so they are burning up energy. That means a small intervention will result in (relatively) easy weight loss. When you finally hit the end of your growth, that extra energy (if you don't burn it off some other way) can get converted into fat.
There's a ton of research into age related basal metabolic rate (BMR) changes, and less than a ton (but still a lot) into the effects of testosterone on reversing this. Plus frequent appropriate exercise and lifestyle factors seem to be fairly potent at maintaining a higher than average for your age BMR.
One of the big issues with looking at the research on BMR/Test/age is that a lot of studies are fairly nonsensical.
Example 1: Look at 1 "large" shot of test every 2 weeks and conclude it doesn't seem to work. No duh, you spend a few days with high test levels, a few days with normal and then then rest of the time below baseline. Overtime your circulating test sort of normalizes, but this dosing is known to cause many side effects because you're spending too much time above "normal" and into "spicy" ranges.
Example 2: Compare tiny doses of test administered via gels (which are enough to crater any natural production you had, but not enough to replace it) with placebos and conclude the gels are barely effective. Yes? If you are trying to replicate natural production of 6-7mg per day, applying a gel (with poor absorption) that would, in a perfect world, provide like 4mg per day, and then wonder why the effect size is so small.
That said, I'm not sure TRT is the route for most. It'll restore your 18-26 year old metabolism, but also restore a huge part of your 18-26 emotions, sex drive and (likely) lead to substantial hair loss.
Frequent exercise, walks, standing desks, physical training to increase (or slow decrease) in muscle mass and HIIT combined seem far more likely to be helpful, without side effects (Sustanon 250, a very popular TRT choice in Europe, b/c of the test roller coaster also comes with a substantial risk of gynecomastia along with mood swings. So worst of both worlds b/c you're spending a few days as a superman (possibly with a growing chest) and then crashed and depressed for a few days).
Thanks. What you're saying makes sense, but I would just point out that I'm almost positive my metabolic rate slowed a lot more than my testosterone levels decreased between the ages of say 20 and 27, so there had to have been something else going on. Maybe figure out what that something else is, and then hopefully I don't have to put myself through HIIT just to be able to fit into the pants I used to wear like three years ago?
It's still calories in-calories out... it's just harder to force the calories out these days, and harder to restrict your calories in when you have your own money and make your own schedule. I'm in the process right now, and lots of water + fruit just before every meal is working (slowly) for me.
HIIT isn't really so bad, it just sounds awful. When I'm in medium-intensity mode coming up on 20 secs of high intensity I'm thinking "oh no! oh no!" but while I'm doing the 20 secs I'm just doing them. And after you dry off and catch your breath & have a drink of water, you're way more alert & energized than you were before you did that shit. That's my experience, anyhow, and believe me I'm no jock.
In my experience, moderate interval fasting (~48h once a month or even less often) has surprisingly long-term effects, which in my case were partially masked by my completely degenerate sweets habit. I kicked it recently and now I'm starting to get concerned I'll end up underweight after the summer.
FWIW, I went from skinnyfat at 20 y.o. to chubby at 27 y.o., so I think the idea of a metabolic shift is solid but it might be just the lifestyle consequences catching up to you.
I'm a bit skeptical on #25. Yes, it's not the first time I've heard that nuclear-winter models in the 80s were wrong - I'll ask a clever friend in applied maths about this. It's the claim that "you will not find peer-reviewed papers on "Nuclear war is not as bad you think" because money and politics go against this." I mean - there are peer-reviewed papers on how some well-publicized estimates on the proportion of women (or people) in the US that will survive rape in their lifetimes may be gross overestimates, or are based on flawed methodology, and surely publishing that is worse for one's professional and personal reputation. What would happen if someone wrote the kind of peer-reviewed revision downwards of the effects of nuclear warfare that #25 seems to think both true and non-existent? Would something start with someone on Twitter saying "Hint hint, I wonder where this American was on August 6, 1945"?
Nuclear winter isn't a particularly sexy issue these days, and the field looking at it is tiny. All of the nuclear winter work comes from about three people (Roblock, Toon and Turco), all of whom have been involved for decades. If no atmospheric scientist has since got this as an interests, who is to do the work of publishing refutations? I hadn't actually realized how tiny the field was earlier, but I'm digging into it for a larger look.
"there are peer-reviewed papers on how some well-publicized estimates on the proportion of women (or people) in the US that will survive rape in their lifetimes may be gross overestimates, or are based on flawed methodology, and surely publishing that is worse for one's professional and personal reputation"
Do you have links? This is something I've often suspected.
Look, as I implied, I do not want to wade into that area; it is not just controversial but sensitive. (And if I mentioned it, it was because I could not think of an area in which there could be *more* blowback for going against a narrative.) One thing one can do is refer to sources that rebut or critique such papers; a quick search gives https://www.jstor.org/stable/3812756 , for instance. I'm sure one can do better - some of what is being pushed against there is clearly not peer-reviewed work but either journalism or essays (Roiphe) - though yet again plenty of what has been published in apparently peer-reviewed journals on all sides reads oddly; "peer-reviewed" doesn't mean quite the same thing it means in the hard sciences, where again it doesn't imply that something is true.
One obvious TL;DR point: the numbers one gets from surveys by criminologists (NCVS) are not consistent with one-in-four or one-in-seven numbers. (The numbers from NCVS are themselves much higher than the number of police reports, but then that is not surprising.) What that means is of course another matter.
My guess is that there's an active research community (or several, actually) devoted to realistic modelling of what would happen under various nuclear strike conditions, but that this research is very very classified.
It seems a very very obvious thing to try to model if you're a nuclear power, and also a very very obvious thing to keep secret.
Yeah this. In order to accurately model the results of a large-scale nuclear war, you kind of need to have the kind of data -- how many warheads of what type exist and would be used, their typical targets and how they'd be used (e.g. airburst versus ground, whether they'd be more or less densely distributed), et cetera -- which comprise among the deepest and darkest of military secrets.
I agree there are certainly teams at Livermore and Sandia who ponder this, but the chances that anything would be published in the open literature are zip.
The fraction of women who are likely to be raped over their lifetimes has serious and actionable social, legal, and political implications. How much money should the government allocate to rape prevention, say, as opposed to breast cancer research, prenatal health care, and any other women's issue? Depends greatly on the actual data.
But what are the downstream consequences of adjusting the probability of drastic climate effects following a global all-out nuclear war? Do you seriously think anyone would say oh well then! we can now start considering this as just another tool of international relations...? And if not...it's a bit of an angels on the head of a pin debate. Everyone *already* agrees all-out nuclear war would be sucky. Whether it's 150% or actually only 92% as sucky as one's bare intuition suggest is not especially interesting to most people, because it's not actionable, and so one would naturally expect pretty few people to spend research man-years on it.
Well, some (*not* all, or most) critics of nuclear winter in the public arena clearly do believe that a nuclear war is "winnable" in some useful sense. Of course this matters. Note I am not suggesting that critiquing the theory of nuclear winter amounts to advocating brinkmanship; I am simply addressing your question - brinkmanship is a thing, and whether or not there would be a nuclear winter figures in its calculations. (Indeed a common line seems to be "people who put forward "nuclear winter" are either bad physicists or people who are lying through their teeth towards a noble cause.)
Really? I can't think of any serious scholar or politician or even pundit that says a first nuclear strike is a reasonable policy choice except in the direst of circumstances. Can you perhaps point me to a source for this assertion?
The main downstream consequences are for contingency planning.
Of course we all hope it doesn't happen, but if it does then we're really going to want to have plans, which will depend on whether the survival rate is going to be 80%, or 5%, or 0.01%.
What Melvin said, and at any rate, look at debates on whether NATO should have a no-first-strike clause. (Hint: the side that wanted such a clause has always lost.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_first_use (If you rather mean "serious politicians advocating that one should attack the other side with nuclear bombs *unprovoked*", then I'm afraid you'll have to go back to the 50s - but I don't see how that's the only context that is relevant.)
Perhaps, but again the people who are going to be doing the contingency planning are going to be doing most of it in the classified arena.
Who is actually going to *pay* for an honest, unbiased, and unclassified assessment of the impact of nuclear war on climate? Not governments, because they have access to the classified version if they care, and the classified version is more accurate and more useful for their purposes. And the usual philanthropic sources usually go for more actionable and/or humanitarian causes.
I suppose. If we ever did that kind of thing, as a species. But I have yet to see, for example, 10% inflation break out over a year and government go "Aha! Time to implement our contingency plans which we made 5 years ago for just this wholly forseeable possibility..." "Oh look! A war between Ukraine and Russia. Fortunately, the possibility of this was pretty easy to foresee, so we have Plans B and C standing by, with pre-positioned assets and personnel ready to go..."
As a species, we can barely be bothered to make contingency plans for something as routine and predictable as a winter that's a little harsher than usual, or a spot of extra high water flooding in the spring. The notion that we might make serious and useful contingency plans for what happens after a world-wide full-scale nuclear war -- except in the narrowest sense of militaries planning for how they keep command 'n' control intact over the short term -- seems entirely aspirational to me.
28: I can't claim to understand it a whole lot, but, reading the abstract, it sounds to me like what they did was take a bunch of macaque faces, take parts of them, and put those parts together with a bunch of non-face objects. And then found that the response was more dependent on the non-face objects than the face parts (or something). The idea is that the part of your brain that lights up for faces is atomic, and lights up for faces, and not made up of like, a part that lights up for noses, and a part that lights up for eyes, and a part that lights up for mouths, and then an aggregator of all that.
(At least, I think, I still don't understand this line: "we discovered graded tuning for non-face objects that was more predictive of face preference than was tuning for faces themselves" or the next "The relationship between category-level face selectivity and image-level non-face tuning was not predicted by color and simple shape properties, but by domain-general information encoded in deep neural networks trained on object classification" In any explainable way. But this is the general impression I got from it.)
(Which kinda sounds analogous to me, interestingly.)
"The relationship between category-level face selectivity and image-level non-face tuning was not predicted by color and simple shape properties, but by domain-general information encoded in deep neural networks trained on object classification". Wow that there's some clotted prose.
I believe you are misinterpreting "macaque face patches"? That's not a part of an image of a macaque face; rather a "face patch" is a part of the IT cortex that is especially sensitive to faces. So they were recording neural responses from these face patches in macaques. They recorded while showing many different images, both faces and non-face objects.
> "we discovered graded tuning for non-face objects that was more predictive of face preference than was tuning for faces themselves"
So for each neuron they computed a "face preference," which is how much more it is expected to fire in response to a face image than a non-face image (on average). Then they tried to use its responses to either *just* the face images or *just* the non-face images to predict this face preference. They found that they could do slightly better with the non-face images. So let's take one of these non-face images that is highly predictive of face preference, say it's a toaster. They would say a toaster has a high "faceness score," and most face-selective neurons are even more toaster-selective than they are face-selective.
The second quote and the rest of the article characterize at what level these images with high "faceness score" are similar to actual faces. I guess the similarity emerges through a process that is more similar to normal object recognition (i.e. less specialized to faces) than they expected. So, it is evidence against the idea that we are born with a face "module" that uses special built-in face detecting circuits vs. that we learn to detect faces the same way as any other kind of object.
Ok, interesting, this makes a lot of sense. Though I got a bit confused again at this point:
"They would say a toaster has a high "faceness score," and most face-selective neurons are even more toaster-selective than they are face-selective."
So, as you said above, they try to predict a neuron's "face preference" by only looking at it's non-face response, and by looking at it's face response, and found the non-face response is more predictive. Are they assigning "faceness scores" to things like toasters? I'm not picking anything like that up.
Though now I feel confused how they got to non-modularity from this. If face-recognition is just a non-extractible sub part of object recognition (which, fully non-modularly should be a non-extractible sub part of cognition as a whole), then why pareidolia? Faces have to be special in our brain somehow, right?
Also a thought occurs. If "face preference" is just how much more it is expected to fire in response to a face, shouldn't we expect that to be more predictable by non-face objects? There's a lot of variation in non-faces, and probably some of that variation is in face-y-ness. So with non-face results, you should be able to get a nice trend line on the face-y-ness v face response graph (which I expect to lead to predictability based on other axes, even if we don't have access to the face-y-ness axis). Whereas with just face pictures, it'd be really hard (impossible?) to distinguish between "this neuron fires for faces" and "this neuron always fires", which should hurt predictability.
> Are they assigning "faceness scores" to things like toasters? I'm not picking anything like that up.
Well, not to the objects themselves but to individual images of objects, yes:
"A positive correlation means that the image tended to elicit a higher response in more face-selective neural sites, and vice versa for a negative correlation. For brevity we use the term ‘faceness score’ to refer to this correlation from here on."
Faces are definitely special, although there's a debate over how much of this specialness is dependent on experience. But maybe that's irrelevant if we're just concerned with the adult brain. And I agree with the rest of your comment.
You had me all worked up, but the World's Largest Fly appears to be rather friend-shaped! Looks like a funny but harmless cartoon critter to me. Much less freaky than a regular fruit fly blown up to the same size with no changes, really.
I was shocked by the idea that there were 5 Nobel Physicists from DC. With the help of the below tutorial, I produced a query that lists 4 of them. The 5th is David Gross, whose wikipedia metadata is inconsistent with the others.
This must be the first time that I have seen a linked data query used to illuminate an Internet discussion. Either I have been hanging out at the wrong places or it is finally becoming useful.
My main purpose was to do the exercise and learn the technique. My verdict is, no, this database (essentially wikipedia) is too hard to use and the data probably too erratic to be useful.
Wolfram Alpha is easy to link. It contains a biographical database sufficient to answer questions like this, but its natural language syntax does not allow complex queries. If I ask for Nobel prize winners born in DC, it just drops DC. If I ask born in France, it drops back to the list of "French" winners (including Marie Curie and Albert Camus, which is what most people want), which it probably got from wikipedia. Except that right now it isn't listing everyone. When it does list them, it makes a point of listing country of birth. (Why does it count Peter Handke for France??)
There are some more specialized databases publicly available on the web. I think it is possible to link queries into the General Social Survey (GSS), but usually people just post results. The CDC has a database of all death certificates in America, but it is not possible to link queries.
My experience of DBPedia is that the quality of the dataset is too variable to be relied upon. Even trying to access the same data about the same class of objects (say Mammals) rarely works as intended due to inconsistent ontology use. It also seems to be very difficult to correct or add data to DBPedia which bugs me.
It's easy to edit the data of wikipedia. Changing the schema is probably political. Changing what triples exist is probably even more political. (What's a "linked data triple"? Google seems to just drop the word "linked"; does it change the meaning?)
The basic schema is that Pages are in Categories. It is easy to add a Page to a Category. I used the Category of Nobelists in Physics. This is just metadata at the end of the page and I don't think that there are edit wars over it. I also used a triple, that some pages have a BirthPlace. I think triples are only allowed in Infoboxes, which are part of the main page, and probably a big point of contention. Once the page has an infobox, I imagine it is easy to correct it, but I think it is a big deal to add an infobox to a page. I don't know the politics; maybe it is expected that every Person should have an Infobox.
I'm confused by the meat Turing test one because there are already people who say they can't tell the difference between some plant based burger patties and meat ones.
> This question resolves positively if, by 2023-04-01, a double-blinded randomised controlled trial reveals that human evaluators are not able to distinguish actual and plant-based meat products. The test must involve at least 50 subjects in both the control group (who receive actual meat products) and at least one of the treatment group (who receive plant-based meat products). [etc.]
This seems underspecified. The chance of success varies wildly depending on the type of meat you try to simulate. Faking a medium-rare porterhouse, in the next 12 months, is basically impossible, but if you're talking about chicken nuggets I wouldn't be shocked if the bar was cleared a few years ago.
They have the criteria that it has to be at least 20% meat by weight. That's such a small amount that it almost certainly can be passed by a properly crafted study today. It's probably meant to capture fast food hamburgers, since a basic MacDonald's hamburger is about 20% meat by weight. But you could do a study with orange chicken, popcorn chicken, soup with ground pork, or something like that to minimize the weight of meat and maximize the strength competing flavors.
If the study is Turing-test like in that the participants are aware of the nature of the study, and able to investigate to their hearts content, perhaps it's not possible, but I think the most likely study would be created by a "vested interest" one way or the other. It's kind of disappointing that the majority of the probability question turns on who is most likely to do a study, their motivations, and the study design rather than what we really care about.
I think part of Crazy Jalfrezi's surprise was that he thought you were taking about the meat patties alone, while you're talking about the weight of a hamburger meal as a whole
27 -- this is just a standard case of post-treatment bias, right? You can't run a regression on race and control for something race affects, because the answer you get is impossible to interpret unless you find a way to incorporate all the possible causal channels connecting race, test results, and future income. Notably, this regression *doesn't* measure the "effects of racism beyond those affecting test scores" or anything like that -- the bias in this sort of problem doesn't come with a clear interpretation, magnitude, or direction. (See e.g. this paper by Bohren, Hull, and Imas for a couple of causal channels that would bias this regression in hard-to-interpret directions: https://twitter.com/instrumenthull/status/1503385611050180610 , and this paper by Durlauf and Heckman explaining the error in a similarly flawed regression: https://twitter.com/brendannyhan/status/1287089470152552450)
Because right now neural networks make a lot of money for a lot of different actors and so would only be bannable with a well-co-ordinated, extremely competent, extremely intrusive world government?
And even if all you care about is X-risks, a world government of that sort is also an X-risk.
Oh well, my comment was tongue in cheek. I fully realize it is impossible to ban an algorithm (even for a world government) and as a technological determinist i do understand that once a technology makes money to anyone it is bound to be widely adopted - sooner or later.
It's not that i am scared of X-risk, i am more scared of AI working as intended. I don't see anything good coming out of deep learning, but maybe I lack imagination.
Deep learning is already accelerating fundamental biomedical research, dropping AI at this point would set medicine back for multiple decades, which goes into some serious megadeaths of impact even without counting QALYs. Without a convincing argument that unfriendly AI is right around the corner waiting to jump out of DeepMind, I'm not keen on killing millions just because Eliezer has a bad feeling about this.
Well, alphafold is exactly the sort of advance that I wish had never happened. A box telling you how proteine folds without us understanding what is going on inside.
Were you expecting to solve protein folding on pen and paper? There's no human-readable process that you can discover, it's just a lot of brownian motion and descending free energy gradients. There is no meaningful sense in which you can "understand" how a protein folds.
Point taken, but I see deep learning being used more and more eg in my field of purely useless reaserch to classify phases of matters.
Does this make technological advancement faster? Well, my field is useless, but in general yes! I guess that my point is that i think that too fast technological advancements do more harm than good.
Because neural networks are kind of like steam, or electricity, or electronic computers, or nuclear power. They are incredibly dangerous in the wrong hands, but also the gateway to the next stage in human development. You can go full Amish on your own time, sure, but don't push your simple lifestyle onto the rest of us.
Those you listed ended up doing more good than harm - with the potential exception of computers - but I am not sure this is going to be the case for deep learning.
And anyway, that's not how technology works, isn't it? Technology is not opt-in, i cannot choose not to have my job transformed into an alienating machine-babysitting, pretty much like horses had no saying when they were substituted by cars.
Also, I am a physicist (in training). A world in which all answers to any problem, any planning, any project is gifted to us by a black box that we have no idea how it reached the correct answer is my nightmare. Everything i value, reaching a collective deeper understanding of the world, would be abandoned - we have the black box after all.
First of all, if you think that computers are doing more harm than good, then your worldview and mine are probably too divergent to come to any kind of agreement (also note that we're having this discussion by means of computers). And yes, job obsolescence due to automation is a huge short-term problem; but in the long term, we are all better off with those jobs being performed by machines, because we get orders of magnitude more productivity. For example, today no one needs to wait in line to make a phone call; dial the number, and you are connected instantly, without going through a human switchboard operator as in the old days. Likewise, food security is still not perfect, but much better than in the days of oxen and plows.
> A world in which all answers to any problem, any planning, any project is gifted to us by a black box that we have no idea how it reached the correct answer is my nightmare.
Your nightmare is my pipe-dream, but it's just that: a pipe-dream. It will never come to pass. Ok, ok, "never" is a long time; let's just say not in the next 1,000 years. Omniscience is just not a real thing that can ever be achieved -- unless, of course, one subscribes to some version of religious faith (in which case physics is pointless anyway).
> note that we're having this discussion by means of computers
Why yes, of course. Nevertheless the internet is precisely the thing that makes me think that computers have made more harm than good, our conversation (being part of the good) notwithstanding.
> we get orders of magnitude more productivity.
I don't think an increase in productivity is necessarely good. It won't necessarely lead to an increase in happiness, because an increase in the level of well being will have the consequence that now people will require even more things to be happy.
> Your nightmare is my pipe-dream
Well, obviously the onmiscience was an hyperbole. But even remaining where we are today, i am not a fan of alphafold, as an example. A magic box we don’t know how it reaches the correct answer. But well, that's probably up to the divergent worldviews.
As someone who did a small-n neuroimaging study (fMRI) and read many more of the same as part of the research, can confirm they are garbage and generally should be considered p-hacked or otherwise wrong unless rigourously proven otherwise.
Results from the national adult literacy survey show that blacks with post-graduate degrees have lower literacy and numeracy skills than college drop-out whites. Black 4-year degree graduates have only slightly better skills than white high school graduates.
It is perfectly rational to have a preference for white applicants over black applicants who are "equally qualified", because "equally qualifed" doesn't actually mean of equal ability. But this is precisely what we should expect considering the scale of affirmative action in this country and the fact that education does not magically transform a person's intellect
A lot of these studies really suggest that you'd be better off looking at someone's qualifications to see if they can do the job and then give them an IQ test or a SAT test or similar and see how they perform on it.
If those qualifications are unable to accurately indicate the numerical and literacy skills of their holders then there is no point using them to assess the suitably of *any* candidate.
24 and 25 on nuclear war seem to be naive and localist in terms of the impacts of such an event. Nearly by definition it means total war and the most vicious of tactics and targeting would be used. Power, fuel, transport, communications, etc would be targeted along with military and political targets. That time a few years ago when Houston or Dallas or wherever had some issue with petrol refining caused months of issues and shortages. And that was a minor disruption which was quickly resolved. If the entire infrastructure of key sites were gone, it’d collapse civilisation for decades if not longer.
Covid showed how anaemic and poor we have become as lean and corporate ideologies of greed destroyed and hollowed out all redundancy and created fragile global supply chains which would cease to function if all or most major ports were knocked out. Even now a small hiccup in supply chains has seen cargo ships lined up for weeks and months unable to deliver their goods due to issues with ports, trucks, and warehouses.
In Christchurch in New Zealand from the 2011 earthquake they were literally unable to rebuild by themselves and many key infrastructure jobs were impossible to compete with local knowledge as no one has built a sewage system from near scratch or electrical grid wholesale in decades. They had to source talent from all over the world in order to try and even over decade later they are not nearly back to where they were. That’s ‘only’ an earthquake and they didn’t have to deal with the other aspects of a MAD catastrophe. Many of the old churches and such were simply impossible to replace with skills to make them being over 100 or 150 years out of date and only a handful of people around the world who could repair them, but couldn’t necessarily build them.
Looking at how bad regional disasters have been and how incredibly reliant on National and intentional responses they were to rebuild themselves over 10 and 20 year periods….if a nation were crippled and unable to draw resources and know how from across an empire to restore a single city, but had to deal with dozens of major cities being knocked out…life would collapse to a very simplified existence for decades and decades with non impacted regions becoming the new global powers. It could take 100 or 200 years to recover…with peaks and valleys of new technology, ie mobile phones and mules for farmers so that 2100 would be both better and worse off than we were in 1800 across various dimensions.
This ‘not so bad’ crap for a MAD scenario is naive to the extreme and thinks of only one city at a time or ignores the compounding effect of so many systems being lost at once where people in cities will start murdering each other for food within a week of the truck deliveries stopping.
Even looking at the Marshall plan and such in Europe from the USA, the UK had meat rationing into the 1960s from a war that ended in 1945…and nominally the UK was on the winning side! Over 20 years to restore just cattle and meat production and distribution! How or why would we ever think something orders of magnitude worse, such as a doomsday MAD scenario, would not be as bad? It’d be much worse and we are much more fragile and reliant on brittle paper thin supply chains now vs how the UK was back then when people were closer to the land in terms of knowledge of food growing and non electric preservation techniques. Would we be better or worse in growing victory gardens today vs back then? Worse I’d say, and we would be trying to feed a lot more people.
The message must be that we never ever have a MAD scenario play out. Softening that vital message by simplistically looking at blast radius zones is utter nonsense.
To quote myself: "This isn’t to minimize the effects, as it would be a humanitarian catastrophe unprecedented in human history, as the global economy breaks down and regions are pushed back on their own resources." Also, "Again, nuclear war is bad, and we should be very careful not to have one,"
>Softening that vital message by simplistically looking at blast radius zones is utter nonsense.
So you're saying it's OK to lie if the stakes are high enough? That is a perspective you can hold, I guess.
> The message must be that we never ever have a MAD scenario play out. Softening that vital message by simplistically looking at blast radius zones is utter nonsense.
It seems to me that there is a meaningful discussion to be had about whether or not a nuclear war is an x-risk, extremely bad or just really really bad and the conclusions drawn from that discussion should inform our decisions about where to spend the limit resources we have for (for instance) x-risk prevention.
Pre-emptively declaring one side of that discussion "utter nonsense" strikes me as unhelpful.
As a New Zealander I'd bet a lot that the time the rebuild has taken is almost entirely due to other factors, like political bickering, not wanting to pay for it, spending ages on deciding what to replace things with, and being extremely integrated into the global economy—relying on foreigners to do the important jobs here is almost a badge of honour (a concept call cultural cringe). Compare how fast Japan can rebuild things.
#11: The willingness to expand 'Romanness' to conquered people as the main reason for Roman success is a major proposition in Mary Beard's work, and is the thesis of her popular-audience book 'SPQR'. I was a little surprised that Grunewald didn't reference it, but I enjoyed his take and it is convincing to me.
#30: I saw this twitter manifesto at Zvi's back in February, and made a similar comment there, but: the statement that 'there are no constitutional rights in substance without freedom to transact' is impossible to divorce, in my mind, from 'there are no constitutional rights in substance without having means to transact with.'
I accept that there is a difference between being prevented by a government from using existing resources that are in some sense 'your own' and not having those resources in the first place. But if a transaction must take place for a right to exist in substance, then both the means and the freedom to use them must be present. Else we are conceding that constitutional rights are contingent on wealth.
27 - the reddit post is from October 2021. The author has an updated (as of January of this year) version at his website https://reasonwithoutrestraint.com/race-and-iq/ - many other interesting analyses of 'controversial' topics as well.
I've already had a panic attack eating an Impossible Cheeseburger, "how did I get here this isn't kosher", even though of course it is. It wasn't the first bite, but it was when I was distracted a few bites in talking to a friend.
So I have very high confidence that fake meat will pass the "turing test". MOOring Test?
If fake meats get good enough that they can be used to dodge absintence requirements for religious observances, I wonder if this will cause a ruling to be issued by the various religions? It's not really the spirit of fast and abstinence if you're getting all the gustatory pleasures of eating meat but it's technically not meat.
Interesting arguments ahead, and the same kind of dodges people have always used to get around rules!
4. The Vox article on Georgism seems much worse than the writings about Georgism I've seen here. Or maybe I don't fully understand the argument.
This article suggests that there is a close relationship between the land value tax and overly restrictive zoning laws. What is this relationship?
Parts of the article pretend that zoning laws don't exist. "And if someone turns their garage into an apartment, providing an affordable housing option for their community, they pay higher property taxes than similarly situated neighbors who don’t add housing options to their land." The reason this doesn't happen more often isn't because of the taxes. It's because it's illegal.
Parts of the article claim that a land value tax will cause overly restrictive zoning laws to disappear. "It turns NIMBYs into YIMBYs." I want to know how this happens. If I don't want a big apartment building going up next door because it's too noisy, how would reducing their taxes change my opinion? If anything, I would expect that a land value tax makes NIMBYs worse: the new development next door could increase my land value, and so my taxes.
I do think that a land value tax is a useful tool to reduce vacancies & make the tax system more fair. I also think that zoning reform should be implemented in lots of places. But these aren't the same problem. The land value tax seems most useful in places with many vacant lots and urban blight, while zoning reform seems most useful in places with no vacant lots and high rents.
Why has this idea become popular recently? Probably because it's a pretty good idea and people are putting forward good arguments for it. Not because "we've run out of suburbs." We haven't. Before the pandemic, suburbs were growing faster than urban or rural areas [1], and I expect that trend increased with more people working remotely.
For the second one - if the body responsible for zoning laws is the one getting the revenue from the LVT, they're strongly incentivised to ignore the complaints of existing residents. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing rather depends on how YIMBY you are, but the logic is about persuading councils or state governments rather than about persuading neighbours.
To suggest an answer to Naval Gazing's question, I think some of the Western appreciation for Russian equipment is that the designs are often good on paper and well fit to novice users. "Deep Battle", the Soviet WWII doctrine of combined arms, can reportedly be implemented by wargamers with modest skill and a few minutes of prep time. It works even with the minimal coordination you can usually achieve in video games. Soviet strategies are brutally straightforward, and their tanks are designed to match. The fact that the vehicles are often manufactured, maintained, and employed well below the design is often ignored. That they have bad ergonomics and situational awareness is not necessarily understood or experienced by enthusiasts or gamers. By contrast, Western strategies are a lot more complex and subtle. The tanks have tradeoffs that are exploitable if not used by professionals, or when used outside a Western combined arms milieu.
But anti-missile systems are definitely an essential technology for every serious military going forward. A well-supported, well-equipped MBT is scarily survivable, even if poorly deployed and defended tanks get got. As a case study, Israel lost *zero* main tanks or modern APCs to Hamas in Gaza in 2014, despite facing the most advanced Russian missiles and RPGs available at the time. These APS systems are even scarier if those systems can not only shoot down the incoming projectile but simultaneously cue the tank where it was shot from; you might not live long enough to see your ATGM defeated harmlessly in front of the tank.
I reread the Naval Gazing post and he's talking about *strategic* missile defenses. I still agree with the sentiment; building missile defenses frees you to act (classed as "destabilizing" because it makes war more likely) whereas building second-strike weapons prevents the other person from acting ("stabilizing", since it makes war less likely).
But we may want to do war-adjacent things! We spent a few decades mostly thinking we could get away without big wars, but that seems to be ending. Plus, non-nuclear countries want some protection from nuclear ones, and countries with pathological neighbors e.g. Israel from the Ayatollahs or their proxies Hamas and Hezbollah. Anyone who falls into one of those categories most definitely wants strategic missile defenses.
The ABM treaty did allow the US and Russia to have a small amount of missile defenses - the idea was that each side could be reassured that their capital and ICBMs were safe but not have so many they risk their country in a nuclear war.
The ABM treaty is no longer in force, but I think the calculus is the same - we want enough defenses to protect against North Korea going nuts, but not so many that Russia or China would fear that we're trying to remove their nuclear deterrent.
The missile cruiser Moskva has been confirmed sunk by Russia on April 14 [1]. Ukraine claims they shot it with two cruise missiles on April 13 [2]. On the same day, April 13, Ukraine released the stamp commemorating the small force on Snake Island telling the Moskva to go fuck itself [3].
Coincidence? I. THINK. NOT.
I'm not in general a conspiracy theorist. The only other fringe conspiracy theory I believe is that "smart lights" only exist because lightbulb companies haven't figured out how to make a mediocre LED. But the timing is too funny to not believe.
P.S. there is truly bonkers rumor that there was Christian relic onboard the Moskva [4]. If 2022 was pitched as the next season of Servant of the People, nobody would have bought it.
Curriously, Russia claims that the cruiser sunk due to onboard fire which led to the detonation of the ammo and that this has nothing to do with Ukraine attack. I'm confused: why would they say that?
Is the ridiculous incompetence of the Russian army a more preferable narrative then a success of an Ukranian attack? My naive intuition tells me that it's supposed to be the other way around. Why is loosing a cruiser in battle considered to be more disgraceful than not even being able to arrive to one?
It may be the inertia of lies, when you are so accustomed to lying that you keep doing it even when it's not helpful for you. It may be the fact that Russian army is well aware of its own incompetence but keeps hoping that Ukranian army is incompetent as well or even more so. Or the doomed attempts to keep to the narrative that Ukranian army resources are completely depleted and thus it couldn't be a missle strike. In any case I think it tells us something interesting about Russian army epistemical situation.
>Curriously, Russia claims that the cruiser sunk due to onboard fire which led to the detonation of the ammo and that this has nothing to do with Ukraine attack. I'm confused: why would they say that?
>Is the ridiculous incompetence of the Russian army a more preferable narrative then a success of an Ukranian attack? My naive intuition tells me that it's supposed to be the other way around. Why is loosing a cruiser in battle considered to be more disgraceful than not even being able to arrive to one?
Agree. I wonder if there are some hidden factors, like they *had* to announce the loss of the ship soon-ish because it would have been just too ridiculous to keep pretending it was fine. But getting permission to say literally anything about the Ukraine military attacks goes through an entirely different chain of approvals that takes way longer, so all they can say, 'it blew up'.
But on the other hand, some people think it looks worse if the air-defense specialized ship was taken out by an air attack. But even if that were the case they can't really expect people to believe it wasn't?
Well personally I'm so confusecd about this situation that I'm giving 20-30% that it was indeed some mailfunction which led to fire and sunking of the ship. Russian flagships do have a history of spontaneously catching fire after all.
Fire is an accident that can happen to everyone. No shame in that. Being beaten by your enemy is disgraceful. Russian reaction makes complete sense to me and I am more surprised that there is an opposite view.
Losing your flagship to an accidental fire would absolutely be shameful incompetence. Fire aboard a warship is the number one situation that is constantly trained for, because of how devastating it can be. Ships in general and warships in particular are designed around fire suppression - sealing compartments for smoke containment, high pressure saltwater ring mains around the ship, etc, etc. Any competent navy will be running firefighting exercises very regularly. To have a random, uncontained fire so bad it sets off your magazine would be a sign of rank incompetence in this day and age.
In general Russians don't think like that. Imagine if lightning hits and causes fire? It is an unfortunate act of God. Yes, you should have better fire-fighting preparedness but still you cannot prevent every fire. It is a bad situation but you can always wiggle out and pretend that even the most competent may sometimes fail.
Whereas admitting that your enemy whom you attacked thinking it to be weak beats you, it would be very shameful.
I just saw the Russian speaker on TV where he was enraged and promised revenge and that this is an act of starting a real war. And yet he was not able to say that Ukrainians by their missiles caused the ship to sink. It is some kind of Russian double-speak where they manage to not say things directly while everybody understands what they really meant.
The number of random Russian citizens who are properly informed as to the importance of firefighting discipline at sea, is <<<100% of the total. The number of random Russian citizens who think their country's warships ought to be able to defend themselves against enemy attack, is ~100%.
More people will forgive the accident, so if you have a chance (and you're a lying bastard) you claim the acccident.
It's a fair point that it was a statement more for unsophisticated domestic consumption, whereas I was thinking in terms of actual, real life implications. But at least one Russian propagandist cum journalist was upset enough, and understood enough to angrily question it live on TV: https://twitter.com/Nat_Vasilyeva/status/1515617876765519872
"I'm infuriated by what happened with 'Moskva' flagship of the Black Sea Fleet. I'm just infuriated. When we say that yes, it was old, yes it went through renovations. Yes, that series of ships truly had vulnerabilities, old traumas, I get that. Just explain to me, how did you manage to lose it? Explain to me, how the hell you ended up in that part of the Black Sea? At that time? And I don't care what happened, whether it was two Neptune rockets as Ukrainians say - since when a combat ship is afraid of a rocket strike when it has equipment allowing it to resist this sort of strikes? Was something not activated? Fine, even with two rocket strikes, 'ammunitions fire emerged', what about your fire fighting measures, explain to me please? Why did your fire fighting measures didn't work and the ship practically burned from the inside out?" - (translation by @mdmitri91)
Of course it's not a coincidence. The Ukrainians have a very limited capability to sink warships at sea; reportedly a single battery of Neptune missiles, *maybe* a dozen missiles total. They are going to be very careful about when and how they use them. They are going to wait for a perfect shot.
The flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, *and* the ship that they made a symbol of their national defiance, sailing alone in a known position in a storm that would degrade the ship's missile defenses, was the perfect shot for them to take. Well, that or an LST carrying a mechanized battalion to the invasion of Odessa, but that never happened and now probably never will, so Ukraine deliberately and non-coincidentally took the best shot they would ever have.
When I first saw "There are no constitutional rights in substance without freedom to transact" idea, I thought that it's interesting but obviously proves too much. For instance, that there are no constitutional rights without post scarcity communist society.
If we assume that constitutional rights require the ability to spend money, we end up with a situation where some people have more money, therefore more constitutional rights than other people, therefore making these rights not rights but privileges.
Freedom to transact definitely operates at a higher level though - one can easily imagine a poor but popular grass-roots advocate raising money to campaign, even if he has none himself; if cut off from the banking system though, raising money becomes impossible.
Of course the satire in 9 cuts both ways: intentionally or not, it puts forward a case that either Jesus is a composite figure, or the Gospel accounts are based on several oral sources that got garbled in transmission, or, if neither is the case, Jesus was as inconsistent, opportunistic and/or psychologically unstable as Trump.
The second option there seems fairly likely, no? It is known that the gospels were recorded decades after the lifetime of Jesus, and there were many versions of them floating around until centuries later, some with quite important differences.
I’ve never known how to greet people on Good Friday: “Happy Good Friday” sounds silly and a bit in appropriate given the subject matter, while just saying “Good Friday!” makes you sound like you’re Amish.
Re: 20, comments in that link mention the fact that English is the only major language that doesn't have a governing body. I think this is under-reported!
I'm pretty sure English is the only officially-democratic language with more then a million speakers. That's based on my own original research though, I haven't seen anyone else talk about it. I feel like it captures something about the libertarian anglophone philosophy, and I would love to learn more about how this came to be the case. Did no one ever try? When did most linguisitc-authorities come into existence? Has it had any measurable effects on English development? Etc.
14. is misleading. This is specifically in reference to brain-wide association studies (BWAS), e.g., "let's try to correlate, uh, which Pokémon starter people prefer to any possible set of structural and functional indices." These studies work off of questionable hypotheses.
Neuroimaging studies with well-argued hypotheses (i.e., NOT grounded in BWAS and/or generically bad science) and relatively modest sample sizes have a lot to offer.
The Banach story reminds me of the protagonist of Le Guins The Dispossessed. He's a leading expert in theoretical physics, and when he visits the sister planet they insist on calling him "Dr." because a guy like that couldn't possibly not have a credentialed title!
The Banach’s exam is straight from the 1939 Czech comedy film “Journey into the Depth of the Student's Soul” where students organize such a subterfuge exam for their well-liked teacher who is afraid to apply for the exam himself, as he considers himself not prepared enough for it. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesta_do_hlubin_%C5%A1tud%C3%A1kovy_du%C5%A1e>
I haven't gone and read the methodology yet, but the blogosphere map seems very out-of-date. It's got the old version of Pharyngula on there, which I don't think has been used for 5 years. And Worthwhile, which barely functions as a blog any more. It's a weird combination of the blogosphere now and what it looked like 5-10 years ago.
Maybe that's just because things have weird half-lives on the internet when they're not very active any more, but they're still available. But it makes the map a bit difficult to parse.
I don't think people put continuing effort into their blogrolls. My impression is that blogrolls get established when the blog is started, but not necessarily updated or pruned. Let me know if I'm wrong.
Also, let me know if there's a better way of looking at connections between blogs.
Isn't the fourth one a subset of the third? Trump may not be clinically insane (but then again he may be) - but that just drives home that the trilemma, as stated, is a false trichotomy; Jesus may have been a moral teacher who, like a lot of other young men, also had what we now call schizotypal traits. (It is difficult to see how someone could get into the prophet/messiah track, common at the time, and *not* have schizotypal traits.)
2: Cool graph, but it can't be complete. Fox is a tiny yellow dot. Where's the tiny purple dot for NYT? Do humans so rarely link to these old corporate media outlets from their blogs that ACX is 30 times bigger than fox in the link graph and NYT doesn't even show up? [Edit: Krugman is a red dot a quarter the size of ACX but the rest of NYT is absent] Does almost all their traffic come from deliberate subsidies by big tech instead of humans linking to them? It approximately seems that way. Prior to Youtube's public decision to subsidize old corporate media by bumping them waaaaay up in all search results, they were getting almost no traffic on youtube.
Categories seem to be
purple: rationalist blogs
red: left/center econ blogs
yellow: right econ blogs
orange: mostly libertarian blogs
yellow: righty blogs (single-issue free speech promoting blogs like thefire.org and volokh get miscategorized as yellow or orange)
purple: lefty blogs
green: wall street (mix of apolitical trading blogs and hyperpartisan blogs that mention wall street)
26: Why is the size-scaling limit for avians >1 OOM larger than the size-scaling limit for flying arthropods?
32: Of course people respond to incentives and fat shaming is an incentive. But you're fighting an uphill battle against hunger unless you categorically change which foods are available to eat. Some foods are vastly more satiating per calorie than others. Anything that spikes insulin is bad because it makes the brain less sensitive to leptin and causes more hunger on the rebound. Meats and vegetables are great. (I have succeeded in reducing my bodyfat percentage from 20% to 16% over the last two months using the rules described here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PPeSqatTRsuFw3ug9/food-manufacturers-are-out-to-get-you)
Singapore probably could have got much more than that 33% reduction in childhood obesity without fat-shaming anyone if only they banned all caloric beverages other than milk.
A new theory I came up with after writing that post was that any superstimulus of tastiness gives you a medium term bias to eat more of other things even after you finish eating the superstimulus. And if you deny yourself the superstimuli you get back to the same hedonic set point soon anyway. Might as well avoid all the superstimuli no matter how small their caloric content.
Ah, commented too quickly. Take that as those who are US citizens when they won…
Better description would be US States by number of *US* Nobel laureates born there. Montana doesn’t get credit for Brian Schmidt now that he is Australian.
"New finding suggest the cult of Trump has much wider geographical extent than previously thought:
According to the new manuscript uncovered at archaeological site on the Pontic steppe, sometime in the second decade of 21 century the settlement of Novgorodskoye was renamed to New York after the mythological birthplace of Trump. The locals believed the renaming will help to earn the favour of the powerful deity and protect the settlement from the destruction by Ork Horde."
28: One of my favorite findings in cognitive science! The paper that started it all is Dehaene (2007). One of the more interesting examples - why are there such strong (complete?) overlap in hippocampal processing of episodic memory & egocentric navigation? How about semantic memory & allocentric (landmark) navigation? Arguably because of deep similarities between the two functions. Buzsaki & Tingley (2018) argue that HF performs sequence processing, leveraged across diverse applications.
Other examples of cultural recycling discussed in Dehaene (2007) include reading & face recognition, arithmetic vs eye movement, music vs speech. These are all construed as needing similar cost functions.
Marblestone et al (2016) argue that DL is moving towards a similar design pattern, which will move us much closer towards AGI.
> We hypothesize that (1) the brain optimizes cost functions, (2) the cost functions are diverse and differ across brain locations and over development, and (3) optimization operates within a pre-structured architecture matched to the computational problems posed by behavior. In support of these hypotheses, we argue that a range of implementations of credit assignment through multiple layers of neurons are compatible with our current knowledge of neural circuitry, and that the brain's specialized systems can be interpreted as enabling efficient optimization for specific problem classes. Such a heterogeneously optimized system, enabled by a series of interacting cost functions, serves to make learning data-efficient and precisely targeted to the needs of the organism. We suggest directions by which neuroscience could seek to refine and test these hypotheses.
Buzsaki & Tingley (2018). Space and Time: The Hippocampus as a Sequence Generator
Dehaene (2007). Cultural recycling of cortical maps
Marblestone et al (2016). Toward an Integration of Deep Learning and Neuroscience
Compare slipping off a balcony and falling toward a hard surface from the 50th vs the 10th floor. Would you similarly prefer falling from the 50th floor (extremely high chance of dying) to falling from the 10th floor (small chance of surviving, crippled)? I would prefer the 10th-floor fall, and also living through the nuclear war - not that it matters what I would prefer.
Does being crippled sound like an individual-scale metaphor for the aftermath of a full-scale nuclear war? If not, is there a better one?
Huh well positive feedback and a ponzi scheme are not all that different. I both cases you hit the power rail... which is the limit.
It's a fairly funny skit on Biblical criticism and the much-beloved Q document which is hypothesised to have existed, even though there is no evidence it did:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_source
And of course the search for the Historical as against the Cosmic etc. personage, with some Mythicists claiming they never existed but were made up out of existing traditions and legends 😀
If that Q document existed why wasn’t it, like the eventual gospels, copied verbatim. Huh?
Maybe it was just an ugly set of scribbled notes, and all the important bits got copied into Matthew and Luke? Maybe it got dropped down the back of the couch, or caught fire? It's not that hard to imagine how a document could go missing.
Maybe Q wasn't actually a document, but a person (you could call him Q-anon), an old man who remembered a bunch of things that Jesus said, and got interviewed by both Matthew and Luke.
Well the latter is what I suspect, given oral tradition at the time. Although it may not have been one man. As to the document Q, why not copy that rather than write your own? Or why didn't it get multiple copies if it had at least 4.
Lots of important documents got lost between ancient times and now. Not for any particular reason; just, things get lost or destroyed. The Gospels are huge outliers in terms of the number of copies that got made.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_literary_work#Specific_titles
Also Richard Whately's "Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Buonaparte", which was written a few years earlier as a satirical rebuttal to Hume's essay on miracles.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Historic_Doubts_Relative_to_Napoleon_Buonaparte
I think the main argument of #25 is simply that it's not a *civilization-ending* event. The author would likely agree that diabetics dying would happen, and would be significant and bad. But it doesn't really bear all that much on the topic under discussion. It would be a tremendous tragedy, but I don't think the survival of diabetics will be the make-or-break for whether humanity continues to exist in the wake of nuclear war, so I can understand their omitting it.
(edit) to put it another way: if you think that people would be alive to worry about increased cancer rates, then you agree with the main point of #25's argument.
I also think #25 is poorly thought through. If we look at just the impact that COVID + Ever Given has had global logistics I can't image what the impact of a nuclear strike on a major US or European port would be. Heck a single strike on northern NJ that takes out NYSE data centers could probably create a complete break down of the worlds financial system. The author is too sure of their conclusions. The unknown unknowns are much too great.
Not to mention that a nuclear strike could be not so bad, but is obviously EXTREMELY bad for whoever is at the target at the time. The economic miracle of the 1950s in the US is a amazing but I don't think you can look at it and say "WW2 wasn't so bad".
The author's conclusion is essentially that we get set back about a century. That'd be bad, especially as we had a pretty strong century, but we'd recover by 2150 or 2200. In other worlds, no x risk.
However I am not convinced by his axiom that a nuclear exchange will revolve around strategic infrastructure. I see a nuclear exchange as a prelude to an extended struggle at a lower level of technology, and as such the best option would be countervalue strikes targeting population structures and civilian infrastructure to maximally set back the adversary state.
"Broken-backed war" was a late-40s concept, basically wiped out by thermonuclear weapons.
The "lower level of technology" is really a lower level of *industrialization*. We'd lose a very little off the top in terms of things we could theoretically build, e.g. the nanometer chip fabs would be gone beyond near-term reconstruction, but there would still be places that could make small batches of 80486s or whatever.
But low level of industrialization means your "extended struggle" is inherently local, because nobody has the logistics for serious global power projection. Yes, the Russians will probably still be trying to crush Ukraine when all they have are stone knives and bear cavalry, but they won't be able to march on Berlin (or vice versa) for quite some time. There may be a Russo-Chinese war, but it will be a border conflict in mostly-uninhabitable Siberia. And nobody will be invading the United States.
What happens to the technology when the generation which was educated before WW3 is dead? There's a lot of tacit knowledge that will be gone/have to be reconstructed, and people won't necessarily have the time to learn even the overt knowledge.
Why? If we get in a shooting war with Russia, is anyone planning to nuke Taiwan? If not, it's hard to see how the ability to make chips goes away. The US may not be able to make them, or afford them, any more, but the rest of the world should motor on well enough. The biggest catastrophe for the world for a big nuclear exchange is almost certainly economic -- in that the largest consumer economy in the world (that of the US) will go offline for significant period of time.
But I hardly see how India, Indonesia, Brazil, or Chile -- all very civilized and technologically sophisticated places these days -- will be wrecked by a conflict that doesn't come anywhere near their territory and doesn't involve destruction of their people and assets. They'll certainly be impacted, economically, but I don't see it as any worse for them than a serious worldwide recession.
If we get into a shooting war with Russia, China is going to conquer Taiwan and Taiwan is going to get broken in the process.
If we somehow imagine that Taiwan survives unscathed, Taiwan is not an autarky that grows 5-nm wafers from naught but local sand, and its chip fabs will go idle when the container ships stop coming. Since the container ships won't *completely* stop coming, any surviving chip fabs won't go *completely* idle, but they will be massively scaled back.
Also, China almost certainly gets nuked if only because Russia knows that nuked Russia + intact China = Russia as China's bitch and the top priority of the Putin regime is making sure Russia isn't anybody's bitch.
This is a bit paradoxical, isn't it? After this whole thing goes down, you don't really need to care about Russian economy because Russians will have way bigger problems to deal with than invading your American ass. In fact, I expect both the Russian Federation and the USA to stop existing in a single day, being replaced by some combination of small makeshift nation-states and warlord territories where said states cannot project power.
There is an existing organization in the United States that is quite well suited to that role, capable of dealing with massively-FUBARed logistics and outcompeting any other wannabe warlord. That organization is the United States Military, and it is burned into its institutional soul that the United States of America will be one nation-state, not many.
That's possible, but there's only so much negligence a region can suffer from the central authority before it secedes. I'd imagine negligence will be the default attitude given the overwhelming demand for, and meager supply of: critical supplies, order, capacity for force projection.
I did actually look at cancer rates. If my math is wrong, please show me and I'll correct it. As for other things, I think that was covered when I said "a humanitarian catastrophe unprecedented in human history, as the global economy breaks down and regions are pushed back on their own resources". Obviously it would be very bad, but my argument didn't hinge on exactly how bad.
>I don’t know about the nuclear winter question except that I’m not sure oil well fires are a good proxy for multiple multiple nukes.
Chosen as a case where the other side preregistered their hypothesis. They claim it's different in current papers, but I'm working on a longer deconstruction of that one which isn't done yet, and the threshold for "this time it's different" is always right above what we've actually had to deal with.
What bean says
Note that in the classic nuclear-winter literature, the claim is less "nuclear explosions will kick up dust that will blot out the sun" and mostly "nuclear explosions will start fires that will generate vast plumes of soot that will blot out the sun". With oil fires being a huge part of that, on account of their propensity for fine soot.
So the biggest oil fire you've got, is the best model validation you can get. Anyone who is serious and honest about this, is going to validate their models against the Kuwait oil fires, not volcanoes. And if your models overpredict stratospheric soot and cooling from those fires, you adjust the risk of nuclear winter *down*, at least until you can explain why.
I've read most of the same papers bean has, and my review is archived at SSC. This is really bad science, in the same league as what we'd get if the whole "global warming" debate was turned over to three prestigious scientists who work for Exxon. The bias isn't financial this time (I think), but it's just as strong.
Why would there be a *long-term* increase in cancer rates? That's not what the data from Hiroshima show:
https://bioone.org/journals/radiation-research/volume-187/issue-5/RR14492.1/Solid-Cancer-Incidence-among-the-Life-Span-Study-of-Atomic/10.1667/RR14492.1.full
From the article:
"The radiation [Excess Relative Risk] decreased significantly with...time since exposure (27% per decade; P = 0.001)"
That is, even for people who were most definitely exposed to significant doses of radiation, the odds of this exposure resulting in a cancer *decrease* significantly over time. So where would a long-term increase come from?
Then perhaps you need to express yourself more carefully. What you wrote suggests the ERR increases permanently, or at least over a long time, and that is not at all what the data suggest. What the data suggest is that exposure to radiation jumps up the ERR at the time of the exposure, and then it slowly fades with time.
Sure, the ERR is *detectable* 60 years out -- provided you do very careful research on 100,000 people, like they did here. Does that mean it's a Very Big Deal? Not by itself. Indeed, one thing you'll notice is that in order to dig out the ERR from radiation they had to build a careful accurate model of the ERR for smoking, since the effects of smoking are around the same order of magnitude as being nuked. That alone tells you it isn't an existential-level risk to civilization -- basically, it suggests most of the long-term survivors of a nuclear war (i.e. those that were not killed by immediate effects) would experience the same increased level of cancer risk as if they all took up smoking. Definitely serious, but not civilization-ending by a long shot.
I assume you expected to survive a global thermonuclear war without a netflix outage and with amazon packages arriving on time?
Yes, if you're dependent on a specific, hard to manufacture product you are fucked. You may stochastically get cancer, sucks but hopefully you managed to raise a kid or two in the meantime. For the rest of us, knowing that if you manage to avoid directly getting hit the world will be survivable is really important, and changes the calculus from "guess I'll die lol" to a possibility of you and your family getting through it, if you plan correctly and get lucky.
“ 1: History of the belief that garlic and magnets are natural enemies.” Pliny falls victim to the replication crisis.
Good on him for missing it when the Skeptics were around!
2: The left-leaning blogosphere (purple) seems tiny compared to the right (orange, yellow). Am I missing something? Does this reflect bifurcation where the left is captured by traditional media and the right embraces "alternative" media like blogs?
17: There are two important Turing tests plant-based meat has to pass: one where it's indistinguishable to my taste buds, and another where it's indistinguishable to my wallet. We shall see if both are achievable...
The left is smaller generally, yes, and certainly at the present moment; but not by enough to explain the marked difference here. It looks like an 80/20 or higher difference in the blog map, while the right/left split in America based on opinion polls is more like 55/45, if that. See e.g. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/generic-ballot/ for an idea of what I'm referring to.
I don't think the 40% of people who choose Democrats on a generic ballot read blogs like Instapundit, ChicagoBoyz, or Powerline. So... where on this chart do they live? What blogs do they read? My current speculation is that they just don't read blogs, they just read and listen to media produced by NYT, WaPo, NPR, and the like.
Excellently valid point.
So my definition of the left is more leftist than America's definition, meaning when I told the OP that the left is a smaller group globally, they replied by misinterpreting my definition of left. I then said that it would be impossible to have this conversation if they were an American, because that would mean our definitions are vastly different and they are casting a wider net than they should be. Since then they turned it into a useless conversation about a No True Scotsman fallacy, the kind you'd see in an elementary school debate.
Meanwhile, the point is still rock solid: the blogosphere has less leftists because they are a smaller group. The OP let their American definition of the left confuse them into not understanding why the blogosphere would have less blogs that identify as left, see here:
"It looks like an 80/20 or higher difference in the blog map, while the right/left split in America based on opinion polls is more like 55/45"
... they are falsely assuming the purple blogosphere represents the one half of the partisan split in American politics, when in reality they represent a smaller group, quite possibly only 20% like the OP thought seemed ridiculous.
unconfuse yourself https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman
That's the No True No True Scotsman Fallacy Fallacy right there.
Correct. Lizard is making a claim about false Scotsmen, not true Scotsmen. He's claiming that Scotsmen ID test (the notorious ScID Test!) is generating an abnormally high rate of false positives for Scotsmen.
Of course, Lizard is not defining what a true Scotsman is. If kilts were considered the defining test of Scotsmandicity, Lizard would be only saying that the perceived number of men wearing kilts is larger than number of actual Scotsmen wearing kilts. Of course this begs the question of how you define a kilt. If we define a kilt as "a knee-length skirt of pleated tartan cloth" than any ballerina in a tartan tutu would be a Scotsman. And if Lizard had said "No true scotsmen would wear a tartan tutu," that would be a No True Scotsmanism — because Scotsmen have been spotted wearing tartan tutus at the Glasgow's Gay Pride Parade.
But having said that, Lefties can be notoriously parsimonious about who they define as a Lefty. And Righties are downright expansive (dare I say liberal?) in their definition of Lefties.
https://www.google.com/search?q=tartan+tutu+fancy+dress&tbm=isch&sxsrf=APq-WBuTuY7AKHHu0y5RhRxQShULxiej-A%3A1649985996011&source=hp&biw=1645&bih=780&ei=y8lYYs_cO7Lm_QaImpvgCg&iflsig=AHkkrS4AAAAAYljX3CHE8ot1r_zvMsnTwrWrwBDOqqjT&oq=tartan+tutu&gs_lcp=CgNpbWcQARgBMgQIABAYMgQIABAYMgQIABAYOgcIIxDvAxAnOgUIABCABDoICAAQgAQQsQNQAFjuD2CYIWgAcAB4AIABbYgB3wiSAQM0LjeYAQCgAQGqAQtnd3Mtd2l6LWltZw&sclient=img#imgrc=0nb9NAUd2vXxqM
If you define 'left' to be a smaller group, and then clarify that actually the left is a smaller group, when the person you are responding to was defining the left as a larger group, then you have created the confusion in the post that supposedly clarifies it. The two reasonable definitions are the one that every American knows, and the one that would correspond to the French assembly in the late eighteenth century, i.e. the useful one and the original one. If you have an alternate one, ensure you are not arguing a category argument as a factual argument. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
I've heard two clusters of people earnestly arguing for a narrow definition of "left". Not sure which (if either) Lizard Man is arguing from.
One is people from countries where something like Social Democratic policies and parties are roughly the center of the Overton Window, or by extension, Americans who look at those countries and think they have the right idea. From this perspective, mainstream Democratic Party positions appear to be center-right, mainstream Republican Party positions appear far right, and positions that most Americans would call far right appear to be off the charts. This framework is valid from the perspective of the country the speaker is norming off of, but relatively unhelpful when analyzing American politics: it deviates confusingly from standard usage in that context, and it simultaneously ignores position relative to the status quo, position relative to the Overton Window, and the alignment of typical political battle lines.
The other cluster is people involved or otherwise interested in factional divisions towards the leftward side of the to usual political spectrum, and who wish to draw a general distinction between (if I understand correctly) various Revolutionary Left groups (Soviet-style Communists, Maoists, Trotskyites, Left-Anarchists, etc) and the Democratic Left (mainstream center-left groups, social democrats, progressives, what used to be called Second Internationalists, etc). People in this cluster generally seem to advocate "leftist" for the former and "liberal" for the latter. This is a useful distinction (e.g. it's extremely useful to have terms that distinguish between LBJ and Bernadine Dorhn), and the liberal vs leftist terminology seems like it's be a convenient shorthand in a context where the terms are unambiguously understood in that sense.
The correct definition of "the left" is the one used to categorize the blogosphere map! Any property, regardless of what you call it, that applies to 50% of the population but 20% of the blogosphere requires an explanation
Well, but even if we agree that purpleness should be called "liberalism" or "centrism", we still have that its blogosphere is strangely smaller than the orange and yellow blogospheres!
(Orange and yellow under "RBConfigurationVertexPartition", that is.)
Academics are well known to be much more left-leaning than the total population. Academics also seem like the sort of people who would be really into blogs.
On 2, yes, both tiny and much less constellation-y. Even Krugman is findable, yet fairly small and peripheral. I think this is more about cross-linking behavior than audience size though, Glenn Greenwald is tiny and I'm not sure where Andrew Sullivan even is, and I'm pretty sure they're bigger than ACT. Also, can anyone help with the distinctions between orange/yellow and teal/red?
Use one of the other two "grouping algorithms" under "settings", I think it makes much more sense when you do so. A clear "right-leaning" cluster, a clear "left-leaning" cluster, a clear "econ" cluster, a clear "rationalist" cluster, and some architecture blogs hanging off to the side.
Yeah this is better. And I like that the algorithm is smart enough to break off the architecture blogs before it tries to split hairs within the conservative & economics clusters.
I don't think anyone on the left likes Greenwald anymore.
He's not even a tankie... Just something else.
Greenwald has pretty consistently identified himself as on the left, but he seems to talk about that less and less. His articles are becoming significantly anti-Democrat, even if he's also anti-Republican (probably more anti-Republican, but he doesn't talk about it much). The Republicans disagree with him and move on, but Democrats have gone after him wholesale, and he's reacting negatively on a grand scale.
Following the timeline, he turned against the left when they refused to let him cover a real news story (Hunter Biden). That's still his single biggest pet peeve, but there are a lot of other hypocrisies that get him riled about about the left.
He goes on Tucker Carlson on the regular and called him a "real socialist." Notably, Greenwald only engages in Democrat bashing on the show.
Like he can say he's on the left... but at some point, actions have to matter.
The US has undergone something of a political realignment the last 5-10 years, where divides like populist vs elitist, globalist vs nationalist, orthodox vs heterodox, institutional outsiders vs insiders, et al have become more salient than the old left vs right conflict, at least for some people. Quillette had an article earlier this week about a new politics/punditry mag called Compact, which is apparently run by two conservative Catholics, a Marxist, and a British Feminist philosopher:
https://quillette.com/2022/04/12/point-of-compact/
It's a brave new world we're livin' in. GG's career is a perfect example of this. I think he remains a principled civil libertarian, a faction which used to be part of the left's big tent (to their credit!), but sadly civil libertarian attitudes have fallen very much out of favor on seemingly both the left and right except in a few contexts over the last ten years or so. Thus a guy like GG becomes politically somewhat homeless, and occasionally does some couch-surfing these days with people on the right.
I like the article on compact. I also think it does a good job of showing the disconnect between how people label themselves vs. their actual written output.
GG is no longer a principled civil libertarian. Again, couch surfing with people who applaud the banning of books means that your principles are somewhat fluid.
Civil libertarianism, in the non-Except-The-Outgroup sense, implies that applauding the banning of books is a thing you should be allowed to do.
I am not seeing whence you derive the implicit premise that being principled implies you can't conduct business with people who don't share your principles (as long as you're not directly helping them to violate your principles). Ostracism for crimethink is implied by some principles, but not all - and *particularly* not civil libertarianism.
Fair enough, but his ex-pals on the left don't seem to have any problem banning books, either. Not to mention tweets, youtube vids, public speakers, or pretty much any other form of communication. Like I said, civil libertarianism is dead.
Lots of us on the right despised him even longer. And the term you're looking for is "agent of influence."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_of_influence
You don't think "useful idiot" would be more appropriate? ;-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
Absolutely not. I could believe that, say, John Mearsheimer or some of the US national conservatives are useful idiots, with hard emphasis on the "idiot" part. Greenwald is different beast.
I have to think there's a corollary here to the finding that US conservatives are generally more dissatisfied with the GOP than progressives are with the Democrats. Likewise, conservatives (especially youngish 120+ IQ conservatives, which are probably the core audience for blogs) are more dissatisfied with Fox News and its like than progressives are with the MSM.
Conservative media is generally lowbrow, aimed at Boomers and the white working class, which is tough to sit through if you're a young highbrow rightist. White/Asian Democrats are generally college-educated and media aimed at them is more highbrow. You also have black media and Hispanic media targeted at those demographics.
Dissatisfaction with Fox and its ilk rings true to me. With that said, virtually all of the 120+ IQ liberals I know are similarly deeply dissatisfied with the Democrats, so I don't know what breaks the symmetry... (edit to add: if you have any sources for the finding that conservatives are more alienated than liberals, I'd love to take a peek.)
I think it's generally been a long-term finding that I've heard many times. But here's the first example I found, a Pew poll from 2015:
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/07/23/gops-favorability-rating-takes-a-negative-turn/
68% of self-identified Republicans polled had a favorable opinion of the Republican Party, vs. 86% of Democrats for the Democratic Party. It only shows a few years there, and you can see that it briefly shot up for Republicans in early 2015 but otherwise was lower.
I'll also observe that most of the time in Presidential elections, right-populist + libertarian third-party candidates outperform the third-party leftist candidates, which is probably a signal of major-party dissatisfaction. Nader's run in the 2000 election was a notorious exception, and 2004-2008 were basically even with a minimal third-party presence, but my rule held true for 1992-96, and 2012-20.
Just checked the latest from Pew, it seems to hold up to the present day, although the effect isn't huge. Thanks for the links!
2: I don't think the left is captured by traditional media, rather the right is rejected by it.
Poe-tay-toe, poe-tah-toe?
Does anyone really say poe-tah-toe?
Not really but Scots say tatties (Tah-tees), and chemists say poe-tah-see-um
I'd have guessed the left was more operating on social media like Twitter than writing "traditional" blogs? But that might be more "leftists", whereas you're wondering where all the generic milquetoast American left-wing people are also? A hypothesis there is that non-leftist left-wing Americans don't really generate discourse because their brand and ideology do not filter for the kind of people with a burning need to get their essays out there even if they have little power to implement it. But that may be too pat?
There’s probably at least some truth to the point that if you’re a generic leftist (and not a neo-Trotskyite or something) you can still satisfy much of your demand for leftist discourse from generic social media. Maybe you’re a fan of Star Wars and want to discuss it from a leftist perspective or read others doing so. Just go to r/starwars or whatever. Rightists always get chased out of such places unless they stay in the closet.
If you want to discuss Marvel with rightists, you will need to find a dedicated niche rightist community in which to do it.
That's a good point! (I don't read enough non SSC/ACX blogs to tell: are many of the right-wing blogs on the Blogosphere Chart "general blogs that happen to be by rightists and not shy about that fact"? I was sort of assuming they were actively political blogs at least as much as SSC/ACX.)
I guess I don’t think of this as an actively political blog. But a lot of blogging is reacting to current events. Science news, TV/movies, sports, etc. Or it can be doing a deep dive on topics of intellectual interest like history.
For example Instapundit is a big circle on there and it discusses a lot of topics of general interest.
It's not the most political of blogs, but it's got a regular "philosophy of government" feature in the form of the Dictator Book Club and Scott more generally talks about economy and the government a lot. It's a much more political blog than, I dunno, an opera review blog.
Though re: [2]. Hang on. This graph tracks blogrolls, yes? Maybe right-leaning blogs just do blogrolls more often than left-leaning ones do?
Regarding plant-based meat, my bet on that prediction depends heavily on the precise resolution criteria. Can plant-based meat be indistinguishable form a McDonalds patty? it's basically already there. Can it be indistinguishable from a good steak? I doubt we'll get there in decades.
you think a plant based steak that will be indistinguishable from a "good steak" will take decades? That's longer than most people's AGI prediction lmfao. 0 iq comment
MOD DECISION: Major warning (50% of ban)
your comment on 17 is something people would look back at in 300 years and view as completely asinine. I'm sorry the life of an animal is not worth a small difference in your tastebuds or a few dollars. Or you could just eat one of the millions of delicious plant dishes like curry.
Gross lack of empathy
Almost certainly unoriginal but I have to say it: #33 is clearly wrong because that doesn't look like Elon Musk.
I never watched Kony 2012 because I was already really annoyed by liberals slacktivism (I was ahead of the curve!).
BUT - from a purely marketing/tagline standpoint I could never understand why they wanted to ELECT this bad guy, Kony, in 2012. Wouldn't deposing/arresting him be preferrable? STOP KONY 2012. Was printing those extra four letters on red t-shirts really that much more expensive?
Look, in hindsight Obama vs. Romney was pretty good set of guys to choose from considering everything that's happened since, but some of us felt it was time for genuinely radical change.
HA! I"m sure the gentleman running KONY 2012 offered to fly Kony over from Uganda and that's what finally got him MK'ultra'd. "These two guys just dont' have what America needs. We need more barbarism, jungle living, and sexual assault! I mean one of these suits is a mormon! blech! America needs you Kony!"
On this note, while there aren't many pro-Kony takes out there, this is an interesting anti-anti-Kony take I read a while back:
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/03/11/uganda-truth-museveni-crimes/
This was very good and interesting. Thank you for the link.
Thanks!
"Rather than attacking Museveni’s army, Kony’s forces mainly attacked civilians, kidnapping children and training them to rob, maim, and kill people they believed supported Museveni. How could this possibly advance any rational goal?
What Lewis, along with the filmmakers behind the Kony 2012 video, fail to point out is that Museveni’s forces also seemed to behave irrationally. They were strong enough to defeat Kony but delayed doing so for decades. According to one of Museveni’s commanders, Kony surrendered in 1992, but then Museveni ordered his release. ...
Museveni shrewdly suppressed Kony’s pamphlets and speeches, and asserted, both to his own people and to Uganda’s foreign aid donors and diplomats, that Kony was simply crazy....
As Kony continued to wreak havoc, Museveni bolstered his own image as a champion of peace and stability. Sympathetic donors poured ever more foreign aid into his coffers, even though he and his henchmen were stealing much of it with impunity and his forces were also inflicting terror."
I was aware that KONY 2012 was a thing, but wasn’t aware of who Kony was, other than some bad person in Africa. Was he actually a leader of a country?
I'm sure someone will chime in with more correct info - but it's my understanding he was/(is?) the leader of a militia that liked to murder and rape people for fun (especially kids i think) - and that he started out in Uganda but then hung out in some nearby countries.
I think it was use of child soldiers, not randomly murdering children, that you’re vaguely remembering. But I only have vague memories too
I mean what where the child soilders for? To be sent into the villages to find more people to rape and murder presumably. But yeah, I'm ok with these memories being intentionally vague.
The Kony story is less about the person of Kony (who is still alive but not actually very influential any more) and more about the documentary being just a vehicle for the filmmakers to make money/get attention. By the time the movies came out Kony had been pushed out of Uganda many years before so the whole point of the money (Kony is a terrible war lord) was pointless.
I think we're all relatively aware of that, hence referring to the KONY movie as slacktivism. And I think a common criticism way back in 2012 was that while Kony was still a problem he was now a problem in countries neighboring Uganda, but wasn't in Uganda itself anymore. I agree with the Twitter OP about Kony 2012 being a pivot point in politics - but from my limited vantage point I think all it did was further calcify and create cynicism for anyone who wasn't a SJW - and yes I know SJW wasn't a term in 2012.
Also read about it today just for giggles - and it's not clear if he's currently dead or not. But the general consensus I found was 'lean toward dead'.
The idea pitched in the video was that after this flashmob-like operation, "everyone would know his name," and then once people were curious, word would get out about who he was and why he had to be stopped through traditional news media. The election-like branding was just a gimmick. But I do think the idea that using ironic marketing to convey a message to huge swathes of the American public deserves ridicule.
Oh no doubt! Even though I fully understand their very convoluted idea "make him famous" as if making someone famous stops them - as if the world is as obsessed with faux fame as US teenagers are/were........... - Even though I understand that I still can't get past the fact that KONY 2012 sounds like an election slogan, and just adding the word STOP to the front solves the problem and makes the whole idea much more clear.
19. Are you worried that by posting the explanation of the Zhou Enlai quote you weaken society's ability to be circumspect about predicting the future?
But seriously, thank you for doing this every time I see it referenced earnestly I feel motivated to write an annoying pedantic email.
I think the French Revolution never really did end, and has been going in one form or another ever since. Reganaism looks to me like another incarnation of the Thermidorian reaction.
Recently the French revolution has been focused on worrying about the Amharic influence in the American conservative movement.
Sorry I don't actually know anything about any of this so I'm resorting to silly puns rather than actually responding to you.
the french revolution was characterized by political instability on the macroscale, with microscale staiblity coming only when groups would temporarily hold power. What ended up happening was nobody was ever satisfied with the status quo; there were always conservatives who wanted to bring back the monarchy and people who wanted to take things more to 'the left' which lined up more or less with american notions of left/right today, as long as you translate for 250~ years ago.
So you might see the response to wokism among mainstream progressives as being akin to something like the thermidorian reaction, as analogized by a WSJ journalist:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/dave-chappelle-peggy-noonan-comedy-special-trans-woke-pc-11634853357
I think the analogy is way more apt than she realized.
Paywall, can't read.
https://archive.ph/J3XzH
Even without knowing the context, that quote always struck me as a translation failure. "It's too early to say" seems like the sort of thing you would say if you only half understood the question, but wanted to look like you understood it and had something profound to say.
Bret Devereaux has a great series of posts touching on #11 with much the same thesis. https://acoup.blog/2021/06/25/collections-the-queens-latin-or-who-were-the-romans-part-ii-citizens-and-allies/
I was about to post the same link, but instead I'll just endorse your post (and the whole Romans series it's from).
I came here to post that same thing.
Thanks, this is interesting.
It seems that Scott's summary of the article is maybe simplifying the thesis a little too much. What was more important to Rome during the critical struggles of the Middle Republic wasn't citizenship per se so much as the successful incorporation of the socii into a loyal and reliable confederation that was willing to shoulder much of the burden of empire, even when things were looking bad.
By the time of the Social War, when they were actually awarded citizenship, Rome didn't have a serious rival anywhere near the Mediterranean Basin.
To be clear, Greek and Roman "citizenship" was very distinct.
This is also a good nuclear discussion w Luisa Rodríguez and Rob Wiblin
https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/luisa-rodriguez-why-global-catastrophes-seem-unlikely-to-kill-us-all/
#23 (the debate on how much sleep you need)
This is one of those things where I have no idea why people trust the underlying data. I get about 6 hours of sleep a night. If you asked me if it was enough, I’d tell you definitely. Ideal, actually. I get to relax at night with my wife after putting the kids to bed, watch some tv, and still get up early enough in the morning to go for a run while still being able to make the kids breakfast. Perfect!
Then one night I’ll turn it at 8 PM and sleep until 6 and OH MY GOD IS THAT GREAT I HAD NO IDEA.
Basically I have no bead at all on what works best for me. I don’t see how Alexey and Natalia would.
I think Alexey might mostly agree with you and that his 'you can do with less than 7-8 hours of sleep' is a reaction to the conventional wisdom.
I sometimes wonder whether the people advocating 7-8 hours of sleep are some kind of mutant. I couldn't sleep for 7 hours even if I tried, unless I was recently sleep deprived. If I try to go to bed early, I won't be able to sleep, and even if I do, I'll just wake up earlier. The only time I ever go to bed at 8pm is when I'm jet-lagged and extremely sleep deprived.
I'm 48 years old, I weigh about the 140 pounds -- more or less the same I weighed in college -- and I sometimes wonder if fat people actually exist. I eat what I want, exercise irregularly, and my weight never changes! All the available evidence suggests it is literally impossible to be overweight.
I'm also fortunate enough to not gain weight easily. It's interesting how many experiences that people think are universal actually aren't.
Yeah, there are all kinds of people who are hard to believe in. I'm moderately fat. I pretty much eat what I please.
I don't become extremely fat. I don't understand people who have to struggle to eat enough to keep their weight high enough. (These are people who have access to food. They burn it off really fast.)
I don't understand people who like hard exercise. And so on.
I consider it a valuable and somewhat difficult to keep a grasp on people having experiences which are very different from mine. How about people who spend a lot of time on hatred? Not only why do they like it, but where do they find the energy?
And there are also people who like beer. I don't understand that.
Nonsense, extrapolating from myself, literally everyone in the world likes beer.
Like I said, people are wired differently. My father was that type, once he had enough sleep he couldn't stay in bed. Others of us would stay in bed as long as we were allowed.
It does seem to me, as I get older, that I do sleep less than when I was younger. Some mornings I will wake up early and get up as it's pointless staying in bed, I won't sleep. So there is that as well.
Yes, people are wired differently. It's almost as though there is a statistical distribution of outcomes. And sometimes I almost get the sense that people who live in the tails of those distributions love to post personal anecdata on message boards while claiming to simply not understand what all the fuss is about.
Meanwhile I wonder how anyone manages with less than 9 hours of sleep. I can just scrape by on 8, but notice that I'm more lethargic on it. I can also weather a single night of 5 hours, but I can absolutely not sustain that, and it messes me up badly on the day after (my sleep deprivation lags for some reason). :) But my primary is more like you; he can't sleep very long! (To be fair, he is also perpetually exhausted and miserable, which makes me wonder if he needs more sleep. But it doesn't change that he just can't and doesn't want to.) It's remarkable how different people are about sleep.
Meanwhile, if I got 7 hours of sleep every night for two weeks, I'd be straight-up depressed by the end the second week. If on a given mon-fri I slept 6 hours each night, I'll consistently sleep for 13 uninterrupted hours on Sat+Sun. I'm a young healthy person, I just need (and have always needed) a lot of sleep!
I have similar experiences with random fluctuating amounts of sleep. I might sleep for as little as four hours on some nights, and feel oddly fine. Other nights I might get 8-9+ and still feel a bit tired. When I first tracked my sleep as a teenager, I would naturally sleep 10 full hours, and was very tired if I only got 8. I probably average under 7 hours a night now and feel perfectly fine most days, though I sometimes have nights where I go to bed very early and wake up more refreshed than I would have thought I needed.
I'll talk to people who routinely get less than six hours (or worse, can't sleep more than that no matter how much time they have available) who seem fine. I also know people who get nine or more hours about every night and struggle to get up. I'm convinced that people have different needs when it comes to sleep, and that those needs can fluctuate long term and short term.
I think different people do have different sleep needs. I'll sleep as much as I can get; if I have to, I can get up early after a short amount of sleep, but more sleep is better.
Some people can only sleep six hours a night and if you force them to stay in bed, they'll just lie awake and toss and turn and be miserable.
Isn't there something to the REM cycle? Or whatever the mechanism, I know that usually when I wake up with 6 hours of sleep, I feel fine. But often with 7 hours, I feel much more tired. Basically there seems to be certain intervals in which waking up is ideal. Also a big difference between waking myself up vs. getting woken up by something external (besides maybe sunlight).
I think there is – for me anyways. I used to use an iPhone app as my wakeup alarm and it would listen to you as you sleep and time its alarm for the 'best' point in your sleep cycle (within 30 minutes or so of when you _had_ to be up at the latest). That seemed to work great (for me)!
(But I had to keep my phone plugged in all night and, because of the power draw of the app, and probably where I had my phone stored when I slept, I went thru several phone batteries – they all swelled. I _wish_ there was a standalone alarm clock like that.)
Sleep quality seems to matter a lot and be hard to control for. Anecdotally: for various reasons, I would usually get ~6.5 hours of sleep during the week, and be functional but tired. On the weekend I’d sleep 8-10.
But the last couple weeks I’ve started sleeping with earplugs, and suddenly 6.5 hours is exactly enough. I feel better during the week and now on the weekend I can’t / don’t feel like “sleeping in” at all.
Is it fair to say that the French Revolution never really ended?
What would you consider the end condition of a revolution?
It had long historical impact, but I think you have to tie yourself into odd rhetorical knots to claim that Napoleon's rule reflected the French Revolution's ideals.
The French revolution itself didn't reflect its own ideals: the assembly greeted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of with great acclaim. After some parliamentary debate a more length and full declaration was written ( in 1793). There were prints and stone tablets and paintings made of it, which were put on display in many places.
One thing though: the protections granted by the declarations were never put in force. The assembly and the government elected by it considered that to implement the declaration, it was first necessary to maintain a strict policy of ever increasing terror to root out the enemies of the republic.
"Once the enemies of the revolution have been rooted out, the state will wither away, and the paradise will be realized." Hmmm, where else have I heard that? Thanks for the context.
Both the French Revolution and Napoleon were high modernist, centralized states that attempted to impose their system of government on everyone else.
There certainly are important differences in their ideals. But there are also important areas of overlap.
Has the American Revolution ended?
I think that it makes more sense to use the term "Revolution" to refer to the initial period of rapid changes to the systems of power, not for the new system that establishes itself afterwards.
No, it isn't fair to say that. It ended at a minimum two centuries ago.
Technological revolutions seldom end but political ones always do.
As the name implies, it keeps on spinning.
I propose we call the plant meat Turing test the Moo-ring test. Because it's to see if you can accurately determine if your meal ever moo'd.
The flatness of the line suggest that Moore's Law has stopped improving the quality of plant-based meat every 18 months.
Two things. Firstly I don't think a flat line of a prediction about the the probability of something at a particular time says anything about Moore's law type effects.
Secondly it's called Moo-re's law in the plant meat space.
#12 This call for missile defence is very dangerous. The blog's argument is as follows.
* NATO has not been able to intervene in the war to the extent we would like because of Russia's nuclear weapons
* we should build missile defences so that Russia's retaliation threat is not sufficient to deter NATO involvement
The blogpost is literally saying that we should build up these defences so that we can credibly threaten to go to war with Russia without the risk of nuclear response being overwhelming. Given that large residual risk will still be there (as these systems are impressive but highly imperfect), this is inviting strategic error on an X-risk scale.
MAD is a crazy paradigm, but it's going to take a lot to convince me that we know that another alternative is safer especially one that attempts to neuter a nuclear adversary.
Also, Russia has already built nuclear missiles that can evade theoretical missile defenses that are far better than anything we can actually build right now.
Like what? The newest Russian missile is the RS-28 Sarmat, and aside from the relatively trifling aspect of having a shorter boost phase -- and current US strategy does not even contemplate boost-phase interception -- I can't find anything it does that would offer a more serious challenge to terminal and glide phase interception than prior generations of Russian (and indeed Soviet) launchers[1].
So far as I know, the major challenge to strategic missile defense is simply the sheer cost of the number of assets needed. You just need a heck of a lot more interceptors than we currently have, and they are expensive. Not to mention the rapid-response communication, cooperation, and command system linking together all the components would be very expensive indeed.
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[1] I'm of course aware of Russian boasting to the contrary, but the Ukrainians have been busily demonstrating the worth of Russian boasts for several weeks now, to those who were unduly credulous before.
In theory this: https://missilethreat.csis.org/missile/avangard/
Hypersonics are overrated. They are useful for avoiding defenses narrowly tailored against ballistic missiles, but there is a ton of hype around them. (Discussion thread on DSL about this recently with links to a couple of articles.)
I guess the question is: does the US military have weapons that can shoot/intercept one of these reentry vehicles?
Also this is probably a dumb question, but I've wondered for years: could one not use a nuclear bomb to intercept an enemy missile? Close only counting in horseshoes, hand grenades and half megaton reactions?
It's not entirely clear how well current US weapons would work against Russian hypersonic vehicles. I'm generally positive, but it's the sort of thing we can't know for sure.
A lot of the early ABM systems were nuclear-tipped. They worked OK, but had side-effects.
To be fair, everything we currently have fielded is pretty “narrowly tailored against ballistic missiles” in that sense, so a true boost glide weapon would be a challenge (as opposed to a ballistic missile with a bit of re-entry maneuverability, which is all the “hypersonic missile” that Russia huffed and puffed about launching in Ukraine is). Truly hypersonic scramjet cruise missiles also don’t have a direct counter, but practical scramjet tech seems farther away.
But it’s a technical problem and probably solvable, not some sort of unstoppable magic bullet like the hype makes it out to be.
Boost glide weapons are a trade off like anything else - harder to intercept in a traditional ballistic way, but the weapon’s glide phase is a legitimate guidance and control challenge much more likely to result in a mission failure than a dumb warhead that just lets Newton and Kepler do the driving. If half your warheads tumble out of control or miss their targets, that’s no better than getting intercepted. You also sacrifice the ability to use traditional decoys, since anything that can replicate a boost glide vehicle is going to be as complicated as another boost glide vehicle.
Meh. Warheads *already* re-enter at Mach 25, which is far above what even the most optimistic hypersonic glide vehicles might achieve, so I'm not especially impressed by the sheer speed. Plus you're making a much bigger (and powered) vehicle, so your payload is significantly reduced *and* made more fragile -- pretty much *any* damage, the slightest bend in a fin, to a Mach 6 vehicle in powered flight is going to result in aerodynamic catastrophe.
Hypersonics are clever if what you're trying to do is evade detection for a few vehicles, some kind of targeted strike, by flying low and fast. But if you're launching 1,500 vehicles and you trade down from 3,500 ballistic warheads to 2,000 more fragile hypersonics I'm not necessarily seeing that as a win. It kind of reminds me of the early hype about partial orbit delivery systems, which gave a similar kind of lessened predictability about where they were going to land -- but everybody abandoned those early on, since the tradeoff in reduced payload and accuracy was totally not worth it.
I don't think we can or should try to neuter them. I'm in favor of missile defense because it would reduce the humanitarian catastrophe of nuclear war. I don't think it's actually feasible to take out all of the missiles, but I also think Russia being less sure about our non-involvement in Ukraine would be a good thing for Ukraine.
Also, absolutely not an X-risk.
If missile defense occurred in a vacuum absolutely. But in practice it changes the strategic calculations on both sides. NATO would inevitably have a lower bar to intervene against Russia and Russia would have strong incentives to subvert the missile defenses and find ways to continue to signal a credible threat. If everyone calculates correctly, then the new equilibrium is preferable. But we have a lot of years of learning to calculate under the old equilibrium and none in the new one. The early years of the old system had near misses (i.e. Cuban missile crisis), and it's plausible that the learning curve for a new equilibrium might come with similar near misses or actual disaster.
In terms of X-risk, I certainly agree that the most likely outcome of a full nuclear exchange is not human extinction. On the other hand, nuclear exchange might lead to the collapse of the current international order and whatever comes next might well increase X-risks.
I think you're overthinking this. Nuclear strategy just isn't as complicated as it's normally made out to be. Nuclear weapons are very destructive, and we should try to avoid using them. Missile defense isn't going to make us hugely more likely to start throwing huge amounts of weight around. It does give us options when dealing with a crazy person, and reduces the casualties if things do go badly wrong. There's no massive change in equilibrium unless we posit an extremely effective missile defense system springs up overnight, which isn't going to happen.
BMD was widely considered destabilizing during the early Cold War, and that was one of the reasons for the ABM treaty[1], because a reasonable response to the existence of a leaky BMD by your opponent is to (1) accelerate your production of vehicles and warheads, so as to overwhelm by sheer numbers, and (2) consider more seriously a first strike during a crisis, since you could hope the element of surprise would reduce ABM effectiveness.
Of course, later there were many strategists and some politicians (e.g. RR) who disagreed, and that's how we got SDI.
I think the modern difficulty is that we are less sure what form a confrontation might take, and also that the intentions and other capabilities of plausible opponents (Russia and China) are less clear than they used to be. Russia, especially, has fallen from among the first rank of economies, or conventional military powers, and the behavior of *formerly* great powers with nukes is a novelty. The Chinese are also baffling because we don't really understand their geopolitical aims -- and I even wonder whether *they* do.
But without understanding the nature of the likely confrontations, and aims of the potential belligerents, I think whether a BMD is stabilizing or not is a fraught question, without obvious answers.
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[1] The other reason more cynical being that it became rapidly clear a continental BMD, thousands of Nike sites, would be extremely expensive, and why bother if MAD would keep the peace?
I don't think it was as wide as it looks in retrospect. A lot of it was that the Kennedy-McNamara camp had really good PR, and managed to get a lot of their strategic concepts enshrined as conventional wisdom, even though they're absolute garbage. This is the strategy that mismanaged Vietnam into what it became, so empirically it doesn't work well. And that was deeply tied to a lot of their positions, including on BMD.
A leaky BMD might encourage production of warheads, in which case I say let Russia build them, and we can build more interceptors. The economic case isn't what it was in the 1960s. As for pushing a first strike, I doubt it. The point of a leaky missile defense is that it preserves the deterrent effect while saving lives. Is America really less deterred today facing 1500 warheads than it was in the 80s facing 40,000? Because we've managed the equivalent of an extremely effective BMD, and it hasn't stopped us being deterred. For that matter, nobody talks about how we can be more free with China than with Russia because China has fewer nukes. It just doesn't come up, which is strongly suggestive of how at least American psychology works on this.
Even ignoring the strategy effects (which I still think are serious) a leaky BMD only saves lives if the system reduces the total number of nukes that go through. If we were facing 40,000 or even 10,000 warheads with a leaky BMD, I am not at all convinced we would be hit with a lower number than 1,500 with minimal BMD. As of a few years ago, the success rates in tests of large scale missile defense were only about 55%. Strategists sometimes claim you can get 90% efficacy just by firing three missiles at the incoming one, but this assumes independence of probabilities and it looks like a lot of failures are systematic (e.g. atmospheric conditions, positioning etc) so the hit rates are correlated for a given target.
Maybe these numbers are higher now and you could certainly increase that just by adding more systems, but I'd need to see a lot more evidence that we're anywhere near a BMD that could seriously reduce the number of nukes that get through. Even if the figure reached the sometimes claimed 80% number, if the Russians increase their ICBMs to 7,500 that eliminates all of the gains from BMD.
On the strategy side, more ICBMs is not the only possible response. Russia could also invest more in SLBMs and give its submarine commanders more autonomy on firing decisions so that we can't decapitate their command and control. That's creating more risk.
I would actually have said the other way around, that the belief that it was destabilizing appeared more widespread in the 80s than it does now, in hindsight. Anyway, generally I agree BMD is a very worthwhile endeavour (and I also thought so in the 80s fwiw), but I admit the calculus is...complex. It's really hard to predict what The Other Side is going to do and how it's going to shake out.
The problem with your argument is that you are assuming the crazy person you need to protect yourself from will always be on the other side of your defense system. No defense system can protect you from the destabilizing attempts of your own country's desire to provoke or escalate war, or from the incompetence of your own strategists who may overestimate their ability to control an escalatory spiral they've provoked themselves. Our situation today is the product of the massive change in equilibrium that has happened since the 1990s -- if NATO was even stronger, it would be even more aggressive in its expansion that it already is, and nuclear war would be far more likely.
Good point. It is too easy to assume that the baddies will always be on the *other* side.
It's a defensive agreement, no? Russia can't really believe they've anything to fear from nato, other than limiting their ability to expand
I strongly disagree. Much that I've read (and reinforced by the occasional conversations with Russians themselves over the decades) leads me to believe that a sizeable number of Russians feel that the sole overriding concern of every country in the world except Russia is to destroy Russia.
I'd call it paranoia, but I'm beginning to lean toward believing that for such Russians the only thing worse than the entire world conspiring to bring Russia low would be for the entire world not to care about Russia at all.
That's weirdly schizophrenic. "We" can't build a system that protects "us" against "our" own evil? The meaning of the pronouns "we" and "our" and "you" in your paragraph is shifting wildly from sentence to sentence. It would be much easier to parse if you were more precise about who you mean each time.
Okay, let me try again.
-
In response to the idea that missile defense systems are needed to protect Americans from "crazy" or "irrational" actors, I am pointing out that
1), no system cannot entirely insulate American civilians from the consequences of irrational and emotionally-driven decisions made by their own leadership;
AND,
2), The current situation the world finds itself in today is largely a product of the growing power imbalance between NATO and Russia, enabling NATO's eastward expansion as well as its decision to arm anti-Russian forces right on its border.
--
Here's a guide to the pronouns I used in my previous comment:
"You" = bean, but other American and "Western' civilians by extension
"Our" = American civilians + the rest of everybody on this shared planet
I did not use the pronouns "we" or "us" or "our".
It also reduces odds of Russia from resorting to nuclear weapons as there is a serious risk they are wiped out before any of their missiles get through our missile defence system.
I think credible missile defense also reduces the risk of accidental nuclear war due to a rogue actor or a glitchy missile detector. Imagine Stanislav Petrov had a third option besides “launch massive retaliatory strike” and “do nothing and hope you’re right about it being a glitch”.
The idea does strike me as dangerous, but to be fair, I don't read the post as arguing that we should build up missile defense for the sake of enabling NATO to enter a hot war with Russia. Rather, the argument seems to be that Putin is both threatening nuclear strikes and also possibly not entirely rational, so we should as a matter of course invest in missile defense to make ourselves safer against bad actors. The post then kind of hand waves away the likely Russian response and the danger of us engaging in reckless behavior ourselves if we believe we have an effective shield.
So I was basing that reading off the second sentence of the paragraph that talks about missile defenses which reads: "Putin has successfully deterred NATO from intervening largely because he possesses nuclear weapons, but some of his actions with them have given observers reason to question his sanity.". I read that as at least strongly hinting that it would be good if Russia's deterrence capability was lower (if not for this conflict then in some other cases). If that's not Bean's intent, then fair enough, but that was where I got that reading.
But as you say, regardless, of whether that's the explicit goal, the effect will be that greater protection will make it harder for NATO leaders to argue for non-intervention in future interactions with Russia.
Your reading is plausible, no question. I just think the weight of the paragraph is much more focused on the basic issue that (potentially) crazy actors such as Putin and Kim Jong-Un have nukes and we would be safer if we protected ourselves from them, consequences be damned.
But it is telling that the implicit nod to the license this would give NATO in the Ukraine conflict shows just how destabilizing this move could be *even short of causing a nuclear war.*
This is more or less what I was trying to get at, yes.
>he post then kind of hand waves away the likely Russian response and the danger of us engaging in reckless behavior ourselves if we believe we have an effective shield.
What likely Russian response? I don't think it will ever be in Russia's interest to initiate a nuclear war over a plausible missile defense, and I doubt any near-term missile defense will be good enough to make our politicians that stupid. It will reduce the damage if things go badly.
In my opinion we are engaging in reckless behavior by tiptoeing around while possibly 10,000+ people starve in Mariupol. A credible missile defence system wouldn't shift us all the way over the middle ground but rather let us get there in the first place
On what basis are you suggesting that the "10,000+" people starving in Mariupol is a result of the US "tiptoeing around"?
The Russians have claimed to open humanitarian corridors and then failed multiple times. I understand that they want to seal the city and reduce their casualties even if it costs 10 citizen's lives per soldier saved
What we should do is figure out a simple weapons delivery that the Russians would like less than opening a humanitarian corridor and start shipping it, pausing half the shipment indefinitely if they do a good job of letting people out and supplies in. I would think 20 anti ship missiles
Are you suggesting that more weapons delivered to the conflict zone will lead to fewer civilian deaths? On what basis? What is preventing Russia from escalating further in response, as they've clearly and formally indicated they will?
I think "winning" the proxy war and preventing civilian suffering are two distinct aims requiring us to prioritize distinct actions. If preventing civilian deaths is your priority, the only honorable thing to do is negotiate some kind of settlement (which would include banning the Azov Battalion, and Russian-language media and schools to operate again). If humiliating Russia or recovering some kind of moral legitimacy for the US (after Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya) is the priority, then more weapons are probably the best solution.
Lets say it is accurate that Russia prioritizes the life of one soldier over ten civilians in Mariupol. In an equilibrium environment this would mean that the threat of weapons capable of killing one Russian soldier would be able to change their behavior to the extent of saving ten Ukrainian citizens. If 20 anti ship missiles can kill 2000 Russian sailors they would allow 10,000 people in Mariupol to be saved through opening a humanitarian corridor to prevent 10 of those missiles from being delivered
There is the risk of an escalation cascade to be sure, but the fact is they are already escalating the situation towards mass starvation in Mariupol. This is not a scenario NATO countries believed the Russians capable of when they were determining what weapons they would not send
To prevent a knee-jerk Russian response it would be smart or even necessary to link a "do this or else" weapons shipment announcement with certain concessions from Ukraine. Tell the Ukrainians that the shipment threat will be put into motion if they announce that they will support a vote in the Donbass regions determining the creation of new puppet government zones there. So the threat puts some pressure on both sides, with the potential to de-escalate the whole situation
I'm all in favor of destroying Russian conventional military capacity, which is happening at a rapid rate, slaughtering all the young Russians who are enthusiastic or dumb enough to go to Ukraine and kill people, and shining a bright spotlight on the weaknesses of the Russian military machine. So, lots more weapons makes sense to me.
I consider the question of balancing these useful goals against civilian deaths something the Ukrainians decide for themselves. As long as they consider the tradeoff worth it, and keep saying to us "More guns! More bullets! We have more orcs to kill...!" we can keep going. I'm pretty comfortable that the US even by itself has the industrial capacity to supply 10 Javelins for every single piece of Russian armor, and 5000 bullets for every Russian man under age 25, without even breathing hard.
On the other hand, if the Ukrainians consider the tradeoff not worth it they can sue for peace themselves, and then of course we won't be sending them weapons any more. But it's not my problem to decide which they should choose, or when.
MAD only works when everyone has rational leadership.
This was always a very dangerous (and frankly, stupid) assumption to make.
Putin's decision to invade Ukraine was NOT rational, so MAD dies on the spot. Not to mention the fact that people like Kim Jong Un exist. There's zero guarantee that any leader of Russia, China, or North Korea is sane. Pakistan and India are both potentially under threat of such as well in the medium term. Israel is an apartheid ethno-religious state as well, and while probably not a threat to the US, are potentially problematic in other ways.
The heir to a nuclear state is not always going to be sane, and indeed, many nuclear states have been led by unstable leaders. We were fortunate that Stalin and Mao did not cause more problems than they did, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was overseen by RATIONAL actors, STILL almost lead to World War III.
As such, having a missile defense shield is pretty necessary.
It would also remove the leverage of people trying to build nuclear bombs, which would have other advantages. The present situation where Russia or China can potentially attack non-aligned states is not a good one and is exactly the sort of thing that is likely to encourage nuclear proliferation, because no one can trust those countries, and nuclear proliferation will greatly increase the odds of an unstable leader with nuclear weapons (or a country failing to secure them properly, which is a risk unto itself).
The US actually has worked on developing a defense shield before, and we actually very likely have one already; how effective it is is not known.
But yeah, it's really questionable to assume that MAD has actually worked. Even with rational actors, the Cuban Missile Crisis still nearly led to World War III, and Castro - who might have been able to seize control of Soviet missiles - was definitely NOT a rational actor, which was a miscalculation by Soviet leadership. There were also a few near-brushes with people thinking a launch was going to be coming. Stalin and Mao also were not rational actors, and Putin's invasion of Ukraine has shown that he isn't one, either.
There is very little evidence to suggest that Putin is not rational, and even less to suggest that the decision to invade Ukraine was not rational. It was obviously a massive strategic blunder, but that is not at all the same thing as being irrational.
Putin has been making clear his thoughts and intentions about Ukraine and NATO for literally decades, including a 2014 invasion that went swimmingly for him. Again, all very rational.
First off, if you make an egregious enough blunder, and greatly overplay your hand, that's precisely the sort of thing that can cause a Big Boy War.
Secondly, it's very obvious from the way that Russia was behaving that they were flat-out delusional about the power imbalance between Russia and Ukraine. They assumed that they would easily be able to conquer everything, and there's evidence that Putin is so lacking in empathy - the ability to understand other people - that he actually bought his own bullshit about how he would be greeted as a liberator.
Thirdly, he was making the assumption that no one would learn anything from 2014, which IS irrational - assuming your opposition never learns anything and never changes their plans is irrational.
Fourth, the genocide in Ukraine is irrational - committing genocide is precisely the sort of thing that might make NATO countries feel like they HAVE to get involved. At which point he is completely screwed and has nothing but nukes, as his military is a bad joke. He can't even establish control of the skies over Ukraine, his military has been forced out of most of Ukraine, and he has pissed off the Ukrainians to the point where they might well invade Crimea and retake it.
He has put himself in a situation where he is constantly terrified of being assassinated, because that's the environment he has created for himself.
Indeed, the notion that invading Ukraine to try and conquer it wouldn't immediately make Finland at least want to join NATO was really quite farcical. And that was highly predictable.
He doesn't seem to have a good grasp of the consequences of his own actions, which is exactly what undermines someone's rationality.
Saying someone is a rational actor is more than just saying they're not crazy - they actually have to be responding to reality, not some made up alternate universe. He doesn't seem to really be doing that.
All of his actions have basically put him in a place where he is widely loathed by his neighbors, badly undermining the national security of Russia.
His actions are only sensible if you assume that only the best possible case scenario would occur - and that ISN'T rational.
Moreover, that's incredibly dangerous, because if you have nukes, and you assume that you can get away with anything, then that is precisely the sort of way that you blunder yourself into a war with the United States.
No, sorry. I know you are going to want to keep listing out things that prove Putin is irrational, but he's not, at least not in the sense that you are hoping for to do the work of proving that we should chuck MAD in the bin.
The war in Iraq was immensely stupid, but that doesn't mean that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are "irrational." They are just bad at foreign policy.
So, first off: your underlying premise is wrong, therefore nothing else you build on top of that premise follows.
Secondly...nothing. That's it. You're wrong.
Agreed. It isn't irrational for Russia to object to the West arming Ukraine, or to aim at its "de-militarization". And there clearly are Neo-Nazis operating in Ukraine, as even a cursory look at older NYT articles will reveal.
Is it really Putin who is "living in a made-up universe" here and assuming only "the best-possible scenario will occur"? Do you really think the US leadership that thinks it is worth risking global famine and nuclear war just to deny Russia these fairly limited aims is being "rational" here?
The entire thing is irrational. The only reason why Ukraine is hostile to begin with is because of Russian aggression.
Russia had massively better relations with the countries to the west of it in the 1990s. It is because it is trying to subjugate its neighbors and attack them and steal their land that everyone has become so hostile towards it.
The whole "But muh neo-nazis" thing is nonsense. There's a tiny, tiny number of neo-Nazis. Russia funds neo-Nazis in the US. So the whole thing is just a farce. Russia itself is a fascist state which employs and supports white nationalists.
Russia needed to be dismantled in the wake of World War II. Sadly, that didn't happen, and we continue to pay the price of that mistake to this day.
It's simply not safe for authoritarian states like Russia to have nukes. Putin is a narcissist, which is very obvious if you look at the propaganda about him and his behavior. He's not a rational actor.
The War in Iraq wasn't "immensely stupid", actually. While I think that it was the wrong move in terms of investment of resources, calling it stupid means you probably don't understand what actually happened.
The result of the War in Iraq is that the US flipped a hostile state to a friendly one and created an Arab democracy. This has led to significant pressure on other despotic states, with popular uprisings and protests against their authoritarian rule.
This was, in fact, the entire point of the endeavor, and it has, in fact, worked. Iraq is much better off than it was prior to the war as well.
Now, that's not to say that everything went perfectly; the whole ISIS debacle was the result of people trying to pull out too soon, as this is a multi-decade investment.
But yeah. It wasn't actually irrational, it was about advancing the macro US strategy (everyone should become a liberal democracy) in the Middle East.
Rational/irrational isn't a binary. Invading Ukraine was a fairly irrational choice, though people generally didn't expect it to work out as badly for Russia as it has.
Starting WW3 is more irrational than invading Ukraine, but how much more irrational?
Eh...I don't think you can credibly argue the decision to invade Ukraine was not rational. It was *wrong*, to be sure, as events have proven in spades, but wrong != irrational. Based on what Putin knew at the time, his expectation that a quick decapitation was quite possible isn't unreasonable at all -- the most obvious evidence being that *nearly everybody* was surprised by the strength of the Ukrainian resistance, which means Putin's expectation were widely shared by analysts from many different viewpoints. That's pretty robust evidence that he wasn't thinking bizarre thoughts at the time.
And "irrational" is a pretty high bar to clear. The fact that you or I might have come to different conclusions, or that his conclusions were a wee bit optimistic, or based on flawed understandings, does not make his reasoning *irrational*. We can't equate "rational" to "perfect reasoning" any more than we can equate it to "correct in hindsight." "Irrational" means "listens to voices inside his head" or "believes he'll win the war if it starts while the moon is in Aquarious" -- and we have no evidence that this is what was going on.
The thing is, I was aware of how strong Russia's military was. Or rather, how weak it was.
And I'm just a rando. I knew because I read up on the subject matter.
It's been obvious for a very long time that the Russian military was decrepit and incompetent. They were taking small areas from weak countries that were running the same sort of Soviet-era armies as they were, but smaller.
The problem is that after these actions, his neighbors have changed what they are doing. Ukraine's military is not up to NATO standards, but it is pushing in that direction, while the Russian military is dependent on... what, exactly? Tanks? Outdated jets that they can't afford to replace? An aircraft carrier that isn't combat ready, or even seaworthy? A sub fleet that is aging and can't afford proper upkeep?
The US stomped Iraq flat in the first and second Gulf Wars in a comically lopsided fashion. And while Iraq isn't Russia, it isn't wholly dissimilar, either, and the Iraqis used a bunch of Russian equipment.
Russia has no chance against a NATO-level modern military. All it has is nukes, and if it goes to nukes, Russia STILL loses and might well cease to exist as a nation state.
That's been the case for a long time.
And while some pundits are morons, people who actually had a realistic assessment of Russian forces knew how much they sucked.
Putin is in charge of his country. He should know how strong his military is, and he clearly didn't.
Believing you are strong when you are weak is irrational and is exactly the sort of thing that can cause wars, as you act like a Big Man when you are, in fact, someone who should be trying to avoid drawing the aggression and ire of the actual powerful players.
Likewise, the genocide in Ukraine is irrational. It's exactly the sort of thing that might make NATO nations feel morally compelled to actually intervene in Ukraine, which is GG, as the Russian military has zero chance if NATO intervenes. It would just be Iraq all over again - air superiority would be established by NATO and they'd proceed to bomb the crap out of whatever they felt like and send flying robot assassins out to take out targets freely, and the only thing Russia could do is launch nukes, at which point Russia is annihilated. Even if NATO doesn't directly intervene, NATO arming Ukrainian troops with more offensive weapons is a likely response - and that is exactly what happened in real life, which opens up the possibility of Ukraine retaking its territory.
What happens if the Ukrainians retake Crimea? Is that even a survivable situation for Putin?
Even if he managed to take over Ukraine, he'd just end up with endless rebellions against him that he can't really afford to deal with, doubly so with the crushing sanctions.
Hell, look at the deployment of Russian troops to Chernobyl.
Nothing he has done smacks of someone who lives in reality.
"The genocide in Ukraine is irrational. It is exactly the sort of thing that might make NATO nations feel morally compelled to actually intervene in Ukraine..."
Don't you think a similar argument can be made (and has been made, by everyone from Kissinger to Maersheimer) about the likely consequences of the US arming Ukrainian nationalists and expanding NATO to Russia's boundaries? Does that imply that that Obama, Trump, and Biden don't "live in reality", because they seemed to genuinely believe it was possible to arm Ukraine without provoking war? Or is there something seriously wrong with the narrative that would have us believe a war supported by the majority of Russia's population is the product of one man's paranoia?
Nope. Russia could have chosen to ally itself with the west but instead Putin decided to be Stalin 2: Electric Boogaloo. The entire conflict and New Cold War is stupid and unnecessary. The biggest theoretical security threat to Russia is from the East - China. Western countries simply don't invade their neighbors to conquer territory anymore. Who was going to attack them? Finland? Norway? Neither has any interest in conquering Russian territory. Meanwhile countries like Ukraine have no ability to usefully invade Russia.
The reality is that it had already been decided that Russia doesn't get to rule those states when the Soviet Union collapsed; it was made very clear at that point that Russia no longer had the ability to control those states, and indeed, Russia is a decrepit state which is not capable of actually controlling these countries anymore, which is precisely why the USSR collapsed in the first place. As such, Russia needed to take a new more multilateral approach that made these states more friendly to them so as to avoid issues with them, and to understand that it really doesn't have the ability to project power usefully anymore.
It instead chose the opposite approach, which is precisely why they all want to join NATO.
The entire notion of "security" is nonsense. NATO has zero interest in invading Russia inherently; it doesn't stand to gain from it at all. Russia is an aggressive hostile state with a history of genocide, and their neighbors were not willing to allow it to control them anymore. It needed to move away from that and into more modern ways of exerting influence, but it instead decided to go with the tanks again.
The reality is that this is driven by narcissism and greed rather than any sort of actual security interests Russia might have; Russia was more secure on its western flank in the 1990s when it had much better relations with the West.
The "security situation" it has is entirely of its own making. NATO was friendly with Russia and was engaging in cooperative efforts with Russia for many years.
> Or is there something seriously wrong with the narrative that would have us believe a war supported by the majority of Russia's population is the product of one man's paranoia?
The war fever is the product of propaganda from state run media from Putin. So, yeah, it actually is the product of him and his.
I don't think I am going to convince you to revaluate your priors. I agree that the world is facing hunger and the threat of nuclear war now because of of narcissism and greed, rather than any actual security interests. We just disagree on the question of whose narcissism and greed is responsible for getting us to this point.
Russia: invades neighbors.
Neighbors: try to join NATO, because it seems like the most reliable defense.
Russia: "Why are you threatening me like this?"
OK, as I said, you or I may reach different conclusions than Putin did, but that does not make his reasoning "irrational." If you want to say he was wrong, that's fine, and if you want to say he was wrong in a surprisingly easy way, OK, although as I said the fact that *many* people thought he was going to succeed -- may yet succeed -- makes that a pretty iffy proposition, one for which you'd have to present a pretty credible argument that does *not* proceed from hindsight.
But to argue he was *irrational* in the way that a leader would need to be to start a nuclear war for completely stupid reasons, or completely heedless of the consequences, this doesn't cut it -- not by a long shot. You'd need much greater evidence of much higher levels of delusional thinking.
That's an interesting point about rationality. There's acting rationally on the information you've got, but knowing when you need more information is another level.
I don't think so. Being rational necessarily includes understanding the limits of your information. Thinking there are no limits to your information is a particular *type* of irrationality, but it's still irrational.
It may be that we are using different definitions of "rational" of course. You may be using it in a more restricted sense than I, in the sense that you're saying "reasoning logically from given premises and data" so that it allows for the possibility of GIGO (reaching stupid conclusions because your assumptions and data input are obviously fucked).
I'm using it in the far broader sense of "not being irrational" followed by a long list of irrational things, that include not thinking about the limitations of your data, not being aware of the influence of your assumptions on your reasoning, not understanding that others may think differently than you, not being aware of the fact that you have a viewpoint, being unaware of the possibility of your reasoning backwards from desired conclusion to pseudo-rational argument for same, et cetera -- in *addition* to the core errors of logic involved in saying 2 + 2 = 5.
Terms like "rational" should apply to systems and not just to leaders. You can imagine a form of "chinese room" experiment in which a perfectly rational decision-maker is presented with false information, and therefore makes a rational decision that would appear irrational to someone who had the facts.
Apply this to nuclear war: a perfectly rational leader could become wrongly convinced that a nuclear exchange is winnable (perhaps even necessary for survival) and the next thing you know, the logic of MAD doesn't work.
I don't think so. An essential element of rationality -- the reason we distinguish it from mere OCD logic-chopping -- is that it recognizes the limits of its information, takes into account the possibility of faulty assumptions or bad data, and hedges its bets accordingly.
Human rationality is on a much higher plane than just following an algorithm without mistake. That's why strong AI isn't a thing, at least yet.
"Irrational" is the wrong word here, and too many people are off chasing it and the flock of wild geese it is running with. Putin's decision to *invade* Ukraine, was based on mistakes of fact, and was probably rational given those mistaken beliefs.
What Putin is, is *desperate*. If he doesn't come out of this with something he can sell to his people as a win, he risks leaving office the way Beria did, or worse. And he can't win anything like the sort of victory he was originally planning on. That makes it *rational* for him to think about options like limited nuclear war. That may be safer for him and the things he cares about, that conventional defeat.
Desperate is just as dangerous as irrational. More predictable, but the predictions are pretty dire.
It was clear to people who actually understood the strength of Russia's military that Russia was not capable of conquering Ukraine; that is why many of the people who actually understood how weak Russia's military truly is thought that the massing of troops was a bluff, because it was obvious to them that Russia couldn't actually win the war with Ukraine that they were posturing for.
Putin has shown considerable signs of narcissism, and narcissists are not rational actors.
Almost all the analysis I read prior to the invasion did not predict the performance of the Russian army, which indicates to me that it was not clear to many, many experts.
Given the thousands of factors that go into overall effectiveness of an army, I think any claim as to Russian army's effectiveness would have to have a large amount of uncertainty to be considered even slightly credible.
Success has a thousand parents.
Everyone correctly predicts things after they happened, the trick is to have written up some place ahead of time what was going to happen before it did!
The same category of analysts thought that the first Gulf War was going to be a super tough fight against the Iraqi military and their elite Republican Guard.
Instead it was a comically lopsided war.
I don't think so. It takes more than desperation. Let us say Putin concludes that he himself, personally, will not survive defeat in the Ukraine. He'll be hauled off to the Lubyanka and get the traditional bullet.
Does it then follow that to avoid this possibility he will throw his entire country and heritage into the nuclear furnace? No, not unless he is *irrational* as well as desperate. He *values* his country and his heritage -- you can't listen to him 10 minutes without becoming aware of that. He prefers to lead the country rather than get rich and buy fabulous yachts like many equally talented (in the political/social sense) of his countrymen. Certainly there are plenty of paths he could have taken, and could yet take, that maximize his personal welfare at the cost of Russian culture and national welfare, or pride, and he doesn't take them. It's clear whatever his conception of Russian culture and pride are, they take precedence over almost everything else in his life. That doesn't sound like someone who would willing sacrifice Russia itself for his own life -- not unless he is also *irrational* about calculating the odds of that outcome.
Putin may believe that the Russian heritage *he* values, is more likely to survive a global thermonuclear war than a humiliating defeat in Ukraine. He may believe that the Russian heritage he values, can only be preserved if he or one of his inner circle rules it during this critical period.
And he may not be wrong about that. It's not the existence of a hundred and forty not-quite-suicidally-depressed Russian citizens that he values, or the purchasing power parity of their per capita GDP. An increase or decrease in their numbers, wealth, or happiness is a secondary concern at best, possibly tertiary.
Yes, indeed Putin *may* believe that Russian heritage (as he defines it) may be best served by being nuked. But that would be *irrational*, you see, and that closes the circle. As I said, he has to not only be in personal despair, he has to be *irrational* -- e.g., he has to believe that the interests of Russia the country and Russia the culture would *actually* be best served by losing a thermonuclear war over the Ukraine -- which is a deeply irrational, delusional, and perhaps clinically insane belief
A terminal value cannot be irrational, by definition. There are things real people hold as terminal values, which would likely endure nuclear war, and therefore "that would lead to nuclear war, which would destroy what you value, thus be irrational", is false.
Hitler cared about Germany, until it failed him and he tried to burn it down to the ground around him.
And Putin, being a narcissist, defines Russia in terms of himself.
NATO probably does not want to intervene much more than it already has, and particularly does not want to send its armies to fight in Ukraine. The list of countries NATO will fight to defend is quite explicit, and Ukraine isn't on it. And the bit where NATO will also bomb small impotent countries to punish their evil dictators for being evil dictators, doesn't apply to anyone who can shoot back. NATO wants to do about what it is doing, supporting from a safe distance, and is slightly modulating that to manage escalation risk.
But, what NATO is doing *already* has a >10% chance of leading to at least limited nuclear war, and >1% of global thermonuclear war. We pretty much knew that going in, and here we are. Because once the Ukrainians put up a serious fight on day one, there was really no way to avoid that.
We offer enough material assistance that Russia can't win a conventional victory in Ukraine, and when they are faced with the sort of humiliating retreat that would endanger the Putin regime on the domestic front, ~20% Putin tries to see if he can win a limited nuclear war. And ~10% that escalates out of control.
We offer no or trivial assistance so that Russia wins a decisive conventional victory over Ukraine, and ~50% chance they try the same thing in the Baltic states or Finland in a few years. Which places us right where we are now, but with at least double the risk of escalation because they're attacking NATO from the start.
A subvariant of Plan A where as soon as Russia uses tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine we back off and say "gosh, we had no idea it was that important to you!", which negates most of the escalation risk this time but again sets up a high probability that they'll try again.
Another subvariant where when they invade the Baltics or whatever we cut them loose rather than risk nuclear escalation, which again negates the immediate risk but now Russia knows it can attack NATO and win and we're looking at Poland next time.
Probably the minimum risk of nuclear war comes from the scenario where we give Ukraine *almost* enough assistance to win, ultimately letting Russia prevail but at cost of burning their army to the point where Baltic adventures are implausible for many years to come. Of course, they'll vent their frustration about that on conquered Ukrainians to a nigh-genocidal degree. But, A: that's a knife-edge balance between too much assistance and too little, and B: Western governments aren't going to cynically condemn forty million Ukrainians to night unto genocide when there's a 98% chance we can stop it at little (to us) cost.
So, every plausible path leads to a ~2% chance of global thermonuclear war either this year or a few years down the road. This isn't a foolhardy thing that we could do and need to be dissuaded from doing by our deliberate vulnerability, this is an inevitability we cannot avoid, made so the moment Vladimir Putin decided to invade and Volodymr Zelenskyy decided to ask for ammunition rather than a ride. Really, it was inevitable from 2014 at the latest, maybe 2008.
And, per #25, this wouldn't be literally the end of the world, but it would be the greatest catastrophe in human history. So if there's a thing that we can do that would reduce the damage and the death toll by say 80%, it would probably be a good idea to do that.
And, yeah, as an additional benefit, it would make it easier to do the right thing when we're looking at decisions between "2% nuclear war here and now" and "1% nuclear war here, 50% genocide over there".
It's interesting that without reading the actual article behind the link I thought primary about short-range missile/rocket-propelled artillery defense. Because this is the primary method Russian military uses to lay waste on Ukrainian cities causing a lot of damage to civilian infrastructure and people themselves. And this is the reason why last year Hamas launched several thousands missiles on Israel yet inflicted very limited damage and very few casualties.
I think it increases deterrence against a dictator who just wants not to lose.
I can see someone like Putin launching in the knowledge that it likely means the destruction of his own country: he might not win but at least his enemies will suffer too. Good missile defence changes that calculus.
A quick point so far unaddressed. Missiles are not the only means of delivering nuclear weapons. A shipping container would work as well.
2. Is there a way to find particular blogs in the graph?
Blog rolls strike me as a very approximate measure, though probably better than nothing. My impression is that people don't keep track of their blog rolls.
The labels are text, so the find feature of your web browser highlights a blog name you type in (I tested this).
Here is a list of all included blogs:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jacobwood27/035_blog_graph/master/blogs.txt
Thank you. I was looking for metafilter.com (an old, respected, possibly medium-sized left-wing blog) on the assumption it would be included, and when it didn't show up, I assumed "find" didn't work.
It does work for blogs which are there.
It is in the link I provided, but not in the "processed" list of sites. I think that means it was in 1 blogroll but not 2. I think of it as a platform, not a blog. Of the 50 posts on front page, 40 are by unique authors and only 1 author has more than 2 posts. People put Krugman in their blogrolls, not NYT.
Metafilter is a social media site, not a blog, which would explain it not being present.
For 8, doing it per capita based on current population makes no sense. The prizes should be divided by average births over the relevant time period, or something. This unduly favors historically large and currently less large states, and handicaps historically small but currently large states.
13. Nazarbayev is by most accounts the real power in Kazakhstan. He is, despite being an awful person, also one of the saner dictators. He tortures and murders people. But usually for rational, if immensely selfish and monstrous, reasons. He's also done a lot of institution building. The rumor is he basically wants to make Kazakhstan into Singapore and he's been making moves in the direction of at least a semi-democracy since 2010 or so. This doesn't seem like a notable break from that trend.
18. They were also common under Communism. There's a lot more attention to how Communist states controlled women's reproduction because that included abortion which is a modern hot button issue. But the Communist state wanted to control everyone's really. Some other dodges: get betrothed to a woman and then break it off. Marry a someone just as they're dying to immediately become a widow(er). In societies with the relevant exemption take minor orders and play at debating becoming a priest...
19. Another famous Chinese misquote. "To get rich is glorious." Deng Xiaopeng never said that. What he said was, "We have to let some people get rich first." It was a reference to Marxist theory not some general statement China was selling out to Mammon.
25. Yes. The issue will be the scale of the cleanup and the loss of key industrial capacity hampering that effort. The idea it will destroy all life is an exaggeration by anti-nuclear activists who tend to spill over into criticizing even peaceful uses. There's a lot of people very invested in making nuclear energy look scary for what I think are bad reasons. Of course, strategically nuclear war would still be so destructive as to be worth it only in the direst circumstances. But you'd end up with something more like post-WW2 Europe and less like Fallout. To be clear, post-WW2 Europe was REALLY BAD.
30. China already does this. Fines are deducted directly from bank accounts as a matter of "convenience." So in Shanghai if a camera sees you outside they just auto-fine you. The thing is that digitization of finance is coming and we as a society have to decide how, not if, we're going to do it. The option of remaining in the past not only hobbles us but won't really work for long. Alas, all the political discussion about finance is dominated by a combination of conservative outrage over corporate liberalism and progressive desires for mostly pretty bad regulatory proposals. This is one thing where the dictatorships have an advantage. There's an easy answer as to who this digitization should serve. The center.
The national university of Singapore and nazarbayev university have a very strong exchange program.
14. Best paper of all time. http://prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf.
You beat me to that comment.
The full paper is here:
https://teenspecies.github.io/pdfs/NeuralCorrelates.pdf
The background is here (complete with stories of what else they scanned):
http://prefrontal.org/blog/2009/09/the-story-behind-the-atlantic-salmon/
9: I don't blame the thread author for omitting such a complex topic in their brief overview, but I would be interested to hear their thoughts on the status of the "Q source". Last I checked, there was active debate among scholars whether it's (1) a genuine source carrying the tradition forward from M; (2) just that subset of M with the most messianic character; or (3) a spurious invention by detractors of the Trumpist tradition, created to tar the tradition by association with absurd eschatological claims.
Not that I have the latest theological journals hot off the presses, but my vague impression was that there was a slight tilt to the "Q who?" side.
But these things go in cycles of challenges existing orthodoxy -> popularly accepted -> challenged in its turn, I'm sure in a couple of years there will be a resurgence in the "Q is true!" side.
I'm more concerned about this bit of a text from the link of [26]:
> Adult males are flower visitors, while females do not feed at all.
How does the females 'not feeding at all' work? They seem way too big to have an extremely short lifespan. Or do they just feed enough as larvae to both transform into adults and then survive just long enough until they can reproduce?
The Wikipedia article on the family of that fly _does_ state:
> They [adults] are infrequently encountered as the adult lifespan can be quite short.
Wild
There's a number of insects who only feed as larva, including many moths, crane flies, and the obvious mayfly, who has a 24-hour adult lifespan. Crane flies are also pretty big (although obviously not nearly as big), so the "only feed as larva" seems quite plausible.
I guess I was just surprised by how alien natural selection can seem!
Which is weird a reaction too, because this is still rather tame compared to the convoluted life cycles of some other organisms.
Am I wrong or does the Vitamin D study actually demonstrate the lack of effect of sending people Vitamin D supplements in the mail? Will the full paper maybe describe the follow up finger prick testing to see if serum level actually changed in the supplement groups? Also, were the positive tests for ARIs or Covid random with respect to serum level change or was there a relationship there?
I liked the “historical Trump” thread. A good satire on Jesus studies.
I assumed it was a satire on the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentary_hypothesis, particularly the identification of the sources as single letters in parenthesis.
It seemed most similar to me to Gospel criticism, which includes a number of similar concepts.
That Metaculus link is *conditional on such a test being conducted* which dramatically changes the interpretation.
Conducted, or published?
I would suggest that the only people likely to conduct a study are the marketing departments of fake meat companies, and that as such the file drawer effect will be extremely strong. Given the small sample sizes and mediocre p values needed I think it would be reasonably easy to repeat the study (maybe using different combinations of real and fake meat products) until you got the desired result.
14: "Most neuroimaging studies have samples in the the 2-3 digits, but would need to be in the 4-5 digits to have enough power to detect real effects." This is misleading. The linked article is about neuroimaging studies seeking associations with disorders like schizophrenia and autism. Some neuroimaging effects can be large and highly reliable: you can distinguish the functional neuroimaging responses of left-hand vs. right-hand motor activation with your eyes in real-time, with a single subject and 20 seconds of data. The need for 4-5 digit sample sizes may have a little bit to do with neuroimaging and its acquisition and sampling properties, but it is mostly about the statistical nightmare of identifying group differences in brains associated with heterogeneous or ill-defined psychiatric disorders.
Agreed. The big problem with the Nature paper was not it's specific topic, the 'Brain Wide Association Study', but how it was so quickly and predictably misunderstood by science journalists and the wider public.
Didn't Hellenistic people settle on the north coast of the Black Sea in antiquity? How many cities derive their names from those settlements?
Yeah I was going to say. That areas around the Black Sea have roots going back to the Hellenistic world doesn't seem like it needs much explanation other than ancient history. There's a bunch of towns with "Alexander" in their name for the same reason.
"There's a bunch of towns with "Alexander" in their name for the same reason."
Cue Horrible Histories!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VmEbpFNAXo
Of the 17 cities visible on the map of the Black Sea in the wikipedia article on it, none of the ones on the north coast use their ancient names. Several on the south coast do. Batumi in Georgia seems to have an ancient Greek name. Trabzon and Samsun in Turkey are derived from ancient Greek. Istanbul, Turkey is medieval Greek, as is Constanța, Romania. Burgas, Bulgaria is controversial, could be anything, more likely medieval Greek than ancient. Odessa stole its name from the ancient Greek city now known as Varna, Bulgaria.
Huh, I always wrote the second person imperative of "salir" as "sale".
People take this as a criticism of Spanish but it's great to have a language that actually has rules that can be applied to deduce the ways words are written or spoken.
It's good to have rules; it's just that representing /ʎ/ as <ll> is a bad rule that leads to weird things.
"sale" would be "(it) exits".
"salirle" means "to exit towards it".
"sal+le" is like an order "(you) exit towards it". But there's a rule that says "LL" maps to what is the english equivalent of *"sh as in shop" and Spanish is so commited to keeping written phonetics consistent so you get this situation.
* not really, depending on the dialact it might be "sh as in shop", "j as in jam" or "ee as in eel" BUT it's consistent for all phonetics inside that dialact. Like, "LL" always sounds like sh in Argentina.
Fun fact, Argentina (and Uruguay and a couple other places that use "voseo") form imperatives differently and "salLe" here is "salíle".
If you're wondering when "salíle" is used, it's very common in football as a command to goalkeepers to leave the post and face attackers quick before they can shoot.
> 2: Jacob Wood’s Graph Of The Blogosphere.
Maybe you could use RSS to make something with this UI that lets you select blogs and shows their latest posts.
6: I think the start of the thread is broadly good, but then it goes off the rails.
The poster includes some factual inaccuracies, especially here (https://twitter.com/ctbeiser/status/1500257579145916418). Jason Russel did have a mental break, but he was never jacking off. It was a one off line in some gawker shit and it caught on. Russel denies jacking off, he isn't jacking off in the film, and the police never claimed he was nor was he charged as such.
The claim that Russel was drugged is also pretty crazy (just apriori), but especially because he did an interview on Oprah (https://youtu.be/Q7MCh19igW4) where he talked about the whole thing and his explanation is total reasonable. His pet project blew up beyond all imagining, and he was doing back-to-back interviews and running on fragments of sleep, while being hounded by random journalists and internet people.
I gave up on the thread very quickly when I realized it seemed to be heading into cuckoo-crazy land, so thank you for doing the research to confirm my suspicion.
imo this video (though a bit silly) is a much better summary of the topic: https://youtu.be/Y7nymZEXjf8
Uses actual news reports and interviews to tell the story.
Ditto on that: I think a lot of people who have more-justified gripes with activist causes try to project their grudge onto every case, even ones that actually did have good intentions.
11 (Rome)
> A possible causal pathway is “some unknown cause X led Rome to prosper economically, which in turn led Rome to military success, which in turn caused Roman culture to spread” And one excellent candidate for X is Rome’s location.
I notice a pattern in history: most pre-industrial civilizations put traders as the lowest status class. Some where official about this (eg China) while in other places it was unofficial. Places that didn't do this, and instead treated traders at least somewhat fairly all seem to have ended very wealthy for the pre-industrial period.
I think the Roman Republic was another case. They treated traders fairly and because of that the traders generated wealth for the republic.
I never understood why traders were almost universally “low class” across the globe until I read a Brett Deveroux article about it and realized that nobody in the ancient world had any framework for understanding the societal good that traders produce. In other words, nobody had discovered and popularized the laws of supply and demand. For just about everyone the fact that a trader bought wheat from farmers at one price and sold it to city dwellers at a higher price meant that someone had been cheated: either the trader gave the farmer too little or took too much from the city dweller. Because, after all, it’s the same grain: surely it has the same value regardless of location!
“ As far as elites were concerned, merchants didn’t seem to produce anything (the theory of comparative advantage which explains how merchants produce value without producing things by moving things to where they are most valued would have to wait until 1776 to be mentioned and the early 1800s to be properly explained) and so the only explanation for their wealth was that they made it by deception and trickery, distorting the ‘real’ value of things “
In the modern world we take the law of supply and demand for granted: we forget how recent a discovery it was.
https://acoup.blog/2020/08/21/collections-bread-how-did-they-make-it-part-iv-markets-and-non-farmers/?amp=1
>A bachelor tax existed in Argentina around 1900. Men who could prove that they had asked a woman to marry them and had been rebuffed were exempt from the tax. In 1900, this gave rise to the phenomenon of "professional lady rejectors", women who for a fee would swear to the authorities that a man had proposed to them and they had refused.”
That's a bit like the "professional co-respondent of mid twentieth century UK. Divorce was not easily attainable except in cases of adultery, so couples who merely hated each other would arrange fake adultery with a third party , the professional co-repondent and a private detective who would spring out of a wardrobe or other hiding place to.provide photographic evidence.
Professional co-respondents wore a special kind of shoe.
Maybe I'm being dense here, but what kind of shoe are you talking about?
It's not that they wore this shoe, but rather the style of shoe was considered flamboyant, even tasteless; not the kind of thing a gentleman would wear but a cad certainly would:
Co-respondent shoes, or more staidly named spectator shoes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectator_shoe
See also the brothel creeper:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brothel_creeper
(The things you learn reading Golden Age detective novels!)
Does Alexey Guzey have kids?
11: I thought we knew this already. No? Same for the Zhou Enlai quote.
26. As long as it doesn't bite.
32: I don't know if I'm in the minority, but losing weight was fairly easy when I was a kid. I had to do so for sports-related reasons on a couple different occasions, and it seemed like calories in/calories out really was the operative dynamic. That all changed when I hit....26, maybe? It got steadily harder afterward, eventually becoming nigh on impossible. Point being that shaming might work on kids, but probably not anyone else. Also, if you're looking to solve our global obesity problems, maybe try to figure out what changes in people's metabolism/endocrine systems between say 16-26.
I think the dumb, simple answer there is kids are growing, so they are burning up energy. That means a small intervention will result in (relatively) easy weight loss. When you finally hit the end of your growth, that extra energy (if you don't burn it off some other way) can get converted into fat.
There's a ton of research into age related basal metabolic rate (BMR) changes, and less than a ton (but still a lot) into the effects of testosterone on reversing this. Plus frequent appropriate exercise and lifestyle factors seem to be fairly potent at maintaining a higher than average for your age BMR.
One of the big issues with looking at the research on BMR/Test/age is that a lot of studies are fairly nonsensical.
Example 1: Look at 1 "large" shot of test every 2 weeks and conclude it doesn't seem to work. No duh, you spend a few days with high test levels, a few days with normal and then then rest of the time below baseline. Overtime your circulating test sort of normalizes, but this dosing is known to cause many side effects because you're spending too much time above "normal" and into "spicy" ranges.
Example 2: Compare tiny doses of test administered via gels (which are enough to crater any natural production you had, but not enough to replace it) with placebos and conclude the gels are barely effective. Yes? If you are trying to replicate natural production of 6-7mg per day, applying a gel (with poor absorption) that would, in a perfect world, provide like 4mg per day, and then wonder why the effect size is so small.
That said, I'm not sure TRT is the route for most. It'll restore your 18-26 year old metabolism, but also restore a huge part of your 18-26 emotions, sex drive and (likely) lead to substantial hair loss.
Frequent exercise, walks, standing desks, physical training to increase (or slow decrease) in muscle mass and HIIT combined seem far more likely to be helpful, without side effects (Sustanon 250, a very popular TRT choice in Europe, b/c of the test roller coaster also comes with a substantial risk of gynecomastia along with mood swings. So worst of both worlds b/c you're spending a few days as a superman (possibly with a growing chest) and then crashed and depressed for a few days).
Thanks. What you're saying makes sense, but I would just point out that I'm almost positive my metabolic rate slowed a lot more than my testosterone levels decreased between the ages of say 20 and 27, so there had to have been something else going on. Maybe figure out what that something else is, and then hopefully I don't have to put myself through HIIT just to be able to fit into the pants I used to wear like three years ago?
It's still calories in-calories out... it's just harder to force the calories out these days, and harder to restrict your calories in when you have your own money and make your own schedule. I'm in the process right now, and lots of water + fruit just before every meal is working (slowly) for me.
HIIT isn't really so bad, it just sounds awful. When I'm in medium-intensity mode coming up on 20 secs of high intensity I'm thinking "oh no! oh no!" but while I'm doing the 20 secs I'm just doing them. And after you dry off and catch your breath & have a drink of water, you're way more alert & energized than you were before you did that shit. That's my experience, anyhow, and believe me I'm no jock.
Insulin resistance, perhaps?
In my experience, moderate interval fasting (~48h once a month or even less often) has surprisingly long-term effects, which in my case were partially masked by my completely degenerate sweets habit. I kicked it recently and now I'm starting to get concerned I'll end up underweight after the summer.
FWIW, I went from skinnyfat at 20 y.o. to chubby at 27 y.o., so I think the idea of a metabolic shift is solid but it might be just the lifestyle consequences catching up to you.
I'm a bit skeptical on #25. Yes, it's not the first time I've heard that nuclear-winter models in the 80s were wrong - I'll ask a clever friend in applied maths about this. It's the claim that "you will not find peer-reviewed papers on "Nuclear war is not as bad you think" because money and politics go against this." I mean - there are peer-reviewed papers on how some well-publicized estimates on the proportion of women (or people) in the US that will survive rape in their lifetimes may be gross overestimates, or are based on flawed methodology, and surely publishing that is worse for one's professional and personal reputation. What would happen if someone wrote the kind of peer-reviewed revision downwards of the effects of nuclear warfare that #25 seems to think both true and non-existent? Would something start with someone on Twitter saying "Hint hint, I wonder where this American was on August 6, 1945"?
Nuclear winter isn't a particularly sexy issue these days, and the field looking at it is tiny. All of the nuclear winter work comes from about three people (Roblock, Toon and Turco), all of whom have been involved for decades. If no atmospheric scientist has since got this as an interests, who is to do the work of publishing refutations? I hadn't actually realized how tiny the field was earlier, but I'm digging into it for a larger look.
"there are peer-reviewed papers on how some well-publicized estimates on the proportion of women (or people) in the US that will survive rape in their lifetimes may be gross overestimates, or are based on flawed methodology, and surely publishing that is worse for one's professional and personal reputation"
Do you have links? This is something I've often suspected.
I would much rather discuss nuclear winter.
That suggests you do not actually have evidence of such papers.
Look, as I implied, I do not want to wade into that area; it is not just controversial but sensitive. (And if I mentioned it, it was because I could not think of an area in which there could be *more* blowback for going against a narrative.) One thing one can do is refer to sources that rebut or critique such papers; a quick search gives https://www.jstor.org/stable/3812756 , for instance. I'm sure one can do better - some of what is being pushed against there is clearly not peer-reviewed work but either journalism or essays (Roiphe) - though yet again plenty of what has been published in apparently peer-reviewed journals on all sides reads oddly; "peer-reviewed" doesn't mean quite the same thing it means in the hard sciences, where again it doesn't imply that something is true.
One obvious TL;DR point: the numbers one gets from surveys by criminologists (NCVS) are not consistent with one-in-four or one-in-seven numbers. (The numbers from NCVS are themselves much higher than the number of police reports, but then that is not surprising.) What that means is of course another matter.
My guess is that there's an active research community (or several, actually) devoted to realistic modelling of what would happen under various nuclear strike conditions, but that this research is very very classified.
It seems a very very obvious thing to try to model if you're a nuclear power, and also a very very obvious thing to keep secret.
Yeah this. In order to accurately model the results of a large-scale nuclear war, you kind of need to have the kind of data -- how many warheads of what type exist and would be used, their typical targets and how they'd be used (e.g. airburst versus ground, whether they'd be more or less densely distributed), et cetera -- which comprise among the deepest and darkest of military secrets.
I agree there are certainly teams at Livermore and Sandia who ponder this, but the chances that anything would be published in the open literature are zip.
The fraction of women who are likely to be raped over their lifetimes has serious and actionable social, legal, and political implications. How much money should the government allocate to rape prevention, say, as opposed to breast cancer research, prenatal health care, and any other women's issue? Depends greatly on the actual data.
But what are the downstream consequences of adjusting the probability of drastic climate effects following a global all-out nuclear war? Do you seriously think anyone would say oh well then! we can now start considering this as just another tool of international relations...? And if not...it's a bit of an angels on the head of a pin debate. Everyone *already* agrees all-out nuclear war would be sucky. Whether it's 150% or actually only 92% as sucky as one's bare intuition suggest is not especially interesting to most people, because it's not actionable, and so one would naturally expect pretty few people to spend research man-years on it.
Well, some (*not* all, or most) critics of nuclear winter in the public arena clearly do believe that a nuclear war is "winnable" in some useful sense. Of course this matters. Note I am not suggesting that critiquing the theory of nuclear winter amounts to advocating brinkmanship; I am simply addressing your question - brinkmanship is a thing, and whether or not there would be a nuclear winter figures in its calculations. (Indeed a common line seems to be "people who put forward "nuclear winter" are either bad physicists or people who are lying through their teeth towards a noble cause.)
Really? I can't think of any serious scholar or politician or even pundit that says a first nuclear strike is a reasonable policy choice except in the direst of circumstances. Can you perhaps point me to a source for this assertion?
The main downstream consequences are for contingency planning.
Of course we all hope it doesn't happen, but if it does then we're really going to want to have plans, which will depend on whether the survival rate is going to be 80%, or 5%, or 0.01%.
What Melvin said, and at any rate, look at debates on whether NATO should have a no-first-strike clause. (Hint: the side that wanted such a clause has always lost.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_first_use (If you rather mean "serious politicians advocating that one should attack the other side with nuclear bombs *unprovoked*", then I'm afraid you'll have to go back to the 50s - but I don't see how that's the only context that is relevant.)
Perhaps, but again the people who are going to be doing the contingency planning are going to be doing most of it in the classified arena.
Who is actually going to *pay* for an honest, unbiased, and unclassified assessment of the impact of nuclear war on climate? Not governments, because they have access to the classified version if they care, and the classified version is more accurate and more useful for their purposes. And the usual philanthropic sources usually go for more actionable and/or humanitarian causes.
I suppose. If we ever did that kind of thing, as a species. But I have yet to see, for example, 10% inflation break out over a year and government go "Aha! Time to implement our contingency plans which we made 5 years ago for just this wholly forseeable possibility..." "Oh look! A war between Ukraine and Russia. Fortunately, the possibility of this was pretty easy to foresee, so we have Plans B and C standing by, with pre-positioned assets and personnel ready to go..."
As a species, we can barely be bothered to make contingency plans for something as routine and predictable as a winter that's a little harsher than usual, or a spot of extra high water flooding in the spring. The notion that we might make serious and useful contingency plans for what happens after a world-wide full-scale nuclear war -- except in the narrowest sense of militaries planning for how they keep command 'n' control intact over the short term -- seems entirely aspirational to me.
28: I can't claim to understand it a whole lot, but, reading the abstract, it sounds to me like what they did was take a bunch of macaque faces, take parts of them, and put those parts together with a bunch of non-face objects. And then found that the response was more dependent on the non-face objects than the face parts (or something). The idea is that the part of your brain that lights up for faces is atomic, and lights up for faces, and not made up of like, a part that lights up for noses, and a part that lights up for eyes, and a part that lights up for mouths, and then an aggregator of all that.
(At least, I think, I still don't understand this line: "we discovered graded tuning for non-face objects that was more predictive of face preference than was tuning for faces themselves" or the next "The relationship between category-level face selectivity and image-level non-face tuning was not predicted by color and simple shape properties, but by domain-general information encoded in deep neural networks trained on object classification" In any explainable way. But this is the general impression I got from it.)
(Which kinda sounds analogous to me, interestingly.)
"The relationship between category-level face selectivity and image-level non-face tuning was not predicted by color and simple shape properties, but by domain-general information encoded in deep neural networks trained on object classification". Wow that there's some clotted prose.
I believe you are misinterpreting "macaque face patches"? That's not a part of an image of a macaque face; rather a "face patch" is a part of the IT cortex that is especially sensitive to faces. So they were recording neural responses from these face patches in macaques. They recorded while showing many different images, both faces and non-face objects.
> "we discovered graded tuning for non-face objects that was more predictive of face preference than was tuning for faces themselves"
So for each neuron they computed a "face preference," which is how much more it is expected to fire in response to a face image than a non-face image (on average). Then they tried to use its responses to either *just* the face images or *just* the non-face images to predict this face preference. They found that they could do slightly better with the non-face images. So let's take one of these non-face images that is highly predictive of face preference, say it's a toaster. They would say a toaster has a high "faceness score," and most face-selective neurons are even more toaster-selective than they are face-selective.
The second quote and the rest of the article characterize at what level these images with high "faceness score" are similar to actual faces. I guess the similarity emerges through a process that is more similar to normal object recognition (i.e. less specialized to faces) than they expected. So, it is evidence against the idea that we are born with a face "module" that uses special built-in face detecting circuits vs. that we learn to detect faces the same way as any other kind of object.
Ok, interesting, this makes a lot of sense. Though I got a bit confused again at this point:
"They would say a toaster has a high "faceness score," and most face-selective neurons are even more toaster-selective than they are face-selective."
So, as you said above, they try to predict a neuron's "face preference" by only looking at it's non-face response, and by looking at it's face response, and found the non-face response is more predictive. Are they assigning "faceness scores" to things like toasters? I'm not picking anything like that up.
Though now I feel confused how they got to non-modularity from this. If face-recognition is just a non-extractible sub part of object recognition (which, fully non-modularly should be a non-extractible sub part of cognition as a whole), then why pareidolia? Faces have to be special in our brain somehow, right?
Also a thought occurs. If "face preference" is just how much more it is expected to fire in response to a face, shouldn't we expect that to be more predictable by non-face objects? There's a lot of variation in non-faces, and probably some of that variation is in face-y-ness. So with non-face results, you should be able to get a nice trend line on the face-y-ness v face response graph (which I expect to lead to predictability based on other axes, even if we don't have access to the face-y-ness axis). Whereas with just face pictures, it'd be really hard (impossible?) to distinguish between "this neuron fires for faces" and "this neuron always fires", which should hurt predictability.
> Are they assigning "faceness scores" to things like toasters? I'm not picking anything like that up.
Well, not to the objects themselves but to individual images of objects, yes:
"A positive correlation means that the image tended to elicit a higher response in more face-selective neural sites, and vice versa for a negative correlation. For brevity we use the term ‘faceness score’ to refer to this correlation from here on."
Faces are definitely special, although there's a debate over how much of this specialness is dependent on experience. But maybe that's irrelevant if we're just concerned with the adult brain. And I agree with the rest of your comment.
You had me all worked up, but the World's Largest Fly appears to be rather friend-shaped! Looks like a funny but harmless cartoon critter to me. Much less freaky than a regular fruit fly blown up to the same size with no changes, really.
Yes it looks like a rubber toy you would buy at a toy store
I was shocked by the idea that there were 5 Nobel Physicists from DC. With the help of the below tutorial, I produced a query that lists 4 of them. The 5th is David Gross, whose wikipedia metadata is inconsistent with the others.
tutorial:
https://tinysubversions.com/notes/how-to-query-wikipedia/
https://dbpedia.org/snorql/?query=SELECT+%3Fwinner+WHERE+%7B+%0D%0A+%3Fwinner+%3Chttp%3A%2F%2Fpurl.org%2Fdc%2Fterms%2Fsubject%3E+%3Chttp%3A%2F%2Fdbpedia.org%2Fresource%2FCategory%3ANobel_laureates_in_Physics%3E%0D%0A+.%0D%0A+%3Fwinner+%3Chttp%3A%2F%2Fdbpedia.org%2Fontology%2FbirthPlace%3E+%3Chttp%3A%2F%2Fdbpedia.org%2Fresource%2FWashington%2C_D.C.%3E%0D%0A%7D%0D%0A
Not restricting to physics adds Al Gore and Christopher Sims.
https://dbpedia.org/snorql/?query=SELECT+%3Fwinner+WHERE+%7B+%0D%0A+%3Fwinner+%3Chttp%3A%2F%2Fpurl.org%2Fdc%2Fterms%2Fsubject%3E+%3Chttp%3A%2F%2Fdbpedia.org%2Fresource%2FCategory%3AAmerican_Nobel_laureates%3E%0D%0A+.%0D%0A+%3Fwinner+%3Chttp%3A%2F%2Fdbpedia.org%2Fontology%2FbirthPlace%3E+%3Chttp%3A%2F%2Fdbpedia.org%2Fresource%2FWashington%2C_D.C.%3E%0D%0A%7D%0D%0A
This must be the first time that I have seen a linked data query used to illuminate an Internet discussion. Either I have been hanging out at the wrong places or it is finally becoming useful.
My main purpose was to do the exercise and learn the technique. My verdict is, no, this database (essentially wikipedia) is too hard to use and the data probably too erratic to be useful.
Wolfram Alpha is easy to link. It contains a biographical database sufficient to answer questions like this, but its natural language syntax does not allow complex queries. If I ask for Nobel prize winners born in DC, it just drops DC. If I ask born in France, it drops back to the list of "French" winners (including Marie Curie and Albert Camus, which is what most people want), which it probably got from wikipedia. Except that right now it isn't listing everyone. When it does list them, it makes a point of listing country of birth. (Why does it count Peter Handke for France??)
There are some more specialized databases publicly available on the web. I think it is possible to link queries into the General Social Survey (GSS), but usually people just post results. The CDC has a database of all death certificates in America, but it is not possible to link queries.
successful Wolfram query:
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=time+from+death+of+Lewis+Carroll+to+birth+of+CS+Lewis
15 years of GSS:
https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/?s=gss
death certificates:
https://wonder.cdc.gov
My experience of DBPedia is that the quality of the dataset is too variable to be relied upon. Even trying to access the same data about the same class of objects (say Mammals) rarely works as intended due to inconsistent ontology use. It also seems to be very difficult to correct or add data to DBPedia which bugs me.
By "difficult" do you just mean "slow"? You edit it by editing wikipedia, but there's a 1 year cycle time.
Can you set linked data triples in wikipedia?
It's easy to edit the data of wikipedia. Changing the schema is probably political. Changing what triples exist is probably even more political. (What's a "linked data triple"? Google seems to just drop the word "linked"; does it change the meaning?)
The basic schema is that Pages are in Categories. It is easy to add a Page to a Category. I used the Category of Nobelists in Physics. This is just metadata at the end of the page and I don't think that there are edit wars over it. I also used a triple, that some pages have a BirthPlace. I think triples are only allowed in Infoboxes, which are part of the main page, and probably a big point of contention. Once the page has an infobox, I imagine it is easy to correct it, but I think it is a big deal to add an infobox to a page. I don't know the politics; maybe it is expected that every Person should have an Infobox.
I'm confused by the meat Turing test one because there are already people who say they can't tell the difference between some plant based burger patties and meat ones.
the resolution criteria are stricter than that:
> This question resolves positively if, by 2023-04-01, a double-blinded randomised controlled trial reveals that human evaluators are not able to distinguish actual and plant-based meat products. The test must involve at least 50 subjects in both the control group (who receive actual meat products) and at least one of the treatment group (who receive plant-based meat products). [etc.]
https://www.metaculus.com/questions/7057/turing-test-for-plant-based-meat-by-2023/
This seems underspecified. The chance of success varies wildly depending on the type of meat you try to simulate. Faking a medium-rare porterhouse, in the next 12 months, is basically impossible, but if you're talking about chicken nuggets I wouldn't be shocked if the bar was cleared a few years ago.
They have the criteria that it has to be at least 20% meat by weight. That's such a small amount that it almost certainly can be passed by a properly crafted study today. It's probably meant to capture fast food hamburgers, since a basic MacDonald's hamburger is about 20% meat by weight. But you could do a study with orange chicken, popcorn chicken, soup with ground pork, or something like that to minimize the weight of meat and maximize the strength competing flavors.
If the study is Turing-test like in that the participants are aware of the nature of the study, and able to investigate to their hearts content, perhaps it's not possible, but I think the most likely study would be created by a "vested interest" one way or the other. It's kind of disappointing that the majority of the probability question turns on who is most likely to do a study, their motivations, and the study design rather than what we really care about.
Really? 20% meat by weight for a Mickey D's patty? What is the rest of it made from?
I got that number from here, which is, you know, not super reliable: https://weightofstuff.com/whats-the-weight-of-mcdonalds-burgers/
But it didn't seem implausible to me.
I think part of Crazy Jalfrezi's surprise was that he thought you were taking about the meat patties alone, while you're talking about the weight of a hamburger meal as a whole
27 -- this is just a standard case of post-treatment bias, right? You can't run a regression on race and control for something race affects, because the answer you get is impossible to interpret unless you find a way to incorporate all the possible causal channels connecting race, test results, and future income. Notably, this regression *doesn't* measure the "effects of racism beyond those affecting test scores" or anything like that -- the bias in this sort of problem doesn't come with a clear interpretation, magnitude, or direction. (See e.g. this paper by Bohren, Hull, and Imas for a couple of causal channels that would bias this regression in hard-to-interpret directions: https://twitter.com/instrumenthull/status/1503385611050180610 , and this paper by Durlauf and Heckman explaining the error in a similarly flawed regression: https://twitter.com/brendannyhan/status/1287089470152552450)
33. Can.. uh.. can anybody remember me why we are doing this instead of banning neural networks?
Because right now neural networks make a lot of money for a lot of different actors and so would only be bannable with a well-co-ordinated, extremely competent, extremely intrusive world government?
And even if all you care about is X-risks, a world government of that sort is also an X-risk.
Oh well, my comment was tongue in cheek. I fully realize it is impossible to ban an algorithm (even for a world government) and as a technological determinist i do understand that once a technology makes money to anyone it is bound to be widely adopted - sooner or later.
It's not that i am scared of X-risk, i am more scared of AI working as intended. I don't see anything good coming out of deep learning, but maybe I lack imagination.
Deep learning is already accelerating fundamental biomedical research, dropping AI at this point would set medicine back for multiple decades, which goes into some serious megadeaths of impact even without counting QALYs. Without a convincing argument that unfriendly AI is right around the corner waiting to jump out of DeepMind, I'm not keen on killing millions just because Eliezer has a bad feeling about this.
Well, alphafold is exactly the sort of advance that I wish had never happened. A box telling you how proteine folds without us understanding what is going on inside.
Were you expecting to solve protein folding on pen and paper? There's no human-readable process that you can discover, it's just a lot of brownian motion and descending free energy gradients. There is no meaningful sense in which you can "understand" how a protein folds.
Point taken, but I see deep learning being used more and more eg in my field of purely useless reaserch to classify phases of matters.
Does this make technological advancement faster? Well, my field is useless, but in general yes! I guess that my point is that i think that too fast technological advancements do more harm than good.
Because neural networks are kind of like steam, or electricity, or electronic computers, or nuclear power. They are incredibly dangerous in the wrong hands, but also the gateway to the next stage in human development. You can go full Amish on your own time, sure, but don't push your simple lifestyle onto the rest of us.
Those you listed ended up doing more good than harm - with the potential exception of computers - but I am not sure this is going to be the case for deep learning.
And anyway, that's not how technology works, isn't it? Technology is not opt-in, i cannot choose not to have my job transformed into an alienating machine-babysitting, pretty much like horses had no saying when they were substituted by cars.
Also, I am a physicist (in training). A world in which all answers to any problem, any planning, any project is gifted to us by a black box that we have no idea how it reached the correct answer is my nightmare. Everything i value, reaching a collective deeper understanding of the world, would be abandoned - we have the black box after all.
First of all, if you think that computers are doing more harm than good, then your worldview and mine are probably too divergent to come to any kind of agreement (also note that we're having this discussion by means of computers). And yes, job obsolescence due to automation is a huge short-term problem; but in the long term, we are all better off with those jobs being performed by machines, because we get orders of magnitude more productivity. For example, today no one needs to wait in line to make a phone call; dial the number, and you are connected instantly, without going through a human switchboard operator as in the old days. Likewise, food security is still not perfect, but much better than in the days of oxen and plows.
> A world in which all answers to any problem, any planning, any project is gifted to us by a black box that we have no idea how it reached the correct answer is my nightmare.
Your nightmare is my pipe-dream, but it's just that: a pipe-dream. It will never come to pass. Ok, ok, "never" is a long time; let's just say not in the next 1,000 years. Omniscience is just not a real thing that can ever be achieved -- unless, of course, one subscribes to some version of religious faith (in which case physics is pointless anyway).
> note that we're having this discussion by means of computers
Why yes, of course. Nevertheless the internet is precisely the thing that makes me think that computers have made more harm than good, our conversation (being part of the good) notwithstanding.
> we get orders of magnitude more productivity.
I don't think an increase in productivity is necessarely good. It won't necessarely lead to an increase in happiness, because an increase in the level of well being will have the consequence that now people will require even more things to be happy.
> Your nightmare is my pipe-dream
Well, obviously the onmiscience was an hyperbole. But even remaining where we are today, i am not a fan of alphafold, as an example. A magic box we don’t know how it reaches the correct answer. But well, that's probably up to the divergent worldviews.
The machine gives you answers but you still have to build an understanding around them. It's a scientific instrument like any other.
The absence of the usual "misleading links" banner implies that all the linked opinions are now true in the past and in the future.
As someone who did a small-n neuroimaging study (fMRI) and read many more of the same as part of the research, can confirm they are garbage and generally should be considered p-hacked or otherwise wrong unless rigourously proven otherwise.
27
Results from the national adult literacy survey show that blacks with post-graduate degrees have lower literacy and numeracy skills than college drop-out whites. Black 4-year degree graduates have only slightly better skills than white high school graduates.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170501225350/https://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93275.pdf
It is perfectly rational to have a preference for white applicants over black applicants who are "equally qualified", because "equally qualifed" doesn't actually mean of equal ability. But this is precisely what we should expect considering the scale of affirmative action in this country and the fact that education does not magically transform a person's intellect
A lot of these studies really suggest that you'd be better off looking at someone's qualifications to see if they can do the job and then give them an IQ test or a SAT test or similar and see how they perform on it.
If those qualifications are unable to accurately indicate the numerical and literacy skills of their holders then there is no point using them to assess the suitably of *any* candidate.
24 and 25 on nuclear war seem to be naive and localist in terms of the impacts of such an event. Nearly by definition it means total war and the most vicious of tactics and targeting would be used. Power, fuel, transport, communications, etc would be targeted along with military and political targets. That time a few years ago when Houston or Dallas or wherever had some issue with petrol refining caused months of issues and shortages. And that was a minor disruption which was quickly resolved. If the entire infrastructure of key sites were gone, it’d collapse civilisation for decades if not longer.
Covid showed how anaemic and poor we have become as lean and corporate ideologies of greed destroyed and hollowed out all redundancy and created fragile global supply chains which would cease to function if all or most major ports were knocked out. Even now a small hiccup in supply chains has seen cargo ships lined up for weeks and months unable to deliver their goods due to issues with ports, trucks, and warehouses.
In Christchurch in New Zealand from the 2011 earthquake they were literally unable to rebuild by themselves and many key infrastructure jobs were impossible to compete with local knowledge as no one has built a sewage system from near scratch or electrical grid wholesale in decades. They had to source talent from all over the world in order to try and even over decade later they are not nearly back to where they were. That’s ‘only’ an earthquake and they didn’t have to deal with the other aspects of a MAD catastrophe. Many of the old churches and such were simply impossible to replace with skills to make them being over 100 or 150 years out of date and only a handful of people around the world who could repair them, but couldn’t necessarily build them.
Looking at how bad regional disasters have been and how incredibly reliant on National and intentional responses they were to rebuild themselves over 10 and 20 year periods….if a nation were crippled and unable to draw resources and know how from across an empire to restore a single city, but had to deal with dozens of major cities being knocked out…life would collapse to a very simplified existence for decades and decades with non impacted regions becoming the new global powers. It could take 100 or 200 years to recover…with peaks and valleys of new technology, ie mobile phones and mules for farmers so that 2100 would be both better and worse off than we were in 1800 across various dimensions.
This ‘not so bad’ crap for a MAD scenario is naive to the extreme and thinks of only one city at a time or ignores the compounding effect of so many systems being lost at once where people in cities will start murdering each other for food within a week of the truck deliveries stopping.
Even looking at the Marshall plan and such in Europe from the USA, the UK had meat rationing into the 1960s from a war that ended in 1945…and nominally the UK was on the winning side! Over 20 years to restore just cattle and meat production and distribution! How or why would we ever think something orders of magnitude worse, such as a doomsday MAD scenario, would not be as bad? It’d be much worse and we are much more fragile and reliant on brittle paper thin supply chains now vs how the UK was back then when people were closer to the land in terms of knowledge of food growing and non electric preservation techniques. Would we be better or worse in growing victory gardens today vs back then? Worse I’d say, and we would be trying to feed a lot more people.
The message must be that we never ever have a MAD scenario play out. Softening that vital message by simplistically looking at blast radius zones is utter nonsense.
To quote myself: "This isn’t to minimize the effects, as it would be a humanitarian catastrophe unprecedented in human history, as the global economy breaks down and regions are pushed back on their own resources." Also, "Again, nuclear war is bad, and we should be very careful not to have one,"
>Softening that vital message by simplistically looking at blast radius zones is utter nonsense.
So you're saying it's OK to lie if the stakes are high enough? That is a perspective you can hold, I guess.
> The message must be that we never ever have a MAD scenario play out. Softening that vital message by simplistically looking at blast radius zones is utter nonsense.
It seems to me that there is a meaningful discussion to be had about whether or not a nuclear war is an x-risk, extremely bad or just really really bad and the conclusions drawn from that discussion should inform our decisions about where to spend the limit resources we have for (for instance) x-risk prevention.
Pre-emptively declaring one side of that discussion "utter nonsense" strikes me as unhelpful.
As a New Zealander I'd bet a lot that the time the rebuild has taken is almost entirely due to other factors, like political bickering, not wanting to pay for it, spending ages on deciding what to replace things with, and being extremely integrated into the global economy—relying on foreigners to do the important jobs here is almost a badge of honour (a concept call cultural cringe). Compare how fast Japan can rebuild things.
#11: The willingness to expand 'Romanness' to conquered people as the main reason for Roman success is a major proposition in Mary Beard's work, and is the thesis of her popular-audience book 'SPQR'. I was a little surprised that Grunewald didn't reference it, but I enjoyed his take and it is convincing to me.
#30: I saw this twitter manifesto at Zvi's back in February, and made a similar comment there, but: the statement that 'there are no constitutional rights in substance without freedom to transact' is impossible to divorce, in my mind, from 'there are no constitutional rights in substance without having means to transact with.'
I accept that there is a difference between being prevented by a government from using existing resources that are in some sense 'your own' and not having those resources in the first place. But if a transaction must take place for a right to exist in substance, then both the means and the freedom to use them must be present. Else we are conceding that constitutional rights are contingent on wealth.
27 - the reddit post is from October 2021. The author has an updated (as of January of this year) version at his website https://reasonwithoutrestraint.com/race-and-iq/ - many other interesting analyses of 'controversial' topics as well.
I've already had a panic attack eating an Impossible Cheeseburger, "how did I get here this isn't kosher", even though of course it is. It wasn't the first bite, but it was when I was distracted a few bites in talking to a friend.
So I have very high confidence that fake meat will pass the "turing test". MOOring Test?
If fake meats get good enough that they can be used to dodge absintence requirements for religious observances, I wonder if this will cause a ruling to be issued by the various religions? It's not really the spirit of fast and abstinence if you're getting all the gustatory pleasures of eating meat but it's technically not meat.
Interesting arguments ahead, and the same kind of dodges people have always used to get around rules!
For Kashrut it’s excellent, I haven’t met a single rabbi who wasn’t excited about it.
4. The Vox article on Georgism seems much worse than the writings about Georgism I've seen here. Or maybe I don't fully understand the argument.
This article suggests that there is a close relationship between the land value tax and overly restrictive zoning laws. What is this relationship?
Parts of the article pretend that zoning laws don't exist. "And if someone turns their garage into an apartment, providing an affordable housing option for their community, they pay higher property taxes than similarly situated neighbors who don’t add housing options to their land." The reason this doesn't happen more often isn't because of the taxes. It's because it's illegal.
Parts of the article claim that a land value tax will cause overly restrictive zoning laws to disappear. "It turns NIMBYs into YIMBYs." I want to know how this happens. If I don't want a big apartment building going up next door because it's too noisy, how would reducing their taxes change my opinion? If anything, I would expect that a land value tax makes NIMBYs worse: the new development next door could increase my land value, and so my taxes.
I do think that a land value tax is a useful tool to reduce vacancies & make the tax system more fair. I also think that zoning reform should be implemented in lots of places. But these aren't the same problem. The land value tax seems most useful in places with many vacant lots and urban blight, while zoning reform seems most useful in places with no vacant lots and high rents.
Why has this idea become popular recently? Probably because it's a pretty good idea and people are putting forward good arguments for it. Not because "we've run out of suburbs." We haven't. Before the pandemic, suburbs were growing faster than urban or rural areas [1], and I expect that trend increased with more people working remotely.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/05/22/demographic-and-economic-trends-in-urban-suburban-and-rural-communities/
For the second one - if the body responsible for zoning laws is the one getting the revenue from the LVT, they're strongly incentivised to ignore the complaints of existing residents. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing rather depends on how YIMBY you are, but the logic is about persuading councils or state governments rather than about persuading neighbours.
Of course it's bad. It's Vox.
To suggest an answer to Naval Gazing's question, I think some of the Western appreciation for Russian equipment is that the designs are often good on paper and well fit to novice users. "Deep Battle", the Soviet WWII doctrine of combined arms, can reportedly be implemented by wargamers with modest skill and a few minutes of prep time. It works even with the minimal coordination you can usually achieve in video games. Soviet strategies are brutally straightforward, and their tanks are designed to match. The fact that the vehicles are often manufactured, maintained, and employed well below the design is often ignored. That they have bad ergonomics and situational awareness is not necessarily understood or experienced by enthusiasts or gamers. By contrast, Western strategies are a lot more complex and subtle. The tanks have tradeoffs that are exploitable if not used by professionals, or when used outside a Western combined arms milieu.
But anti-missile systems are definitely an essential technology for every serious military going forward. A well-supported, well-equipped MBT is scarily survivable, even if poorly deployed and defended tanks get got. As a case study, Israel lost *zero* main tanks or modern APCs to Hamas in Gaza in 2014, despite facing the most advanced Russian missiles and RPGs available at the time. These APS systems are even scarier if those systems can not only shoot down the incoming projectile but simultaneously cue the tank where it was shot from; you might not live long enough to see your ATGM defeated harmlessly in front of the tank.
I reread the Naval Gazing post and he's talking about *strategic* missile defenses. I still agree with the sentiment; building missile defenses frees you to act (classed as "destabilizing" because it makes war more likely) whereas building second-strike weapons prevents the other person from acting ("stabilizing", since it makes war less likely).
But we may want to do war-adjacent things! We spent a few decades mostly thinking we could get away without big wars, but that seems to be ending. Plus, non-nuclear countries want some protection from nuclear ones, and countries with pathological neighbors e.g. Israel from the Ayatollahs or their proxies Hamas and Hezbollah. Anyone who falls into one of those categories most definitely wants strategic missile defenses.
The ABM treaty did allow the US and Russia to have a small amount of missile defenses - the idea was that each side could be reassured that their capital and ICBMs were safe but not have so many they risk their country in a nuclear war.
The ABM treaty is no longer in force, but I think the calculus is the same - we want enough defenses to protect against North Korea going nuts, but not so many that Russia or China would fear that we're trying to remove their nuclear deterrent.
The missile cruiser Moskva has been confirmed sunk by Russia on April 14 [1]. Ukraine claims they shot it with two cruise missiles on April 13 [2]. On the same day, April 13, Ukraine released the stamp commemorating the small force on Snake Island telling the Moskva to go fuck itself [3].
Coincidence? I. THINK. NOT.
I'm not in general a conspiracy theorist. The only other fringe conspiracy theory I believe is that "smart lights" only exist because lightbulb companies haven't figured out how to make a mediocre LED. But the timing is too funny to not believe.
P.S. there is truly bonkers rumor that there was Christian relic onboard the Moskva [4]. If 2022 was pitched as the next season of Servant of the People, nobody would have bought it.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61114843
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/04/14/ukraine-russian-missile-cruiser-moskva-warship/; paywall
[3] https://www.jpost.com/international/article-704096
[4] https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1514763143892791297 (epistemic status: literally a rumor from Twitter)
Curriously, Russia claims that the cruiser sunk due to onboard fire which led to the detonation of the ammo and that this has nothing to do with Ukraine attack. I'm confused: why would they say that?
Is the ridiculous incompetence of the Russian army a more preferable narrative then a success of an Ukranian attack? My naive intuition tells me that it's supposed to be the other way around. Why is loosing a cruiser in battle considered to be more disgraceful than not even being able to arrive to one?
It may be the inertia of lies, when you are so accustomed to lying that you keep doing it even when it's not helpful for you. It may be the fact that Russian army is well aware of its own incompetence but keeps hoping that Ukranian army is incompetent as well or even more so. Or the doomed attempts to keep to the narrative that Ukranian army resources are completely depleted and thus it couldn't be a missle strike. In any case I think it tells us something interesting about Russian army epistemical situation.
>Curriously, Russia claims that the cruiser sunk due to onboard fire which led to the detonation of the ammo and that this has nothing to do with Ukraine attack. I'm confused: why would they say that?
>Is the ridiculous incompetence of the Russian army a more preferable narrative then a success of an Ukranian attack? My naive intuition tells me that it's supposed to be the other way around. Why is loosing a cruiser in battle considered to be more disgraceful than not even being able to arrive to one?
Agree. I wonder if there are some hidden factors, like they *had* to announce the loss of the ship soon-ish because it would have been just too ridiculous to keep pretending it was fine. But getting permission to say literally anything about the Ukraine military attacks goes through an entirely different chain of approvals that takes way longer, so all they can say, 'it blew up'.
But on the other hand, some people think it looks worse if the air-defense specialized ship was taken out by an air attack. But even if that were the case they can't really expect people to believe it wasn't?
Well personally I'm so confusecd about this situation that I'm giving 20-30% that it was indeed some mailfunction which led to fire and sunking of the ship. Russian flagships do have a history of spontaneously catching fire after all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_aircraft_carrier_Admiral_Kuznetsov#PD-50_sinking
So yeah, maybe their plan is working after all!
Ironically, if the Russian account is true, then the Moskva really did go fuck itself.
Fire is an accident that can happen to everyone. No shame in that. Being beaten by your enemy is disgraceful. Russian reaction makes complete sense to me and I am more surprised that there is an opposite view.
Losing your flagship to an accidental fire would absolutely be shameful incompetence. Fire aboard a warship is the number one situation that is constantly trained for, because of how devastating it can be. Ships in general and warships in particular are designed around fire suppression - sealing compartments for smoke containment, high pressure saltwater ring mains around the ship, etc, etc. Any competent navy will be running firefighting exercises very regularly. To have a random, uncontained fire so bad it sets off your magazine would be a sign of rank incompetence in this day and age.
In general Russians don't think like that. Imagine if lightning hits and causes fire? It is an unfortunate act of God. Yes, you should have better fire-fighting preparedness but still you cannot prevent every fire. It is a bad situation but you can always wiggle out and pretend that even the most competent may sometimes fail.
Whereas admitting that your enemy whom you attacked thinking it to be weak beats you, it would be very shameful.
I just saw the Russian speaker on TV where he was enraged and promised revenge and that this is an act of starting a real war. And yet he was not able to say that Ukrainians by their missiles caused the ship to sink. It is some kind of Russian double-speak where they manage to not say things directly while everybody understands what they really meant.
The number of random Russian citizens who are properly informed as to the importance of firefighting discipline at sea, is <<<100% of the total. The number of random Russian citizens who think their country's warships ought to be able to defend themselves against enemy attack, is ~100%.
More people will forgive the accident, so if you have a chance (and you're a lying bastard) you claim the acccident.
It's a fair point that it was a statement more for unsophisticated domestic consumption, whereas I was thinking in terms of actual, real life implications. But at least one Russian propagandist cum journalist was upset enough, and understood enough to angrily question it live on TV: https://twitter.com/Nat_Vasilyeva/status/1515617876765519872
"I'm infuriated by what happened with 'Moskva' flagship of the Black Sea Fleet. I'm just infuriated. When we say that yes, it was old, yes it went through renovations. Yes, that series of ships truly had vulnerabilities, old traumas, I get that. Just explain to me, how did you manage to lose it? Explain to me, how the hell you ended up in that part of the Black Sea? At that time? And I don't care what happened, whether it was two Neptune rockets as Ukrainians say - since when a combat ship is afraid of a rocket strike when it has equipment allowing it to resist this sort of strikes? Was something not activated? Fine, even with two rocket strikes, 'ammunitions fire emerged', what about your fire fighting measures, explain to me please? Why did your fire fighting measures didn't work and the ship practically burned from the inside out?" - (translation by @mdmitri91)
This will surely increase the value of that stamp. (I really want one now!)
This of course leads to the obvious conclusion that the Moskva was sunk by a conspiracy of philatelists with access to a submarine.
Of course it's not a coincidence. The Ukrainians have a very limited capability to sink warships at sea; reportedly a single battery of Neptune missiles, *maybe* a dozen missiles total. They are going to be very careful about when and how they use them. They are going to wait for a perfect shot.
The flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, *and* the ship that they made a symbol of their national defiance, sailing alone in a known position in a storm that would degrade the ship's missile defenses, was the perfect shot for them to take. Well, that or an LST carrying a mechanized battalion to the invasion of Odessa, but that never happened and now probably never will, so Ukraine deliberately and non-coincidentally took the best shot they would ever have.
When I first saw "There are no constitutional rights in substance without freedom to transact" idea, I thought that it's interesting but obviously proves too much. For instance, that there are no constitutional rights without post scarcity communist society.
If we assume that constitutional rights require the ability to spend money, we end up with a situation where some people have more money, therefore more constitutional rights than other people, therefore making these rights not rights but privileges.
Freedom to transact definitely operates at a higher level though - one can easily imagine a poor but popular grass-roots advocate raising money to campaign, even if he has none himself; if cut off from the banking system though, raising money becomes impossible.
Of course the satire in 9 cuts both ways: intentionally or not, it puts forward a case that either Jesus is a composite figure, or the Gospel accounts are based on several oral sources that got garbled in transmission, or, if neither is the case, Jesus was as inconsistent, opportunistic and/or psychologically unstable as Trump.
The second option there seems fairly likely, no? It is known that the gospels were recorded decades after the lifetime of Jesus, and there were many versions of them floating around until centuries later, some with quite important differences.
Yes, that's what I understand to be the consensus (among scholars).
Today is Good Friday and also Passover, so to those who commemorate these observances, the blessings of the holy seasons to you.
To those who don't, enjoy your chocolate Easter eggs on Sunday and your Satanic hot cross buns!
Satanic, you ask? Which leads into the seasonal video episode of History For Atheists:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJq70tf0AsY
That's the preaching done! 😀
The Philadelphia rationalist meetup was last night. Probably a coincidence.
I’ve never known how to greet people on Good Friday: “Happy Good Friday” sounds silly and a bit in appropriate given the subject matter, while just saying “Good Friday!” makes you sound like you’re Amish.
You just say "hello" and then on Sunday you say "He is risen!" with a happy smile, and that will do just fine.
Re: 20, comments in that link mention the fact that English is the only major language that doesn't have a governing body. I think this is under-reported!
I'm pretty sure English is the only officially-democratic language with more then a million speakers. That's based on my own original research though, I haven't seen anyone else talk about it. I feel like it captures something about the libertarian anglophone philosophy, and I would love to learn more about how this came to be the case. Did no one ever try? When did most linguisitc-authorities come into existence? Has it had any measurable effects on English development? Etc.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/03/the-virus-hunting-nonprofit-at-the-center-of-the-lab-leak-controversy
(Published March 31, likely to have slipped through)
14. is misleading. This is specifically in reference to brain-wide association studies (BWAS), e.g., "let's try to correlate, uh, which Pokémon starter people prefer to any possible set of structural and functional indices." These studies work off of questionable hypotheses.
Neuroimaging studies with well-argued hypotheses (i.e., NOT grounded in BWAS and/or generically bad science) and relatively modest sample sizes have a lot to offer.
The Banach story reminds me of the protagonist of Le Guins The Dispossessed. He's a leading expert in theoretical physics, and when he visits the sister planet they insist on calling him "Dr." because a guy like that couldn't possibly not have a credentialed title!
The Banach’s exam is straight from the 1939 Czech comedy film “Journey into the Depth of the Student's Soul” where students organize such a subterfuge exam for their well-liked teacher who is afraid to apply for the exam himself, as he considers himself not prepared enough for it. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesta_do_hlubin_%C5%A1tud%C3%A1kovy_du%C5%A1e>
I haven't gone and read the methodology yet, but the blogosphere map seems very out-of-date. It's got the old version of Pharyngula on there, which I don't think has been used for 5 years. And Worthwhile, which barely functions as a blog any more. It's a weird combination of the blogosphere now and what it looked like 5-10 years ago.
Maybe that's just because things have weird half-lives on the internet when they're not very active any more, but they're still available. But it makes the map a bit difficult to parse.
I don't think people put continuing effort into their blogrolls. My impression is that blogrolls get established when the blog is started, but not necessarily updated or pruned. Let me know if I'm wrong.
Also, let me know if there's a better way of looking at connections between blogs.
RE: the giant fly
It is categorized as "Insects discovered in 1833." What is the significance?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Insects_described_in_1833
They have similar categories for other years. It's significant if you want to know what insects was discovered in 1833.
Musk: "To get a self-driving car, we need to solve real-world intelligence"
https://youtu.be/cdZZpaB2kDM
Isn't the fourth one a subset of the third? Trump may not be clinically insane (but then again he may be) - but that just drives home that the trilemma, as stated, is a false trichotomy; Jesus may have been a moral teacher who, like a lot of other young men, also had what we now call schizotypal traits. (It is difficult to see how someone could get into the prophet/messiah track, common at the time, and *not* have schizotypal traits.)
What a difficult job moderating is-- a dreamwidth moderator takes a look at twitter and thinks they're doing a difficult job pretty well.
https://twitter.com/rahaeli/status/1515061592416788481?t=8b4AhKiq27e0SDqE0A32Yw&s=09
What it takes to train a tank crew
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1513858825027305482.html
Russians might be trying to get by with 2 soldiers per tank. That would explain a lot.
https://twitter.com/The_Tech_Son/status/1513754333384527877
2: Cool graph, but it can't be complete. Fox is a tiny yellow dot. Where's the tiny purple dot for NYT? Do humans so rarely link to these old corporate media outlets from their blogs that ACX is 30 times bigger than fox in the link graph and NYT doesn't even show up? [Edit: Krugman is a red dot a quarter the size of ACX but the rest of NYT is absent] Does almost all their traffic come from deliberate subsidies by big tech instead of humans linking to them? It approximately seems that way. Prior to Youtube's public decision to subsidize old corporate media by bumping them waaaaay up in all search results, they were getting almost no traffic on youtube.
Categories seem to be
purple: rationalist blogs
red: left/center econ blogs
yellow: right econ blogs
orange: mostly libertarian blogs
yellow: righty blogs (single-issue free speech promoting blogs like thefire.org and volokh get miscategorized as yellow or orange)
purple: lefty blogs
green: wall street (mix of apolitical trading blogs and hyperpartisan blogs that mention wall street)
26: Why is the size-scaling limit for avians >1 OOM larger than the size-scaling limit for flying arthropods?
32: Of course people respond to incentives and fat shaming is an incentive. But you're fighting an uphill battle against hunger unless you categorically change which foods are available to eat. Some foods are vastly more satiating per calorie than others. Anything that spikes insulin is bad because it makes the brain less sensitive to leptin and causes more hunger on the rebound. Meats and vegetables are great. (I have succeeded in reducing my bodyfat percentage from 20% to 16% over the last two months using the rules described here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PPeSqatTRsuFw3ug9/food-manufacturers-are-out-to-get-you)
Singapore probably could have got much more than that 33% reduction in childhood obesity without fat-shaming anyone if only they banned all caloric beverages other than milk.
A new theory I came up with after writing that post was that any superstimulus of tastiness gives you a medium term bias to eat more of other things even after you finish eating the superstimulus. And if you deny yourself the superstimuli you get back to the same hedonic set point soon anyway. Might as well avoid all the superstimuli no matter how small their caloric content.
The Nobel figure is missing a lot of international Nobels. There are at least half a dozen Australian born winners. And France only one?
Ah, commented too quickly. Take that as those who are US citizens when they won…
Better description would be US States by number of *US* Nobel laureates born there. Montana doesn’t get credit for Brian Schmidt now that he is Australian.
Also, if the graph is by "place of birth", Ireland gets one and I see we are not included.
Campbell is also one of those credited with the creation of ivermectin, something that has been greatly discussed on here recently.
We might also have a leg of James O'Keeffe, born in New York to Irish immigrant parents.
Commemoration of another anniversary today - the Easter Rising of 1916.
We were asked in a previous post "Who Gets Self-Determination?" and this is the answer of the Irish revolutionaries back then:
Proclamation of the Irish Republic and independence (text)
https://www.gov.ie/en/publication/bfa965-proclamation-of-independence/#
Reading of the Proclamation outside the GPO today
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvZwbK0E_i0&t=147s
https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2022/0417/1292796-easter/
#3 and #9 is great combo:
"New finding suggest the cult of Trump has much wider geographical extent than previously thought:
According to the new manuscript uncovered at archaeological site on the Pontic steppe, sometime in the second decade of 21 century the settlement of Novgorodskoye was renamed to New York after the mythological birthplace of Trump. The locals believed the renaming will help to earn the favour of the powerful deity and protect the settlement from the destruction by Ork Horde."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_(Ukraine)
28: One of my favorite findings in cognitive science! The paper that started it all is Dehaene (2007). One of the more interesting examples - why are there such strong (complete?) overlap in hippocampal processing of episodic memory & egocentric navigation? How about semantic memory & allocentric (landmark) navigation? Arguably because of deep similarities between the two functions. Buzsaki & Tingley (2018) argue that HF performs sequence processing, leveraged across diverse applications.
Other examples of cultural recycling discussed in Dehaene (2007) include reading & face recognition, arithmetic vs eye movement, music vs speech. These are all construed as needing similar cost functions.
Marblestone et al (2016) argue that DL is moving towards a similar design pattern, which will move us much closer towards AGI.
> We hypothesize that (1) the brain optimizes cost functions, (2) the cost functions are diverse and differ across brain locations and over development, and (3) optimization operates within a pre-structured architecture matched to the computational problems posed by behavior. In support of these hypotheses, we argue that a range of implementations of credit assignment through multiple layers of neurons are compatible with our current knowledge of neural circuitry, and that the brain's specialized systems can be interpreted as enabling efficient optimization for specific problem classes. Such a heterogeneously optimized system, enabled by a series of interacting cost functions, serves to make learning data-efficient and precisely targeted to the needs of the organism. We suggest directions by which neuroscience could seek to refine and test these hypotheses.
Buzsaki & Tingley (2018). Space and Time: The Hippocampus as a Sequence Generator
Dehaene (2007). Cultural recycling of cortical maps
Marblestone et al (2016). Toward an Integration of Deep Learning and Neuroscience